The great Chinese chairman Mao Zedong once declared the death of 300 million of his own people would be a price worth paying. He was basically saying, I can lose half of my people. To get what I want. I'm ready to take that risk. That's a brutal, callous way of thinking.
Ultimately, his heartless political regime oversees the slaughter of millions. Violence works, and it works through power. He was convinced that politics had to be violent. This is the story of a sadistic autocrat addicted to brutality. From his communist roots, through his reign of cruelty and revenge.
Mao was in the league of Hitler and Stalin. Even after his death, the fear Mao instilled keeps him revered to this day. In 1911, China's age-old imperial order is collapsing. After 2,000 years of dynastic rule, the people overthrow their emperor. What follows is a decade of violent, lawless anarchy.
China was in deep depression by the late 19th century, early 20th century. You had an imperial system that didn't permit debate or discussion or criticism. So if you were unhappy with the situation in which you were born, you had to rebel, you had to kick against it, you had to become revolutionary.
Out of the ruins of the empire, two political groups with opposing ideologies begin to emerge. The Nationalists, dedicated to transforming China into a westward-looking capitalist republic. And the Communists, a small group inspired by Lenin's Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Both claim to act for the 600 million peasants.
Living in near medieval conditions. But this clash of ideologies sows the seeds for a bloody civil war that will ravage China for over two decades. A young farmer's son, Mao Zedong.
experiences firsthand both the hardships of imperial rule and the ruthlessness with which the army executes rebelling peasants. If you look at the experiences that he had, particularly as a teenager, you can see many things that are going to influence the way that he behaves later on. Against this bloody backdrop, Mao grows into an angry rebel looking for a cause.
Keen to be considered an intellectual, he reads translations of European philosophy. But when in 1917, at the age of 24, he finds Marxist literature, it strikes a chord. Well, he read the manifesto, the Communist Manifesto, and he read in it a perfect description of why China was humiliated in the way that it was. Mao picks up on that, and from then on is a committed communist. Radicalized by his mentors at Beijing University, by 1921 Mao is a fully fledged left-wing activist.
He is convinced communism is the only route to a successful revolution because the party has powerful friends. It wasn't. His sympathy for Chinese peasants that made him a communist.
Mao spotted one most important thing, that is China's most powerful neighbor, Russia, was determined to put Chinese Communist Party in power. In 1922, just one year after its official inception, Mao joins the fledgling Chinese Communist Party. He believes only they have the ruthlessness necessary to seize power, and he is intent on being on the winning side. But in 1924, Mao's nationalist rivals snatch power and are established as China's official government. Mao realizes he holds the key to how China's communists can fight back.
And he has what becomes the first of many clashes with his Russian comrades. The Russians were intimately involved in the Chinese revolution, in the Chinese Communist Party. And certainly he was one of their anointed when they were fighting the nationalists.
But there was always this sense that the Russians were trying to tell him how to run his revolution. They were trying to tell the Chinese communists how to behave. And Mao would repeatedly say, on the ground, this is not how it works.
Mao is convinced the Chinese revolution must be ignited in a completely different way to the revolution in Russia. The Russians believed that revolution came from within the urban poor, and Mao would say, no, revolution in China comes from the peasantry, it comes from the people in the countryside. It's a completely different system, and you can't tell me what to do.
Mao's stubborn realisation that the spark of revolution has to arise from China's peasants becomes the cornerstone of his political philosophy for four decades to come. Over the next few years, as the Communists focus on building their numbers, Mao's attention is on climbing the ladder. In 1927, party superiors give the now 34-year-old Mao a grand title, Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army. In reality, it's a small ragtag militia.
Mao's task? To lead them out to the villages. To stir up revolution. For Mao Zedong, it's a life-changing experience.
His method for revolution is simple. Turn the peasants against their landowners. Recalling from his student philosophy books that the end justifies the means, Mao doesn't care who gets hurt. In every single village...
