Wick Welker's Reviews > The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957

Single party rule is tyranny.

This is my first Dikotter read who has written numerous books about Mao and Chinese history. If you’re looking for an overview of the rise of Maoism and the CCP and the beginnings of Mao’s communist revolution, this is a good place to start. But be warned: this is a very difficult book to read. This largely covers 1945 to 1957 and begins mostly with war in Manchuria between the communists and the nationalists although a little of this book does cover the previous peasant revolts, the culling of landlords that lead to the rise of Mao.

You’ll get a broad overview of the swift but arbitrary class distinctions of the “poor” and “slightly less poor” after Mao finally took power which resulted in domestic divisions, social turmoil and obscene amounts of state violence. Cue the land reforms, basically just state seizure of land, which resulted in somewhere like 1.5 million dead. There was an insane amount of counter revolutionary panic violence which resulted in many innocent dead civilians including children. Mao literally instituted death and arrest quotas for any given population. Then comes the infatuation of Mao with Stalin and the pro-Soviet propaganda everywhere throughout China despite Mao basically being treated like a subordinate baltic state. Mao got a little bit of military and economic aid from the tons of concessions made to Stalin. Soon there were about 150,000 Soviet soldiers in China.

Then Korea happened and Mao insisted on helping the communist fight there along with Russia which resulted in an eventual standoff. Soon followed widespread paranoia about US biological warfare resulting in state quotas for collecting rat tails and killing bugs as there was fear they were biological vectors. You had impoverished and starving people raising rats to then kill them to then turn the tails into the state for money. This kind of insanity was everywhere. Then there was the bourgeoisie purse resulting in tons of “capitalists” dead, sanctioned or imprisoned in labor camps. Purges like that along with thought reform and re-education, Mao constructed a nice tyrannical house of cards for himself while he and his cadres lived in excess.

The state collectivism and and cooperations which ensued were an absolute disaster. State wheat monopolization resulted in starvation, protests, hoarding, waste and death. As the economy imploded with inflation, it became clear along the way that Mao knew nothing about economics. You’d think the vast labor and prison networks would provide free labor for the state but there wasn’t even infrastructure to use the raw human labor. There was wide suppression of Buddhism and Daoism with closure of temples.

The book finished off around the De Stalinization era of Khrushchev which made Mao change his tactics. In what I thought seemed too clever for Mao, he also publicly opened up about protests and dissent being able to be voiced only to then tighten the fist back again once the “counter revolutionary” traitors and intellectuals were exposed. This book does not cover The Great Leap Forward or The Cultural Revolution.

In my opinion, Mao was an abject tyrant and hypocrite. The peasant revolution he helped ushered in resulted in vast human rights violations, death, disease, starvation and nothing even close to what communism and socialism are supposed to be in theory. If I may take a liberty to express my opinion a little more here. Whether someone is espousing free market capitalism solutions or communism as a viable model to reduce poverty or to liberate the masses, the “No True Scotsman” fallacy is used far too often. Here’s what I mean: one can argue “Hey the CCP and the Soviets were just right wingers under the guise of leftist ideology, communism actually does work if it's instituted in its purist form.” And then on the other end someone can argue “Capitalism works great when it’s used in its most pure form as described by Friedman, Hayek, Sowel, Mises.” This is the No True Scotsman fallacy. What I’m trying to say is I don’t personally care about philosophy and ideology, all I care about is impact. Communism, as it has been practiced by the Soviets and Mao, has not gone well. Both communism and capitalism as pure theories can never be instituted. Successfully modern day societies are clearly combinations of strong constitutional republics, representative democracy, liberalized markets within state regulations as well as Keynesian fiscal and monetary stabilization. Are these systems perfect? Absolutely not.

The problem is single party rule regardless of espoused ideology. It is the source of the complete disaster of Maoism and every other form of authoritarian rule