Wednesday (September 9) marks the 50th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s death. As far as individual life is concerned, in many religious and cultural concepts, the death of any person is worthy of compassion and should not be celebrated. However, from a political and historical perspective, the existence of some powerful people means the demise of a large number of other lives. In early May 1945, many newspapers around the world announced the news in the largest font on their front pages: Hitler is dead! Its desire to end the suffering of war is self-evident.
The death tolls caused by Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong's various autonomous regimes have always been a topic of considerable concern. Although the statistical caliber and nature of the killings are controversial, in terms of the number of deaths directly caused by his policies, Mao Zedong is far ahead. From the land reform, the suppression of counterrevolutionaries, the three anti-revolutionaries and the five counter-revolutionaries, the three major transformations, the anti-rightist movement, the Great Leap Forward and the people's communes, the Four Cleans-ups Movement, and the Cultural Revolution, the number of abnormal deaths in various political movements reached approximately 40 million to 50 million.
Among them, only the Great Famine caused by the Great Famine, retired Xinhua News Agency reporter Yang Jisheng concluded in "Tombstone" that 36 million people died of starvation; Frank Dikötter, a historian at the University of Hong Kong, estimated that at least 45 million people died abnormally based on archives from various places.
Since the CCP is still in power, these abnormal deaths have not yet received normal statistics and condolences, and historical lessons have not been fully summarized. However, after Mao Zedong's death, Deng Xiaoping's gang usurped the power of Mao Zedong's designated successor through intra-party political struggles. In order to legitimate their own power, they negated the political movement led by Mao Zedong to a certain extent.
Let’s first look at the official conclusions of the Chinese Communist Party. The "Resolution on Certain Historical Issues of the Party Since the Founding of the People's Republic of China" adopted by the Sixth Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in 1981 defined the Cultural Revolution as "a civil strife that was mistakenly initiated by leaders, exploited by counter-revolutionary groups, and brought serious disasters to the party, the country and the people of all ethnic groups." It also made it clear that Mao Zedong was primarily responsible for this "overall, long-term serious left-leaning error." But the resolution went on to say: As far as his life is concerned, "merits come first and mistakes come second."
In this resolution of more than 30,000 words, there is not a single number of abnormal deaths. Peasants who starved to death, teachers who were criticized to death, writers who committed suicide, and young people who lost their lives in fighting were collectively called "serious disasters" in the official conclusion, and were then sealed with the words "merit first".
This is not an oversight. In August 1980, Deng Xiaoping was interviewed by Italian journalist Farage and said without any secret: The portrait of Chairman Mao on the Tiananmen Gate "will always be preserved"; the criticism of Mao Zedong's mistakes cannot be overdone, because "vilifying Comrade Mao Zedong is vilifying our party and our country." In other words, this resolution has nothing to do with historical justice, but is only used to satisfy the "legitimacy" needs of the usurper.
Even so, the fact that cannot be concealed is that because of Mao Zedong's death, the large-scale political movement of killing each other in Chinese society temporarily came to an end, and some people who were destined to be criticized, imprisoned, killed and starved to death survived.
The most intuitive way to evaluate what the death of a dictator means is to make a "survivor list" - if Mao Zedong had not died in 1976, but continued to hold the highest power, whose fate would have been rewritten?
Because bureaucrats and intellectuals have the right to speak, people seem to think that they are the most persecuted group. In fact, since the founding of the CCP and to this day, the people who have been exploited and slaughtered the most are hundreds of millions of farmers. The vast majority of those who starved to death in the Great Famine were peasants; the household registration system nailed them to the land; the unified purchasing and marketing system and the "scissor gap" in industrial and agricultural prices have extracted their blood and sweat for decades to support cities and heavy industry.
In November 1978, 18 households of farmers in Xiaogang Village, Fengyang, Anhui, pressed their fingerprints on a contract to allocate fields to each household, which read: "We will allocate fields to each household, and the head of each household will sign and seal it. If this fails, the cadres will be willing to go to jail and behead, and the members promise to raise their children until they are 18 years old." - Two years after Mao Zedong's death, Chinese farmers who wanted to farm their own land to support themselves still had to pay the expected price of "prison and beheading." In the past two decades or so, if farmers did this, "imprisonment and beheading" was the inevitable price.