The villagers are assembled and forced to denounce a number of very carefully selected victims, seen as tyrants or landlords or traitors. There are stories of people taking evil oppressors as the masses and stringing them up and criticizing them and executing them. The violence of 1927 marks the official beginning of the bloody Chinese Civil War, and it teaches Mao a lesson, one that serves him well in his inexorable rise to power. Violence works. He said from that time on he was convinced that politics had to be violent because people don't give up power willingly.
It has to be dragged from them. Famously he said all power grows out of the barrel of a gun. This brutality has a personal effect on Mao that is positively perverse.
When he toured the villages and witnessed the violence and atrocities firsthand, as he said himself, he changed. He felt a kind of ecstasy. That was his word, as he had never experienced it before. Mao becomes a sadist, intoxicated by violence itself.
And this is only the beginning. Within the Chinese Communist Party, Mao's talents are recognized. His career takes soft but far away from the war's front line the leading of the army was left in the hands of others and Mao found himself with this political role with with the role of a political commissar a commissar is a political fixer responsible for enforcing right thinking in the party's rank and file this role teaches him another crucial lesson Controlling what people think can make you supremely powerful.
He was already developing a personality cult. People were already talking about Mao Zedong thought, about him as some kind of philosophical leader of the Communist Party. Appointing himself supreme authority on communist thought is a critical position that Mao leverages on his masterly rise to supremacy. His move to the top is accelerated further when outsiders take advantage of the political chaos in China. In 1931, China's age-old enemy, Japan, invades.
It seizes the entire northern province of Manchuria. The Nationalist government puts up a fight, but it's not enough. A full-scale Japanese invasion is on the cards. The Communists try to take advantage of the mayhem to topple the Nationalists, but fail. Mao's name is made during a year-long retreat to evade the Nationalist army.
The so-called Long March of 1935. As the death toll mounts, Mao finds himself practically the last man standing. Mao simply stayed alive. Every time more loyal communists followed the advice of their superiors and got killed, Mao made it another rung up the ladder. And so at the age of 42, through the strategic use of violence and thought control, and a degree of luck, Mao Zedong Achieves his aim, he is appointed leader of the Chinese Communist Party. A position from which he can initiate his master plan to become ruler of all China.
By early 1937, Mao Zedong's communists are under attack from both the Chinese nationalists, led by the pro-Western General Chiang Kai-shek, and the Japanese invaders looking to crush an unstable nation. As the newly anointed leader of the Communist Party of China, Mao Zedong bases himself. at Yan'an. It's a bombed-out mountain town wrecked by the civil war, but its fame spreads far and wide.
It's popularly believed to be a communist utopia, a place for radicals, intellectuals, and the idealistic youth to think freely. There were teenagers and of course they thought communism was for equality. For a decade they've been flocking there.
All in the cause of liberating China. They didn't think Chiang Kai-shek was doing a good enough job fighting Japan. So these young people, including my own father, then went to the north where Mao was, thinking that they would join the fight against the Japanese.
But Mao has other plans for them. His intention is to turn the Yan'an communist faithful into a force that is utterly obedient to him, and that will take him to power. He actually saw Japanese invasion and the war as an opportunity to destroy Chiang Kai-shek's state, to enable him to seize power. After the war was over.
To do this, he takes the lessons in violence and manipulation he learns as a younger man, and enhances them into a signature toolkit of terror. First, he eradicates the principle of an egalitarian utopia, and sets up a hierarchy, with him at the top. In Vietnam there was absolutely no equality. Housing was graded, food was graded, clothes was graded. And meanwhile Mao was able to wear this sort of fine cotton imported from nationalist areas.
Mao then uses his power to set a trap, luring potential opponents into the open. Mao starts to suggest that people could criticize him openly. Let's have a debate about this. Let's contradict each other. Let's struggle together to work out what is best for us.
One group takes their complaints to a man they nominate as their representative. Wang Shiwei, a writer. Wang Shui was their hero.
He spoke their disillusionment with communism. Wang publicizes his followers' grievances, posting their criticisms for all to see. Mao went to see Wang Shui's posters and saw how crowds of people regarded Wang Shui as their hero.
