A new biography of Mao Zedong by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday is a reminder of just how bad that world-changing leader was. For a perceptive review see Perry Link in a recent TLS. 

     Mao was clearly obsessed with maintaining power above all else and went to awful extremes to create conditions that would serve his personal interests in power.  In this, he was following the old advice of Han Fei Tzu, the Legalist thinker who counseled rulers to be wary of their closest ministers (one of the most dangerous positions in Maoist China was the Chairman’s "closest comrade in arms") and impose swift and severe punishments on those who might demonstrate any independence of thought or action. 

     But however much Mao may have revered the first Qin emperor, who was a staunch Legalist, the Communist leader ultimately failed to appreciate one of the finer points of Han Fei Tzu’s writing:

     In his chapter on "Precautions within the Palace," Han warns that the ruler must be careful not to "afflict the people."  His worry here is not humanitarian (Legalists really don’t feel your pain), but political:

If too much compulsory labor is demanded of the people, they feel afflicted, and this will give rise to local power groups…Hence it is said, if labor services are few, the people will be content; if the people are content, there will be no opportunity for men to exercise undue authority on the lower levels and power groups will disappear.

     This is a fair description of what happened in the People’s Republic during the disaster of the Great Leap Forward (ca. 1958-1961).  The "Leap" (as it was called by Chinese propagandists) was a package of economic policies that demanded people fundamentally reorganize their lives, throw themselves into back-breaking labor, give themselves over completely to the wisdom of the party and the leader, and don’t ask any questions when things started to go bad.  Mao was not the only architect of the Leap (all sorts of embarrassing questions can be asked about where Deng Xiaoping was in 1957 and 1958…), but, as supreme leader he bore a certain responsibility.

     Ultimately, the Leap failed, and the ensuing famine killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 million people over the course of about three years.  30 million deaths in three years.  Let that sink in.  It was probably the worst single event in modern Chinese history, in terms of the number of Chinese people killed and disabled.  And it was largely due to bad policy, lying and coercion.  It was a man-made disaster and Mao has to answer for it.

     Mao’s responsibility was made more prominent by the fact that, just as Han predicted, the affliction of the people became known to some of his ministers, most famously his defense minister, Peng Dehuai, and Peng publicly (well, as public as a Central Committee meeting can be) asked Mao personally to change policies to stop the starvation.  Mao treated this as a direct political threat, as Han might have counseled him to do, politically crushed Peng, and demanded that the Leap continue.  Most of the deaths happened after this momentous meeting. 

    A couple of years later, however, everyone in the leadership realized Peng had been correct.  They banded together, pushed Mao to the sidelines, and stopped the Leap. Mao would later fight back with the Cultural Revolution, another affliction for the Chinese people.

    Focusing just on the Leap: Mao foolishly afflicted the people and allowed for a political backlash that undermined his rule.  He thus failed as a Legalist ruler.  If Han was at his side in 1958, he may have reminded him not to afflict the people.

    Of course, Mao’s failures were much greater than this when we consider non-Legalist, moral, Mencian standards of good government.  In moral terms, the Great Leap Forward, and, by extension, Mao’s rule, were horrendous failures.  But even by the amoral, cynical, power-obsessed standards of Legalism, Mao’s Great Leap was a bust.

     We tend not to talk that much about the Great Leap.  But any consideration of Mao’s life and legacy has to include it.  How can whatever good that might be found in the decades of Maoist rule outweigh the terrible magnitude of the Great Leap?