Dec. 27, 2022 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
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EPISODE 352: THE CHINA FILES - CHAOS UNDER HEAVEN
In Part Two of The China Files - Chaos Under Heaven - the CCP expert himself, Jack Posibiec breaks down the brutal and tragic history of the Cultural Revolution during Chairman Mao’s tyrannical rule over China. From The Great Leap Forward to the infamous struggle sessions, Poso dives deep into the dirty details of how the once great nation of China fell from grace, becoming a beacon of despair and a distorted version of Utopia; better known simply as: communism. If you want to know the whole ...
Welcome to the first episode, The China Files Part 2: Chaos Under Heaven.
In Part 1, we talked all about the decline and fall of the Qing Dynasty, the last empire of China.
We talked about World War II, and we talked about the Chinese Civil War, as well as the rise of Chairman Mao himself, Mao Zedong.
going from the son of a peasant farmer to go on and become the most brutal revolutionary leader the world had ever seen.
But after 1949, Chairman Mao was now the dictator of the entire country, the undisputed leader of the Chinese Communist Party.
The man who, with a single word, could order executions, could order young girls taken to him, which he did many, many times, some as young as 13 and 14, to be brought up to his inner chambers, massive bed that he used to use.
He had absolute power over the country.
But the first thing that he began to do with that power was something called the agricultural reforms.
And what was this?
With the agricultural reforms and possibly in a response to his father and a response to the way that he talked about his father.
If you owned land, that land was taken for you.
brutally beating him and his brothers.
The Chinese Communist Party went into every single peasant village and they found anyone who owned land.
If you owned land, that land was taken for you.
Peasant revenge was the coin of the realm.
Landlords, landowners were shunned, publicly mocked, in some cases brutally executed by the Chinese Communist Party.
Millions of people died in this exercise, in this activity.
These were called legitimate grievances against the landowners.
It was a new class war.
Mao himself actually described it as this in 1950.
Land reform in a population of over 300 million people is a vicious war.
It is more arduous, more complex, more troublesome than crossing the Yangtze River.
Because our troops are 260 million peasant soldiers.
This is a war for land reform.
This is the most hideous class war between peasants and landlords.
It is a battle to the death.
It's hard to tell how many landlords were actually systemically murdered by the Chinese Communist Party during this time.
But it wasn't just landlords that were targeted.
Because Mao soon realized that factory owners, factory managers, and academics all caused problems for him.
And so Mao continued To go after all of them, but for the academics, Mao had a new idea because Mao came up with something called the Baihua Yingdong, the Hundred Flowers Campaign.
And at one point in 1956, Chairman Mao encouraged intellectuals, academics, writers, he said, speak out, let a hundred flowers bloom, tell us the truth of what You believe our country has been up to since the founding of the People's Republic.
Just go ahead and let us know and don't worry, nothing will happen to you.
Well, it shouldn't begin to be very hard to tell you what happened to all those people.
Because every single person who spoke out against Chairman Mao was locked up, discredited, They lost their jobs.
They were forced into gulags and labor camps.
They were sent away for re-education.
Many of which were pushed to suicide or persecuted to the point where they decided to take their own lives rather than live through continued persecution at the hands of the authorities and at the hands of the party.
Hundreds of thousands of leaders, leading intellectuals, professors, We're targeting what was called, and you're gonna love this, it was called the anti-right-wing movement.
Because any criticism of the party was seen as right-wing extremism.
And you're gonna hear that phrase over and over as we talk more about this.
Because right-wing extremism, according to Chairman Mao, was the enemy of the revolution.
And anyone who opposed him was a right-wing extremist.
In fact, the historian Jun Chang wrote, it was a year before the intellectuals gained courage to respond to Mao's call.
But in terms of the education system, there were bitter complaints about copying the Soviet Union, the fact that Marxist-Leninism was held up as orthodox doctrine to be accepted without question, wider social criticism focused on the authoritarian role and various abuses of privilege of the new political elites.
Because the new elites were simply the people that Mao put into power.
But Mao didn't care.
Mao was looking to make a list of enemies.
And for every person who came out, they were criticized, they were persecuted, many of whom were later sent to the farms themselves.
They said, if you don't understand the importance of the peasantry, you must be sent down.
This happened in the 1950s and 60s.
These intellectuals were sent to work on farms themselves as indentured servants and slaves.
And there's another group that was persecuted.
The persecution of them began under this time.
It wasn't as intense as it would later become during the Cultural Revolution.
But that was the church.
Christianity in China began to be persecuted.
Churches were closed.
Missionaries were forced out.
You didn't yet have the mass killings Of priests and nuns, the rapes, that would come later.
But during this period, the Chinese Communist Party, like all communist parties, understood that only one ideology could be allowed to operate.
And so any church that remained in China, any individual congregation, had to be forced, the priests themselves, had to swear allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party.
Or they too would be purged.
They too would be sent to the countryside, and if they were a foreigner, be deported from the country or even worse.
Because in a communist revolution, they always come for the priests first.