With Wang exposed, Mao swoops into action and puts into practice his conviction that through violence comes power. Mao subjects Wang Shiwei to a uniquely excruciating method of knee-breaking, the so-called... Tiger Bench.
Of all the instruments of torture available, it's Mao's personal favorite. Using torture, Mao can get Wang Shiwei to say anything. He makes a false confession, that he is a nationalist spy.
What's more, he is forced to implicate innocent comrades, though nothing he says will prevent his execution. Because Mao is determined to send a message. If you don't think the way Mao wants you to think, you will die. Wang Shui was killed by Mao's KGB. That had a really...
devastating effect on these young people. It's not long before Mao extends his campaign of torture to spread terror through the ranks. He develops this powerful dramatic instinct that if you're going to do something, let me do it on as big a scale as you can so that others learn and profit from it or learn and are frightened. But he's careful never to get his hands dirty.
Mao is always a shadowy figure at the back. I don't think you'll find any evidence of Mao pulling any triggers or actively hanging anybody. Violence was something that he got other people to do for him, and this would escalate throughout his life.
Just like Stalin in the Soviet Union. Mao justifies his terror campaign by claiming to see spies everywhere. Mao had no doubt they weren't spies.
His real objective was to scare these young people and mold them into an army for his future use. From this moment, killing and torture are firmly established as the core of his personal political philosophy. Violence is not an act of...
The incidental aspect of Maoism, it is a necessary part of it. He said, don't execute them before you've got everything out of them you can. The result is that Mao becomes leader of a brainwashed army of half a million, loyal through fear.
By 1945... China has been under siege by the Japanese for eight years. With millions homeless, China is on its knees and ripe for revolution.
The time is right for Mao to make his move. Mao comes down from the hills of Yan'an. His army swells to three million, brandishing military hardware provided by communist ally...
Stalin. By 1949, the Nationalists lack both public support and the will to fight on. Their leader, General Chiang Kai-shek, resigns.
Just days later, Mao Zedong... announces he is the supreme leader of 600 million people. The birth of this new nation is the culmination of 27 years of terror, torture and manipulation.
But he is greeted as a hero by the people. Mao was genuinely popular among ordinary Chinese by 14. Why? Because he'd led a peasant revolution.
He'd thrown off centuries of oppression. He'd overcome the landlords, the warlords, the Japanese, the nationalists. He said, we now stood up as a people and we can create our own world. What the Chinese people don't realize is that their darkest days under Mao are yet to come. By 1950, under Chairman Mao Zedong's new communist regime...
China is still desperately poor, recovering from three decades of bloody war and revolution. As supreme leader, Mao proclaims industrialization on a massive scale is the key to transforming his nation into an economic superpower. And he's going to achieve this virtually overnight, no matter the human cost. Mao calls his scheme the Great Leap Forward.
The idea of the Great Leap Forward was supposedly to take China into the future, to create this communist utopia, and to do it in just 15 years. The plan is to buy ready-made factories from his Russian allies and pay for them with grain grown by the peasants of China. Mao had this dream even before he conquered China.
And to fulfill this dream, Mao needed to buy vast quantities of nuclear technology and equipment, missile technology and equipment, the whole range of military industrial complexes. The chairman has no doubt that his vision... We'll seed China's meteoric rise to vast wealth and global domination with him at the helm. But it all depends on everyone doing exactly what they are told.
Mao starts by outlawing private enterprise in the countryside. Every scrap of grain will now be owned by the state. The grain goes straight from the fields into state granaries.
No private market, no private trading. Then he strips his peasants of all their possessions, ordering them to live and work on vast collective farms. Collectivization really is nothing but stripping people from their every little bit of private property.
The houses are confiscated. Tools, pots, pans, utensils. Become collective.
Lifestock is collectivized. Mao sets impossibly high production targets for these collective farms. And the peasants are told they won't receive food rations if they don't hit their quotas. Quite literally, people who are unable to work are starved to death. This includes children, pregnant women, the elderly.