If Mao Zedong had not died in 1976, the emergence of household contracting would be unimaginable. Household income, food production, population migration, urbanization, cheap labor and the world's factory - the whole world will have another picture.
As the largest group of survivors after the death of Mao Zedong, Chinese farmers are also the largest group of contributors in the era of global intensification. They are also the largest group of victims in the world who have still not been treated fairly.
Next we look at the college student population. This is the easiest historical bifurcation point to observe. During the Cultural Revolution, the national unified college entrance examination was suspended for almost ten years. Universities recruited workers, peasants and soldiers students based on "voluntary registration, recommendation by the masses, and approval by leaders." The college entrance examination was resumed in 1977. About 5.7 million people flocked to the examination hall that year, and eventually more than 270,000 people entered colleges and universities.
If Mao Zedong's political line continues to dominate, the unified examination with academic performance as the main criterion is likely to be significantly delayed - which means that the life trajectories of the 1977, 1978 and 1979 generations will be very different. This is not as simple as "hundreds of thousands of college students missing": this generation constituted the bulk of China's scientists, engineers, doctors, professors, judges and journalists in the next two decades. In other words, the entire formation of China’s professional class from the 1980s to the 2000s was tied to the death of a dictator.
Then let’s look at intellectuals and professionals. The governance logic of the Cultural Revolution was that political identity trumped professional identity: "Professor" was not first and foremost a professor, but a "bourgeois academic authority"; "Engineer" was not first and foremost an engineer, but an object in need of transformation. Around 1978, scientific research institutions, professional title systems and study abroad policies were gradually restored.
If political movement-style governance continues, large numbers of intellectuals will continue to fight, and the overall professionalization process will slow down—and the so-called reform and opening up requires a large number of people who understand mathematics, engineering, economics, law, and foreign languages.
If Mao Zedong had continued to live, self-employed individuals, private enterprises, and later private entrepreneurs and "returnee" scientists might still be struggling in the meat grinder of authoritarian history.
The intergenerational inheritance of Peking Opera, Kunqu Opera, Quyi and classical literature studies may be further fractured. Many careers and lifestyles that people take for granted today began with a funeral.
The “veteran cadres” of the CCP, including members of Deng Xiaoping’s power clique, became the most exposed group of survivors after the Cultural Revolution. Their political status was "rehabilitated" and they regained power, promoting the reform and opening up policy that was different from that of Mao Zedong's era; therefore, their suffering could be told, published and commemorated.
The aspect that is deliberately ignored and abandoned in these accounts is that a considerable number of these people have also been perpetrators. This also hinders the entire country from seeking historical justice, and instead continues different forms of power struggles. The de-justified governance slogan of "stability above all else" is the product of the cynical survivor mentality, and therefore limits the height of reform and opening up.
Some people may say: If Mao Zedong had not died fifty years ago, or even lived to be 150 years old, as the international situation changed - such as China and the United States joining forces to fight the Soviet Union - he might have personally ended the Cultural Revolution and implemented reform and opening up.
When evaluating a historical figure, we can only speculate based on what he has done during his lifetime, but cannot assume a sudden awakening for him - just as we cannot assume that Hitler did not commit suicide, but instead advocated world peace. Based on the historical record of Mao Zedong’s repeated political movements during his lifetime, if he had lived twenty more years, he would have been able to reform and open up, and even more likely his life would have been in ruins.
More importantly, the reason why autocrats owe a lot of blood debt is not only because they happen to be cruel, but also because they construct and rely on an autocratic system that allows them to do whatever they want. Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong had different origins, education and personality traits, but the countries they ruled led to tens of millions of abnormal deaths.
Likewise, Deng Xiaoping had different personalities from Mao Zedong—he even presided over the official denial of Mao Zedong’s mistakes—but this did not prevent him from mobilizing the army to massacre unarmed protesting students and civilians in 1989. Deng Xiaoping, who stood out at the bifurcation point, finally proved that the fork in the road still lies in the same autocratic wilderness.
In this sense, the death of a dictator means the survival of millions of people and the entire country; and as long as the system remains unchanged, the birth of another dictator may also mean the death of millions of people and the entire country.
Changping is a senior media person and current affairs commentator. He is currently a columnist for Deutsche Welle, executive editor of China Digital Times, and chief curator of the June Fourth Memory·Human Rights Museum.
