prolife101.com

I just wanted to let everyone know that I am not only prolife meaning that I’m against abortion, but also prolife in general.

The foundation of the one-child policy in China was laid by Mao Zedong. Many women in China are forced to be sterilized and have abortions because China does not allow more than one child. Mao set the mindset in China that life is disposable. Although he was not the leader of China when the one-child policy was put in effect, he laid the foundation for it and three years after he died, the policy was started.

Mao Zedong: Mass Murderer

When most people think of evil leaders, they think of the totalitarian, murderous leaders, Hitler or Stalin. But one power-hungry leader was much more evil than these two leaders because he was indirectly responsible for causing the murder of approximately 55 million people, which were more murders than Hitler and more than twice as many murders as Stalin caused. (White, 2011) The sheer ruthlessness of his ruling and killing should make him the number one evil leader of the century, yet many people put him on a pedestal and continue to follow his ideals even now. From 1949 to 1976, Mao Zedong was the power hungry leader of China, who developed and implemented evil plans, like the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the Laogai Labor Camps, which led to the mass murder of Chinese people.  (Chung, 1952)

The Great Leap Forward was a plan for China to become an economic superpower through agriculturalization, industrialization, collectivization, but especially through the production of an unrealistically large output of food. It ended up being a failure, eventually causing widespread starvation. The Chinese were told by Mao “that the goal of the Leap was for China to ‘overtake all capitalist countries in a fairly short time, and become one of the richest, most advanced and powerful countries in the world,’” yet that was not what actually happened. (Chung, 1952) Mao tried to fulfill his goal and he tried to speed up the economic development by more than double (Terrill, 1980) by having the Chinese produce as much food as he needed. Mao calculated the amount of food to be produced “not of what the peasants could afford, but of what was needed for Mao’s Programme,” and he tried to do this by getting each of the provincial chiefs to announce that each of their provisions would produce a great amount of food. (Chung, 1952) Whoever failed to produce the amount of food that Mao needed, was tortured and sometimes killed. At the end of the first year of the Great Leap Forward, the country’s grain output was inaccurately reported to be over three times as much as China had actually produced. The “state then demanded an impossible 4.8 times what it had taken the year before” because if the peasants produced more, the state could take more. (Chung, 1952)

In April 1959, Mao saw that there was severe starvation in half of China. Fifteen provinces had no food, meaning that 25.17 million people had no food to eat. Mao responded to the provinces saying to ‘deal with it,’ without explaining how. (Chung, 1952) That year the “grain output fell” and by 1960 China had widespread hunger. (Terrill, 1980) Whole villages of Chinese died of blocked intestines, because they had to eat compounds of the earth. Sparrows began to eat the food that was produced, so the Chinese began to hunt them down. However, this was not smart, because the sparrows not only ate the grain, but also the insects that eat the grain, so insects hit China and ate its crops. The insects ate the food because the food chain was disrupted, and there were not enough sparrows to keep the insects from overpopulating. The food that was produced, Mao had the government take, and then export, pay for nuclear submarines, turn the food into alcohol for fuel, and use the fuel made from the food for missile tests. The missile tests used “10 million kilograms of grain, enough to radically deplete the food intake of 1-2 million people for a whole year.”  (Chung, 1952)

Mao then demanded that the peasants build irrigation systems, without spending money, or having safety precautions or medical care. He had about 100 million Chinese peasants build dams, reservoirs, and canals with their own tools and materials. “In the absence of safety measures and medical care, accidents were frequent, as were deaths, which Mao knew well.” (Chung, 1952) Mao wanted the irrigation systems built immediately and promoted the slogan “Survey, Design and Execute Simultaneously” and this caused the buildings to not be built as well as they could have been. Eventually many of these buildings were abandoned halfway through and others crumbled, drowning tens of thousands of Chinese, just because they were built unprofessionally. (Chung, 1952)