They always come for the people of God.
Because for communism to take hold and take root, There cannot be any higher power than the party, which is always officially atheist.
They smash God, they take him out of the public square, and they appoint themselves and the revolution the new morality.
Because as we're going to learn, the revolution never ends.
As the 10-year mark of the People's Republic was rapidly approaching, Mao became impatient.
Mao was upset because Utopia had not yet been reached.
Millions had been killed.
Millions more had been deported.
Millions more had been taken out of their positions of power and sent to serve as peasants.
The peasants then had been placed in charge of the farms, in charge of the factories, in charge of industrial output, and yet nothing seemed to be working.
Mao then decided That industrial manufacturing and agricultural growth needed to move, quote, faster, better, and cheaper.
And so Mao came up with a new policy, a new plan that he called the Great Leap Forward.
The Great Leap Forward had two objectives.
The first was to industrialize the society, industrialize the economy in order to catch up with the West.
The second was to transform China into a collectivized society where full socialism would be achieved.
This was done through collective communes where those massive farms that we talked about earlier would no longer be owned by any one individual.
They'd be owned by the state.
They'd be owned by the party where you wouldn't even live in your own home anymore.
You would live in dormitories.
You would live in blocks.
You wouldn't make your own food.
No, you'd be served food at cafeterias and canteens.
You'd be given the ability to have a collective meal.
You would have collective work, collective education, collective life.
You would live at the beck and call of the state.
By the Great Leap Forward, this was announced by Mao.
The party was meeting in Nanjing in the South.
And Mao said, we need to follow a different path than the Soviet Union.
We need to figure out a way to organize all peasant labor, eliminate waste, inefficiency.
And of course, Mao realized That the only one to be able to direct all of this, of course, would be Chairman Mao himself.
And so, they came up with a new jingle.
Communism is paradise, and the people's communes are the way to get there.
Private property was confiscated.
Land, farm buildings, tools, livestock, all of it was confiscated by the government, even private homes.
Philip Short, who was a historian, wrote, Now, Mao was also obsessed with steel.
supposed to have at least six hours sleep every day.
But some brigades boasted of working up to four or five days without stopping.
Now Mao was also obsessed with steel and Mao said we need to find ways to make more – China has to make more steel and make it faster.
So Mao decided to come up with a new policy called backyard furnaces because we needed to take the old iron, remember the old plowshares.
We needed more steel plow shares.
And so what was the best way to do this?
Well, the Soviet Union had their massive smelteries, but not in China.
No, no, no, no, no.
In China, they decided to have backyard furnaces.
So all farmers and anyone in China who owned iron, you were then ordered by Chairman Mao to go into your backyard with your hammers, your sights, your equipment, and to smelt all of it down in your backyard furnaces.
Now, did this lead to a new birth of a bountiful harvest for China?
Did these massive communist policies lead to the greatest export and bountiful harvest that we've ever seen in the world?
No.
Unfortunately not.
Because unfortunately for us, the same way that this was tried under Trofim Lysenko, the founder of Lysenkoism, complete pseudoscience in the Soviet Union, This led to the greatest mass humanitarian crisis in world history.
Tens of millions of people starved to death.
Some estimates say it was as high as 47 million.
Some estimates say it's as high as 60 million.
There's an incredible book called Hungry Ghosts that I urge you to read, but I don't urge you to read it on an empty stomach.
Actually, I do urge you to read it on an empty stomach.
Because it shows the abject horror that the people of China, the Laobai Xing, had to live through under the Great Leap Forward, and what they call the Great Famine.
Even today they call it the Three Years of Famine, though of course in official propaganda they say it was due to natural disasters.
The food shortages got so bad, got so critical, that peasants were eating things like sawdust, leather, seeds, animal manure, In Sichuan Province, there are reports of peasants eating soil itself.
Dogs, cats, rice, mice, insects, dead or alive.
Malnutrition spread throughout all of China.
And there was something else that spread throughout China that began to rear its head.
Cannibalism.
Because people would see their neighbors die and they would say, if this flesh can be a way for us to live, then why shouldn't we?
Sometimes, and there are reports of this happening to families eating their own family members, parents, siblings, even in some cases, children.
Child abandonment, child selling, prostitution.
In some cases, there are even stories of parents killing their own children, which they considered an act of mercy, rather than allow them to starve.
All of this in Chairman Mao's quest for a communist utopia.
His quest to make everything equal under heaven.
His quest To right the wrongs of a capitalist, right-wing, imperialist society.
Parents forced to kill their own children.
People eating their own neighbors.
These stories, by the way, you won't find them in a Hollywood movie.
You won't find them anywhere in China.
Because Hollywood is terrified.
To tell the truth of what happened in China under Chairman Mao.
They're terrified to tell the truth of the Chinese Communist Party to this very day.
The most horrific humanitarian crisis on the planet.
50 million, 60 million people dead in peacetime.
And there isn't a single movie about it.
Why do you suppose that is?
So the Great Leap Forward ended in disaster.
