During the last years of his life Mao became
more remote, removed from the day-to-day run-
ning of the state. Now deified he continued to
symbolise for China the communist victory and
China’s emergence as a world power. And herein
lies the final contradiction: Mao’s benign reputa-
tion was not deserved; terror and violence were
the result of the ideological utopias he had pur-
sued. He had ruined millions of lives in the Great
Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the
wholesale forced migrations. Mao had attempted
to ensure that as his life drew to a close the revo-
lutionary fire would not be extinguished with him.
The excesses of the Cultural Revolution, however,
taught some of the Chinese leadership a bitter les-
son in the dangers of Mao’s line of thought and
action. By the time he died in September 1976, in
the context of economic planning there would
only be a revolutionary flicker of his radical ideas
left. But the heritage of a repressive political one-
party state remained very much intact.
The Chinese revolution had created its own
Gulag, a network of forced job placement and
labour camps. Millions of prisoners were con-
demned to forced labour, sometimes for decades,
without trial. During the frequent famines, such
as that after Mao’s disastrous experiment in 1958,
life was reduced to searching for scraps of food.
We know from surviving witnesses that in such
camps the obsession with food replaced all feel-
ings and other desires. Those suspected of ‘wrong
thinking’, the ‘rightists’ and other dissidents fared
the worst and had to submit to sessions of re-edu-
cation to crush their independent spirit. How
many hundreds of thousands did not survive can
only be estimated. There were variations between
conditions in different camps depending on the
camp commanders, the work to be performed and
the prevailing political mood. One truth emerges
from all this horror: the resilience and courage of
the survivors show that the human spirit knows
no boundaries of nationality or race.
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