Page 131 - Communism in Ambush

In the years of the Great
Leap, many Chinese who
resisted Mao's savagery
were brutally executed.
Many were killed by a
bullet to the back of the
head.

was perhaps as many as 33 million (although some births were merely de-
layed), loss of life linked to famine in the years 1959-1961 was somewhere
b between 20 million and 43 million people…This was quite possibly the
worst famine not just in the history of China but in the history of the
world. 83
In the course of the Great Leap, an eighteen-year-old Red Guard,
who was pursued by the authorities and took refuge with his family in a
village in Anhui, described Maoism's cruel face:
We walked along beside the village. The rays of the sun shone on the jade-
green weeds that had sprung up between the earth walls, accentuating the
contrast with the rice fields all around, and adding to the desolation of the
landscape. Before my eyes, among the weeds, rose up one of the scenes I
had been told about, one of the banquets at which the families had
swapped children in order to eat them. I could see the worried faces of the
families as they chewed the flesh of other people's children. The children
who were chasing butterflies in a nearby field seemed to be the reincarna-
tion of the children devoured by their parents. I felt sorry for the children,
but not as sorry as I felt for their parents. What had made them swallow
that human flesh, amidst the tears and grief of other parents—flesh that
they would never have imagined tasting, even in their worst nightmares?
In that moment I understood what a butcher he had been, the man "whose
like humanity has not seen in several centuries, and China not in several
thousand years": Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong and his henchmen, with their
criminal political system, had driven parents mad with hunger and led
them to hand their own children over to others, and to receive the flesh of
others to appease their own hunger. Mao Zedong, to wash away the crime
that he had committed in assassinating democracy, had launched the