One could fill a library with books about the manifold suffering and death caused by communism’s bloody century. The section on the murder and mayhem visited by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the Chinese people would require an entire wing.
- China: 65 million deaths
- USSR: 20 million deaths
- North Korea: 2 million deaths
- Cambodia: 2 million deaths
- Africa: 1.7 million deaths
- Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths
- Vietnam: 1 million deaths
- Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths
- Latin America: 150,000 deaths
That is to say, they were criminal enterprises by their very nature, thuggish assemblages of men who regularly terrorized the populations under their control to keep them fearful and compliant.
These regimes were and are led by lawless, violent men—the Lenins, the Stalins, the Pol Pots, and the North Korean Kims—who killed wantonly, violently, and with zero regard for human life. But none of these mass murderers or even all of them put together come close to matching the magnitude of Mao Zedong and the CCP’s crimes against the Chinese people.
Mao spent his days inventing new ways to terrorize the Chinese people into obeying the dictates of his adopted faith—ways that invariably involved the stigmatization, torture, and execution of large numbers of people. The communist killing machine that he operated cut a wide swath through the population.
The thought that two-thirds of the total victims of communism died at the hands of the criminal enterprise known as the Chinese Communist Party is horrifying enough. But 40 years of studying the Chinese regime has convinced me that the figure of 65 million given in the “Black Book” is actually an underestimate. Others agree. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, in their brilliantly researched book “Mao: The Unknown Story,” give a figure of 70-plus million deaths attributable to Mao during his time in power.
But I believe that the figure is even higher, not only because the killing has continued since Mao went to be with Karl Marx in 1976. Two major campaigns, each of which produced tens of millions of additional casualties, must be added to the list.
The first major addition to this figure would be the 45 million or more Chinese who were starved to death by the communists from 1960–62 in the worst famine in human history. Professor Frank DiKotter, who wrote “Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe,” 1958–62 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), actually believes that the true number may be more than 50 million.
The second, even greater addition to this number is the 400 million tiny victims—both born and unborn—of the CCP’s long-running one-child policy, a policy of which Mao was the ideological godfather.
Only God knows the exact number of those killed by the CCP, but by my calculations, the number is close to 500 million—a truly insane level of butchery.
Much of this killing—although not all—can be attributed to the character of the man who led the CCP for more than 40 years. If one adds together the years that Vladimir Lenin (1917–24) and Joseph Stalin (1924–53) governed the Soviet Union, this still doesn’t match the span of time—from 1935 to 1976—that Mao controlled the CCP.
Mao’s 41-year reign was one long killing spree, with most of the killing carried out on his direct orders.
“Communism is not love,” he once said. “Communism is a hammer that we use to destroy the enemy.”
Mao set in motion some of the CCP’s earliest terror campaigns, carried out in the “Red Base Areas” that he controlled in the 1930s. He was responsible for millions of civilian deaths during the Chinese Civil War in the following years.
Moreover, in the 1950s and 1960s, after he had conquered all of China, he repeatedly carried out bloody campaigns to target, isolate, and destroy different elements of Chinese society. He did this not just to eliminate potential opposition but also, as he freely admitted, to terrorize the rest of the population into unquestioning obedience.
The communist system that Mao created in China—inspired by Marx, weaponized by Lenin, and exported to China by Stalin—continues to devour large numbers of victims. It’s a criminal enterprise that, like its chief progenitor, kills willfully, violently, and with zero regard for human life.
Sometimes, this murderous system kills quickly, as when the Tiananmen Square protesters were gunned down in the streets of China’s capital city. Other times—as in the nearly four-decade-long one-child policy—it kills slowly.
But it kills nonetheless. It’s the very nature of the beast.