All of them are... Cut off from the food supply. It's not long before the situation spirals out of control. The starving people grow weaker and progressively unable to work.
So instead of leading to a great leap forward, it results in an absolute disaster. Across the country. Millions starve to death as food production collapses. Mao believes the problem lies not with his brutal policy, but with the nation's birds eating the people's grain.
So he issues a dicta. The Chinese people are to eradicate Every last sparrow. One of his maddest ideas was war on the sparrows.
He decided that if the Chinese could kill all the sparrows in the country, then the ten grains that each of those sparrows ate would be food for humans. All seemed very logical. So he has the Chinese running around beating pots, throwing rocks at sparrows, keeping them awake until they fall dead from the sky. They would hunt down the birds for days, weeks.
They would rattle anything that made a noise so the birds couldn't settle and rest and sleep. The birds would drop from the sky. They'd gather them in their thousands, put them on poles and parade them around showing this great contribution the village had made to food production. Well done, Chairman Mao, except now there's nothing to eat the insects and so the following year there's a blight. on all the crops because the caterpillars and the locusts are eating all the grain anyway, and there's a huge famine.
Far from alleviating his people's suffering, Mao's intervention has made matters even worse. In Beijing, the story being told is very different. The Communist Party propaganda machine portrays the chairman's great leap forward as a dazzling success. Even senior party members have little idea of the reality of the famine.
But one man for certain knows the truth. There is report after report with extremely detailed information about the famine that lands on the desks. of the top leadership. The reports prove Mao is well aware of the deaths of millions of his people.
To him, it is simply a price worth paying. Clearly, he was prepared to take risks with other people's lives to the extent of 50% of his country. He had the people to spare, and he was prepared to do that if it meant creating a China that he wanted.
By the spring of 1959, the truth starts to leak out. 14 million dead people can't be hidden. Yet rather than stem the tide of famine, Mao plans to extend his great leap forward even further. Within the senior ranks of the Communist Party, there are mutterings about his leadership. But no one is sure what they can do.
The problem that China had and has is there is no opposition. Everyone has agreed that we are already living in a utopia, so no one can say that there's something wrong with this utopia. Behind the scenes, Mao's trusted second-in-command is having serious doubts. Liu Shaoqi is the number two, he's the head of state.
He stands very much behind the chairman, but the authority is truly taken aback by the... scale of starvation. Liu Shaoqi decides to do the unthinkable and challenge his supreme leader.
It's a decision of extraordinary personal bravery. In July 1959, Mao holds a Communist Party conference to rubber stamp the expansion of his great leap forward. What happens next takes everyone by surprise. You made the most courageous act in his life.
Basically, he said there was a great famine and it was a human mistake and we must stop it. To say that there's a man-made disaster is actually direct... attack against the whole vision proposed by Mao with the Great Leap Forward. And that really is breaking it to boot.
To Mao, it's the ultimate betrayal. Mao was furious because he hated to be outsmarted. From that moment onwards, the chairman becomes extremely suspicious and thinks that he has found the very man who will destroy his legacy, destroy his reputation. But Mao can't turn on Liu immediately.
Within the party, Liu is well known and well liked. Mao has to move slowly. Now Mao was wise enough still to know that Liu would still be useful as an administrator. So he keeps him on, but he is a marked man from then on.
This will be a revenge served exceptionally cold. Mao's plan to destroy his second-in-command will be a nationwide, decade-long masterpiece in cruelty. By 1965, the 71-year-old Chairman Mao has been supreme leader of China for 16 years. But because of a disastrous famine caused by his policies, For the first time, there are murmurs within the party that perhaps the great helmsman should be replaced.
Rather than wait for his enemies to come at him, Mao decides to seize the initiative. He was determined to remind people that, in his words, a revolution is not a dinner party. We are going to have to break some heads. We are going to have to be very tough on ourselves in not succumbing to the...
the temptations of what he called the capitalist road. Mao's plan is for a revolution every bit as devastating as the first, but even more sinister in its execution, a cultural revolution. Mao proposes to purge the country of bourgeois thoughts he claims linger in the older generation, just as Adi Annan.
