Mao and the Australian Maoists.(History)(Mao Tse-tung)

IN DECEMBER 1993, to mark the centenary of the birth of Mao Tse-tung, the Melbourne Age commissioned an opinion piece from Albert Langer, who as a student activist in the 1960s had been the best-known public face of Maoism in Australia. Around the time Langer accepted the invitation, Western culture had been beset by a vogue for big, showpiece political apologies: Bill Clinton apologised for slaver, the Queen apologised for British imperialism, the Pope even apologised for the Crusades. But it never occurred to Langer to follow suit.

He wrote at a time when the populations of Eastern Europe had just revealed what they thought of their former communist rulers by throwing them all out of office, and when China was finally pulling itself out of poverty by developing a capitalist economy. Rather than the end of socialism, Langer portrayed this merely as its "low tide". It would inevitably be followed by another high tide like the one he enjoyed in his youth. The impasse into which the Left had fallen, he wrote, would not last forever. "As Mao points out," Langer declared, "there is an alternative--rebellion, straggle, the right for socialism ... Happy birthday Mao Tse-tung!"

When Mao's next major milestone, the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, arrived in 1999 Australian Book Review commissioned another 1960s Maoist, Humphrey McQueen, to write its annual La Trobe University Essay. By this time, McQueen was less of an enthusiast than Langer. He had now, he said, lost all sympathy with the regime. But he still claimed the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s was justified for attempting to bring backward rural China into the modern world, and he still considered Mao a great intellect. "Far from seeing Mao Tse-tung-Thought as sloganeering," McQueen wrote, "I knew how demanding his ideas could be."

When the review commissioned McQueen it could hardly have been unaware of the radical shift in Western opinion about the nature of Mao's regime. This was partly the result of Jung Chang's best-selling 1991 book Wild Swans." Three Daughters of China, which told the story of how her own once-dedicated Maoist family, and many others like it, had been humiliated, imprisoned and destroyed by the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution. When Jasper Becker's book Hungry Ghosts: China's Secret Famine revealed in 1995 that Mao had caused between 30 and 40 million people to starve to death during the so-called Great Leap Forward of 1958-61, the horror of the regime was there for all to see. But McQueen's reminiscences mentioned none of this.

It is unlikely that future Chinese anniversaries will be celebrated by anyone in the Australian media in the same way. Mao Tse-tung now stands revealed as the greatest mass murderer in human history. We now have plausible evidence that he was responsible for the deaths of more than 70 million people, a tally larger than that achieved by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin combined. In their new biography Mao: The Unknown Story (Jonathan Cape), Jung Chang and Jon Halliday attribute 38 million of these deaths to the great Chinese famine of 1958-61. Another 27 million were executed or worked to death between 1950 and 1976 in Mao's gulag of prisons and labour camps. During the initial nationwide campaign of terror to consolidate his regime from October 1950 to October 1951, Mao oversaw three million Chinese killed by execution, mob violence and suicide. A further three million suffered the same fate after 1966 at the hands of the Red Guards and other protagonists of the Cultural Revolution.

Although some of Mao's Australian sympathisers, such as Linda Jaivin writing in the Bulletin, have tried to nitpick Chang and Halliday's total of 70 million dead, their figure is, if anything, conservative. For instance, the 38 million death toll they attribute to the great famine is around the middle of the recorded range. Jasper Becker cited reliable Western demographers who argued at least 30 million died but he also quoted several Chinese estimates that each recorded a total of more than 40 million. One source was the senior Communist Party official Chen Yizi who in 1979 was appointed by Premier Zhao Ziyang to find out what really happened in 1958-61. Chen led a team of 200 officials who visited every province to examine internal party documents and records. His report put the total at between 43 and 46 million dead.

Moreover, Chang and Halliday reveal how much responsibility Mao had for this particular catastrophe. Becker had attributed the famine largely to the ideological folly of a failed experiment in collectivisation. Chang and Halliday produce new evidence to show it was more sinister than that. Mao's regime confiscated Chinese harvests during the Great Leap Forward so it could export food to communist-controlled Eastern Europe in exchange for armaments and political support. Food and money were also exported to support anti-colonial and communist movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the first year of famine, 1958-59, China exported seven million tons of grain, enough to feed 38 million people. In 1960, a year in which 22 million Chinese died of starvation, China was the biggest international aid donor in terms of proportion of GNP in the world. Thanks to Chinese agricultural exports, East Germany was able to lift food rationing in 1958, and Albania in 1961.