Mao’s murders

Rummel estimated that Mao killed wrongfully killed seventy seven million, and the Black Book of Communism estimates sixty five million  – but, of course, it is notoriously difficult to say what a totalitarian terror state based on slavery and mass murder is up to.   They called it an iron curtain because you could not see what was behind it. So how should we judge the accuracy of estimates?

One good way is to see what happens to those estimates when new data arrives.  If the estimates tend to go up when we get new information, the original estimates were on the low side.  If they tend to go down, perhaps the original estimates were exaggerated.

Because the great leap forward was violently controversial even within the communist party, it is the crime of communism that the present party leadership finds least hurtful to investigate. The present leadership descends from those who resisted the great leap forward, and are therefore less implicated by these crimes.  So they have recently allowed investigation.

Rummel estimated the great leap forward democide to be twenty seven million, largely a result of forced exactions of grain from starving peasants, akin to the Ukraine famine.  More recent data indicates forty five million.

The communist party of China now believes in “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” – which looks remarkably like Capitalism with Hong Kong Characteristics, and Hong Kong is itself the society that among present day societies most closely resembles Manchesterism, the capitalism that made the Industrial Revolution, which system was exported to parts of the third world by early nineteenth century colonists.