Mao also had many other schemes during the Great Leap Forward that killed millions of Chinese. The approximate number of deaths during the Great Leap Forward was thirty eight million Chinese. (White, 2011) This number included the number of Chinese that were starved to death and were worked to death. Mao said as the Leap was not going well that even if there was a collapse “that’ll be alright. We’ll rebuild. The worst that will happen is that the whole world will get a big laugh out of it.” The world was not laughing. He killed thirty eight million Chinese people and that was not a laughing matter. In the end, the Great Leap Forward was a disaster and five years of potential progress was lost. (Terrill, 1980)

Mao Zedong also devised the Cultural Revolution, which also caused the deaths of many Chinese. Mao Zedong wished to eliminate “old culture” especially Nationalists, so that the world would be completely Communist. He began his plan by printing a book with his quotations called the Little Red Book. He had the book handed out to everyone in the summer of 1966, and the Chinese were forced to carry it to all public occasions and recite the quotations from it daily. The young were brainwashed by his book and “were told to condemn their teachers and those in charge of education for poisoning their heads with ‘bourgeois ideas’ – and for persecuting them with exams, which henceforth were abolished.” The young students began to form groups and called themselves the “Red Guards,” saying that they wanted to guard Mao. (Chung, 1952)

The young became violent in their guarding Mao and condemning their teachers and this led to many deaths under Mao’s leadership. At a girls’ school, the first death by torture occurred when the headmistress, who was fifty at the time and a mother of four, was tortured until she died. The students trampled and kicked her and poured boiling water over her, and then they made her carry bricks around as they beat her with brass buckles and with sticks with nails sticking out of it. After this tragedy, the students reported to the authority what had happened and “they were not told to stop – which meant carry on.” Not only were teachers the victims of the Red Guards, but also people from undesirable families, whom teenagers also tortured to death. Writers, opera singers, and other artists were also killed because they were considered cultural. Eventually the Red Guards began breaking into people’s houses where they burned books, destroyed paintings, broke musical instruments, and wrecked anything that had to do with culture. (Chung, 1952)

In 1968, the Cultural Revolution ended when Mao was secured into power over China and he felt that all opposition was gone. The new representatives were chosen by their loyalty to Mao and how harsh they were to the enemies of Mao. Although the Cultural Revolution was over, the killings did not stop. Around three million Chinese were killed during the Cultural Revolution. (White, 2011)

Mao believed that many Chinese, who would have been killed for any crime they had committed, could be used for slave labor instead. So many Chinese were sent to labor camps called laogai and there they were worked until their death. Laogai means ‘reform through labor’, which seemed like a good thing, except that these camps were inhumane and worked the laborers to death. (Chung, 1952) “To be sent to laogai meant being condemned to backbreaking labour in the most hostile wastelands and down the most contaminating mines, while being hectored and harassed incessantly.” (Chung, 1952) The laborers were fed three times a day, but the amount of food they were given depended on how well they worked that day. (Pejan, 2011) They did all sorts of work, from farming to working in factories, and worked twelve hours a day or more. (Pejan, 2011) The hygiene standards were terrible and medical care was a serious problem in these camps. (Pejan, 2011) “Many inmates were executed, while others committed suicide by any means, like diving into a wheat-chopper.” (Chung, 1952) These labor camps that Mao initiated killed twenty to thirty million Chinese people. (White, 2011)

Mao devised plans like the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the Laogai Labor Camps, that ended up killing millions of Chinese, making him a mass murderer. The Great Leap Forward caused widespread starvation in China, resulting in millions of Chinese starving to death. The Cultural Revolution brainwashed the Chinese young into Mao’s way of thinking, and anyone who was not on board with Mao’s way of thinking was punished or killed by the teenagers. The Laogai Labor Camps worked criminals until they died or committed suicide. These three plans combined, plus other factors, are the reasons Mao is a mass murderer, responsible for the death of fifty five million Chinese people.

 

References

Chang, Jung., & Halliday, J. (1952). Mao: The Unknown Story. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.

White, M. (2011, February). General format. Retrieved from http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm.

Terrill, R. (1980). Mao: A Biography. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Pejan, R. (2011) Laogai: “Reform Through Labor” in China. Retrieved from http://www.wcl.american.edu/hrbrief/07/2laogai.cfm.