Mao Zedong Genocide

One of the worst recorded genocides in history is the China- Tibet genocide, started by Mao Zedong. Beginning in the middle of the 1950s, Mao repeatedly sacrificed up to a third of the Chinese population in a nuclear war in order to bring the downfall of world capitalism. Mao in the early 1940s pushed for a party purge, with the goal of installing his version of communism, once the Civil War began. A small number of protesters were driven to commit suicide or killed. Although he made a public apology for the brutality of his campaign, it did set an example for future campaigns and whether they were real or imagined, all of the precautions taken to avoid them were called for “greater freedom”. In result, anyone from campaigns that went against what Mao was standing for and trying to lead toward were persecuted, lost their positions, and were sent to reeducation camps, these were any of the leaders to the groups. An unspecified, but probably large, number of victims died or suffered permanent damage to their health from forced labor, abuse, and malnutrition in the camps.

The greatest loss of life during Mao's regime resulted from the deadly spring famines (1,959,961 deaths) of the Great Leap Forward. Once Mao realized by the mid-1960s that his goal for total leadership had been thwarted, he turned to forces outside the CCP to attack what he considered a reserved party that would be against accepting his values and beliefs. Another example of the cruelties that Mao Zedong inflicted upon the people of China and Tibet include; there were no medicines for a ten-year-old boy who died in my arms after being shot by a sniper, a 23-year-old man who had been shot through the heart, or a mother pouring water onto her16-year-old son’s unresponsive lips (the boy had been beaten to death, with a shovel, inside the police station).

The Cultural Revolution was a mixture of party purge and class warfare, during which radicalized students persecuted, humiliated, tortured, and even murdered alleged rightists or counterrevolutionaries. In this one genocide there were approximately 49-78,000,000 deaths that were cause from Mao Zedong’s rise to power. There is no exact number because there was no way to know exactly what happened or how many people were killed. Especially from the famines, there is an unknown value of deaths that have been recorded. In more recent times, the Spanish National court has ruled that China’s policies in Tibet of torture, forced abortions, sterilizations, infanticide, disappearances, arbitrary execution, religious persecution, racial discrimination, and population transfer all present a prima facie case for genocide.

Works Cited

"Mao Zedong." Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. Ed. Dinah L. Shelton. Vol. 2. Gale Cengage, 2005. eNotes.com. 1 Mar, 2012 <http://www.enotes.com/mao-zedong-reference/>

Kerr, Blake. "Mao Zedong." Enotes.com. Enotes.com, 26 Dec. 2011. Web. 01 Mar. 2012. <http://www.enotes.com/mao-zedong-reference/mao-zedong>.

Freetibet.com. 2008. Web. <http://www.freetibet.org/>.