Mao Zedong, China’s founding communist dictator and inspiration for what has been romanticized as The Little Red Book (a must-have knapsack item for old hippies and lefty university professors), was responsible for the deaths of upwards of 50 million people through the planned upheavals of starvation, persecution, prison labour and mass executions.
Estimates vary. Fifty million deaths, according to experts, is at the top end of Mao’s downsizing, with 30 million deaths being the bare minimum.
It’s not good when it’s give-or-take 20-million cadavers, even if the population then was 828 million.
Still, as reported by Blacklock’s Reporter, Canada’s former ambassador to China, Howard Balloch, told a special Commons China-Canada committee this week that Chairman Mao wasn’t a totally bad guy because he “turned a more or less completely illiterate society into a literate society.”
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