He wants all 600 million Chinese to practice true communist right-thinking. And again, he will be the only person to dictate what this right-thinking is. Mao now needs a wingman to help him execute his policy. With a great leap forward, Mao makes the mistake of trusting his party deputies.
He does not intend to repeat that mistake. This time he turns to the one person he can trust absolutely. His wife Zhang Jing, Madam Mao. Zhang Jing is an actress from Shanghai who becomes Mao's lover during the Yan'an decade of terror in the 1940s. As Mao rose Through the party, Jiang Qing adopted a role as a kind of cultural secretary.
She began to initiate cultural policies. She began to say what plays were worth performing and what... Films were worth performing and she started to enact an increasingly invasive role.
As she got older she became increasingly neurotic, but no one dared argue with her. She described herself as Mao's dog when he said, bite I bit, but the others called her the white-boned demon. Together, Mao and Madame Mao make a formidable and untouchable pair.
Typically, Mao begins his new cultural revolution with a statement of policy so vague it can be moulded, at his whim, to any purpose. What Mao said was, let's attack what he called the four olds. Old ideas, old ways, old customs, old pursuits.
Now that covered everything. It's one of those blanket four olds. So anything he disapproved of came under attack.
As a guide to his thinking, Mao issues his Little Red Book, his version of Marx's Communist Manifesto or Hitler's Mein Kampf. As a collection of over 400 of Mao's sayings, it's a window into the mind of a dictator intent on fueling violence. War is the continuation of politics. War is the highest form of struggle. It is up to us to organize the people.
Where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself. Let us hold the banner high and march ahead along the path, crimson with our blood. At over a billion copies, The Little Red Book is one of the most printed books in history. Mao's aim is mind capture of those he can mold most easily, the young. This becomes much more important later on when you have an entire generation who is raised on the thoughts of Mao Zedong.
These children grow up to become a compliant army, just like at Yan'an, to enforce Mao's will. His notorious Red Guards. Now his delight in violence and chaos takes a sick twist. He incites this teen army to rise up and slaughter their elders.
He does a very clever thing psychologically. He calls on the young. You are China.
You are the future. Young people rise up. Purify our society. From all those corrupting elements.
This was Mao's standard procedure. When he wanted to do something, he always created terror. Mao's first target is carefully chosen. The Red Guard youths turn on their teachers. Mao did not particularly hate the teachers.
He regarded himself. As a teacher, but in order to generate the terror, he needed victims. So it was a completely cynical calculation. Thousands of teachers are assaulted.
In Beijing alone, hundreds are murdered. In my school, there was tremendous violence. My headmaster couldn't stand it and he was trying to commit suicide by slashing his neck.
A gardener in the school, he had been a nationalist officer, so he was singled out and beaten to death. The Red Guards ranks swelled to millions. They run riot on a rampage of vandalism and slaughter.
Soon, nothing is off-limits. China becomes a cultural desert. Art, books, music.
Anything with even faintly Western cultural influences are banned or destroyed. But Mao's real target... is only just coming into view.
In the fall of 1967, Mao orders his Red Guards to extend their reign of terror to his rivals in the Communist Party. It's Mao's way of settling scores. The method of surgery was used. You've got to cut out the cancer in order for the body, body politic to recover.
So violence is not simply a means to an end, it's an absolute requirement in any revolutionary situation. Violence is a definition of revolution. Hundreds of thousands of party officials are sent to labour camps, driven to suicide, imprisoned or simply murdered. They're people who have expressed concerns about Mao's great leap forward.
Only now can he move in on his primary target, his second in command Liu Shaoqi. The man who dared once to stand up to him will now pay the price in the most unimaginably cruel way. In 1968, communist chairman Mao Zedong's cultural revolution, intended to crush all those who dare oppose him in China, is reaching its endgame. He is more determined than ever to hang on to power, but he believes one man stands in his way.
