China seems more and more to be taking after its problem child North Korea with its childish threats against the U.S. and the West; in fact we can say that North Korea has merely been an apt pupil of the parent country. After all, had it not been for China’s intervention in the Korean War, North Korea would not exist at all. With China clearly seeing itself as a “superpower,” its expectation is that Russia will be its “junior partner” in its quest for global domination, even if that will be a hard sell for Vladimir Putin to the Russian public. There are those who say that in order to counter this, the U.S. and the West must begin to discontent their economies from both China and Russia now.
China apparently believes itself to be a “modern” country, taking as its historical model Stalin’s Soviet Union. China isn’t alone in thinking “backward”; Putin is taking Russia from beginner’s democracy to authoritarian to totalitarian government. Thus China’s leaders, as The New York Times is reporting, are “bristling” about the West’s insistence that China be a positive player in bringing Russia’s brutal and unjustified invasion of Ukraine to an end. Of course China does not want to do this for its own cynical purposes, for it needs Putin as an ally in its own activities in the South China Sea, and eventually in Taiwan.
China has taken to the absurd claim that Russia and Ukraine are equally victims of circumstances, since it is apparently unmoved by the decided lack of equivalency in the Russians’ use of force. Yet this is the “message” it is sending to the Chinese public, which is allegedly—like the Russian public—being “protected” from Western “propaganda” about the war and not allowed to see with their own eyes the war crimes-level activity of the Russian military, including evidence of mass killings of civilians in the town of Bucha, with some bodies found bound by hand and shot, and others burned.
One is hard-pressed to determine to what degree Chinese society has “progressed” other than economically. It is believed that at least 10,000 pro-democracy demonstrators and activists were killed during the Tiananmen Square protests, and since then its system of governance has only hardened with the aid of technology; while some may be believe that in an era of social media that people are more informed, in fact in countries that choose to can easily use it to alter reality and misinform on a wide scale. In countries like Russia and China, fear of government repression is such that opposition voices stick out like a sore thumb, and as the Japanese proverb goes, the nail that stands up is quickly hammered down.
A 2021 Human Rights Report article states that “despite the threats of imprisonment and even death, “some prominent individuals” have publicly criticized President Xi Jinping; but like everyone from businessman Ren Zhiqiang, who published an essay calling Xi “a clown who desires power,” to a simple school teacher like Cai Xia who called the Chinese Communist Party “a political zombie,” they either receive long prison sentences or are forced to flee the country.
Chinese government paranoia is astonishingly brazen in its self-justifications; among thousands of cases of political prisoners, as reported by Freedom House, there was that of Liu Ping, a member of “the banned New Citizens Movement, which called for greater government transparency and stronger safeguards against official corruption…Liu was sentenced in 2014 to six and a half years in prison for ‘picking quarrels and provoking troubles’ and ‘gathering a crowd to disrupt public order,’ and ‘using a cult to undermine law enforcement.’”
Thus it shouldn’t be a surprise that there is a Chinese fascination with the brutal cult of Stalinism that goes back a long way, and a new “required viewing” documentary is circulating in China that warns of the “danger” of democratization and provides revisionist history in regard to Stalin, a “modernizing leader whose purges” may have gone “too far,” but were necessary “given the threats to Soviet rule.” But the rule of Mao Zedong provides evidence of what Stalinism in its most horrific form was, which tends to be something not talked much about in China, but defenses of Stalin’s abuses is a way to “justify” Mao’s 27-year rule of unimaginable brutality.
A Washington Post story by Valerie Straus and Daniel Southerl some years ago pointed out that the evidence suggests that Mao surpassed Hitler and Stalin as the worst mass murderer in history, at least in total numbers. While more recent estimates put the number gingerly at around 45 million dead of “unnatural” causes through direct murder or “collateral” deaths from calamitous policies, Straus and Southerl noted that the true toll could be as high as 80 million during Mao’s reign from 1949 to 1976.
Stalin and Mao were close, having signed a “friendship” agreement, and Mao was certainly an avid disciple of Stalin’s “programming” while failing to learn from its worst aspects. In fact, Mao went even further than Stalin in exacerbating the worst of it. After Stalin’s death he carried on, even as the new leadership in the Soviet Union sought to “de-Stalinize” the country and ratchet down efforts to impose its ideology on European democracies. This angered Mao, who believed in imposing strict Communism at home and abroad, and it caused a split between China and the Soviet Union.
It is disturbing today that Xi Jinping has led a “revival” of Stalin hero worship in China. While admitting that there were a lot of “casualties” from Stalin’s policies, as we see in China’s despicable defense of Vladimir Putin’s war crimes in Ukraine, there is always a way to “rationalize” it—and in so doing, “rationalizing” Mao’s “Stalinization” of the country, done to frightful effect. Straus and Southerl provide a rundown of Mao’s litany of horrors:
1 to 4 million landowners murdered during the land reform campaign.
“Tens of thousands” to one million “suspected” counterrevolutionaries and Nationalist Chinese were murdered.
“Many thousands” of Chinese Christians were murdered.
“Hundreds of thousands” of what were called “bad elements” were murdered.
20 to 43 million died of famine during the Great Leap Forward. Rapid industrialization moving farmers to the cities left millions of acres of farmland untended, and those who were left were either unmotivated or worked under appalling conditions during the collectivization process—all leading to major food shortages leading to mass starvation. The infamous “four pests” program did far more harm than good in protecting agricultural yields, especially the attempted extermination of the Eurasian Tree Sparrow, ignoring the fact the birds ate locusts and other harmful insects. Historians note that Mao knew that the GLF was killing millions, but he did not care nor did he attempt to provide any relief programs to curb the suffering: to him the “collateral damage” was a “price” he was willing to pay for “modernization.”
1 to 20 million killed during the “Cultural Revolution” campaigns, “Mao's movement to destroy his adversaries, counter ‘bureaucratism’ and create a new society.” Estimates of the number of dead are confused, because some of the bloodiest campaigns—such as the “purification of class ranks”—are little known and little studied by Western historians. “Civil wars” between Red Army factions were also part of the Cultural Revolution, but the casualties of those conflicts have tended not to be included in the number of "unnatural" dead.
A few hundred thousand up to 1 million Tibetans were killed by various means (murder, starvation, torture).
To recap: Putin
seeks to reestablish the old Soviet Union, and to rule it like Stalin. Although
we believe we are living in a different, "modern" world now, as a new article in The New Statesman observes, “Yet Stalin
could not be more relevant. Stalin’s influence is imprinted everywhere in the
state structure of Russia; he remains omnipresent. Putin’s repression at home
increasingly resembles Stalinist tyranny – in its cult of fear, rallying of
patriotic displays, crushing of protests, brazen lies and total control of
media – although without the mass deportations and mass shootings. So far.”
And this is the "model" China views as the way to being a “modern” nation; the reality, of course, is that like Putin, Xi is a psychopath with only power and "glory" on his mind. Being a global "team player" simply does not compute in his mind.
We live in a world where social media allows people to quickly be aware when mass killing is going on, so those dictators predisposed to do it in order to stifle dissent, like Putin and Xi, cannot engage in such without bringing down the condemnation of the world upon themselves. They could, however, like Putin in Ukraine and what Xi wants to do to in Taiwan, engage in mass murder through the shroud of war. The fact is that they are very much a product of history but they have chosen only to repeat the worst of it.
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