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By Root 1248 0

withstood the Mongols were destroyed and replaced with steel factories. The ancient cores of cities were flattened and from the ashes new power plants were built. Some people, of course, objected to this willful destruction of China’s cultural heritage. In response, Mao put them on the wrecking crews. Meanwhile, in the countryside, a half-billion peasants suddenly found their lives in turmoil. Massive waterworks projects were inflicted on the country, including a dam in Henan Province that would subsequently collapse in 1975, killing 250,000 people. Villages were abandoned for communes, where soon the villagers lost their names and gained a number. Numbers, after all, were more efficient than names. Tools and cooking utensils were melted into steel in millions of backyard furnaces so that Mao could claim to have doubled China’s steel production within a year. The steel, of course, was useless, and any pilot flying a plane made with the steel produced in a backyard furnace would soon be dead. But the steel quotas were met, and this is what mattered to Mao.

So too did the grain quotas. Superpowers exported grain. Ergo, China must export grain. To achieve this, Mao ordered the death of every sparrow in China. Sparrows ate grain seeds; thus they had to die. This probably looked like a good idea on paper. Who would have thought that the sudden demise of the lowly sparrow would contribute to one of the worst catastrophes to ever befall humanity? Over the next three years, China would starve like no other nation had starved before. There were, of course, scientists and economists and steelmakers and farmers who could have told Mao that these were not particularly good ideas. But no one dared raise their concerns to the Chairman, who had nothing but disdain for experts, those irksome people who possessed something so irritating as knowledge.

Indeed, in 1956, during what came to be known as the Hundred Flowers Campaign, Mao encouraged dissenting voices to speak up, which they did. So identified, Mao unleashed one of his periodic purges. He ultimately praised the province of Hunan, which had “denounced 100,000, arrested 10,000, and killed 1,000,” and concluded, “the other provinces did the same. So our problems were solved.” In the 1950s alone, as Mao consolidated his power, his purges took the lives of more than 800,000 people. Subsequently, no one dared point out that the steel the peasants were ordered to produce in backyard furnaces was worthless, that the elimination of every sparrow would lead to a plague of locusts, and that the revolutionary changes he had applied to farming were based on nothing more than nonsensical musings. In the ensuing famine, more than 30 million people died. It became the single most devastating famine in human history. Mao, however, remained nonplussed. “Deaths have benefits,” he said. “They can fertilize the ground.” And here’s the real stunner: While China starved, Mao continued to export grain.

There were other ideas, of course, that didn’t turn out so well. Mao’s cult of personality found its most intense expression during the Cultural Revolution, a calculated madness in the late sixties and early seventies designed by Mao’s most ferocious supporters to consolidate power and cripple his rivals. Even Deng Xiaoping, who would one day rule China, was sent into exile in distant Jiangxi Province, where he toiled in a tractor factory. But this was no mere power struggle, and the phrase cultural revolution doesn’t quite do justice to the terror of that time. It was a war against the “Four Olds”—Old Customs, Old Ideas, Old Habits, and Old Culture—carried out by brainwashed, rampaging teenagers, the so-called Red Guards, bands of youths suddenly given free rein to release their inner sadists. “Be Violent,” Mao had instructed them, and they did their best to comply. The police and soldiers were told to not interfere as the youths set about beating and torturing their teachers and anyone else suspected of having “rightist” tendencies.

“Peking is not violent enough,” Mao said of Beijing, using the name