Mao has long taken sadistic pleasure in inflicting pain and humiliation. And now he plots the fate of his loyal deputy, Liu Shaoqi. But because Liu is popular in the Communist Party, first Mao has to undermine his credibility.
Nobody would have any sympathy for him if he spelled out the real reason why he hated Liu Xiaoqi. So he had to create all sorts of accusations like Liu had been a traitor, you know, had betrayed the party and so on. The state propaganda machine obediently whirs into action.
Practically overnight, Liu's reputation is destroyed. Next comes the humiliation. Like hundreds of his comrades before him, Liu is publicly accused and assaulted. Typically, they would be stood on the stage facing a hysterical crowd, and they were kicked and beaten and tortured and made to kneel on broken glass. Being paraded in the streets, eventually sent to the camps.
Liu endures over a year of torture. Only then, in a prison cell, comes death. But it's no act of mercy. This final chapter of Liu's life is planned personally by Mao, to be as slow and as painful as possible. He was a diabetic by that time, and Mao denies him the right to treatment.
It's said he died lying on a prison cell, lying in his own filth. As if to leave the scale of his depravity in no doubt, Mao demands Liu's painful death is filmed for his personal pleasure. It's a grim story because he's a man who, from the long march on, had been Mao's greatest associate, in a way.
There are those who argue that, had he been examined, he would have found in Mao aspects of personality disorder that might classify him as being... Clinically disturbed to the point of insanity. Mao's cultural revolution, instigated to wreak vengeance on his rivals, real and imagined, lasts a decade. In all, two million of China's best educated people are murdered.
Millions more sent to labor camps. Far from creating a utopian society, Mao has made one based on terror. Mao didn't try to build a nation.
I mean, Mao destroyed a nation. He didn't unify China. He was not a builder.
He was a destroyer. Mao's legacy of needless deaths is so great in number, the total may never be known. Exact figures we can never have.
I mean, I've seen 40 million and justified. I mean, customarily we say that in the league tables of horror, he comes top. In the early 1970s.
As he approaches his 80th birthday, Mao's health begins to deteriorate. We met people like Nixon in 72 and others later, and they said that he was still very conscious then, very alert, didn't speak easily, but could understand and could respond through interpreters. But that decreases, that capacity decreases. In 1974, Mao is silenced by a degenerative condition that makes him unintelligible to all.
but his personal nurse. Yet the fear he has instilled into his party means even when he is incapable of leading, he remains untouchable. He lost the power of speech the last two years.
He burbled. But as long as he was alive, moving, of course, nobody could move against him. Mao's declining health means China's progress as a nation is paralyzed.
And beneath the surface, Mao is ravaged by an ever-increasing sense of paranoia. He was in power for 27 years and he lived as though he was in a war zone, ready to flee all the time. On the eve of taking power in 1949, Mao would shake.
Like a leaf, as they say, if he set eyes on a stranger, this guy was about to take power in China and he was of intense fear. Perhaps it's a psychological punishment for his total lack of empathy for other people's lives. Most of all, in his final years, Mao is aware his party believes he has failed.
He hadn't fulfilled his dream of building China into this military superpower so he could dominate the world. He didn't feel satisfied. He was full of self-pity. None of his feelings were for the tragedy he brought for the Chinese population and for the death of well over 70 million Chinese in peacetime. As a result, of him pursuing his dream.
On September 9, 1976, after 27 years in power, Mao Zedong, Supreme Leader of China, dies. The Communist Party marks his passing with hysterical scenes of national mourning. Yet after his death, Mao's ideology is almost entirely spurned.
Many of those he imprisoned become the country's future leaders. Though a sadist and a despot, the equal of Stalin and Hitler, today his portrait remains everywhere. In part, it is because to admit what he really did would undermine the rule of the Communist Party.
And in part, it is because for good and ill, Mao Zedong is the father of modern China.