Mass starvation, tens of millions killed.
Many of the other senior leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, people like Deng Xiaoping, people like Liu Xiaoqi, realized that they had to come up with a new plan.
And so they went to Chairman Mao and they said, let us take over economic reforms.
We can work on this.
We can make things better.
We can set things right.
And initially Chairman Mao said, fine, go ahead.
But then something happened.
As Deng Xiaoping and Liu Xiaoqi and the other individuals who were running these new reforms in China, Mao became very upset because he saw themselves as being successful and they were winning over the people.
But Mao didn't like that one bit.
He didn't want anyone to have that kind of connection with the people other than him.
But the problem was, for the people that had lived through the Great Leap Forward, the people who understood the years of famine, they understood who was to blame, and they'd already been swung.
So anyone who was over 18 understood that it was Chairman Mao's issue.
So Chairman Mao came up with a new solution.
He decided that people like Deng Xiaoping and people like Liu Xiaoti, these other party leaders, or anyone who opposed his rule, his unquestioned rule, must then be eliminated his unquestioned rule, must then be eliminated and purged.
And Mao launched something in 1966 that can only be referred to as a revolution against his own revolution.
And he used the youth in order to do this.
He began to hold massive stadium filled speeches, broadcasts across the news, across everywhere.
Speeches from Tiananmen Gate and Tiananmen Square.
And he brought these youth to him, these new cadres that he referred to as the Red Guards.
And the Red Guard brigades were then formed in every city, in every province, from the cities of the East to the deserts of the West, to the countryside, to the South.
And Mao asked for only one thing, unquestioned loyalty to himself and unquestioned loyalty to the revolution.
If you were accused of anti-revolutionary thought, As the brigades of thousands of Red Guards marched up and down the streets, they would go onto buses and they always held up Mal's Little Red Book, and they would ask you to make sure that you had your copy of Mal's Little Red Book on you.
They might even ask you to quote from it, and if you couldn't finish the quote they started on the bus, you'd be hauled off and sent to your struggle session.
If you were accused at school, if you were accused at work, of uttering anti-revolutionary thought, the persecution began.
Teachers would throw themselves out of buildings and kill themselves rather than face the struggle sessions.
Massive soccer stadiums where people were placed with placards around their necks and forced to self-incriminate, forced to stand there and be persecuted by the people, spat upon, have things thrown at them, in some cases executed, Some cases not.
The Red Guards soon became too powerful for anyone to control and the cult of Mao became so large that everyone in the country had to go with it.
Churches at this point were completely destroyed.
Anything attached to the past or attached to another country became a target of attack.
A new vector of destruction.
You had to prove your worth.
You had to prove your fervor, your revolutionary fervor to Chairman Mao.
People were dug up.
Old emperors were dug up.
And their bodies were desecrated.
Graveyards were smashed.
Things that may bear a striking similarity to things that you saw in the United States in 2020.
As statues were smashed, language itself was twisted.
And the enemies of Chairman Mao were purged, blacklisted, in many cases persecuted and murdered.
Even one individual, Lin Biao, who had been the head of the Red Army during the Chinese Civil War, during the war against the Nationalists, Lin Biao, who had always supported Chairman Mao.
He was the Minister of Defense.
Even he was accused because Mao was becoming crazier and crazier as he lost his mind.
Many people thought that he had even had syphilis.
And it's gone back to say that some of his doctors have confirmed this.
That Mao thought that Lin Biao was working against him.
And there's been new information that's come out in years since that Lin Biao may have been having secret discussions with the nationalists, with the Republic of China back down in Taiwan.
As to say, we need to do something about Mao.
We need to form a new government.
This has been a complete disaster.
Mao found out what was going on.
And Lin Biao, and took his entire family, nine people, and they ran to an airplane, private airplane, a Hawker Siddeley Trident.
They took off from Beijing.
Excuse me, they took off from Hebei Province.
They tried to flow up to the Soviet Union, but the Soviet Union didn't want issues with Mao.
They tried to fly back down to Taiwan, but they realized that they ran out of fuel.
They crashed over Mongolia.
Everyone, Lin Biao's entire family was killed.
Even someone who had been a massive supporter of Mao himself and his whole family died because Mao had lost his entire mind.
And he was accusing everyone of being against him.
It's in these final years that Nixon and Kissinger made their trips over.
They met with Mao.
Mao made a series of crazy statements to both of them.
And then Mao in 1976 finally died.
His body was embalmed.
Believe it or not, Mao's body is still on public display to this very day in Tiananmen Square.
And you can go visit his mausoleum.
But if you want to go visit the Mao mausoleum, you better plan the whole day for it.
Because the line to get in is hours and hours long.
There ain't no fast pass like Disney World.
Because even to this day, because of the power of propaganda, people wait in the thousands to see the body.
of the Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao.
Join with us tomorrow as we'll talk about what happened next.
To the regime, Mao dies.
Deng Xiaoping is able to take over.
There is an increase.
There are reforms in economics and politics, but it culminates in something called the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
