Reinvigorating Mao.(Mao Zedong)

ITEM: "After three decades of free-market economic reforms, China's leaders are re-emphasizing the study of Marxism and urging ruling party members not to turn their back on the communist ideology that's guided the nation since Mao Zedong's day," reports the Knight Ridder Service in the (Vermont) Times Argus for February 26.

ITEM: The San Francisco Chronicle for February 26 reported: "Thirty years after Mao Zedong 's death, Mao kitsch is the new cool, and young men are wearing Mao T-shirts as a sure way of getting admiring looks from young women. 'I think it shows the man is thinking, questioning Mao and China,' said a 19-year-old woman who asked to be identified as Lu. 'Our generation did not see Mao, so we have to make up our own image of him.' " Communist authorities, acknowledged the Chronicle account, "have never allowed an honest appraisal of Mao 's legacy, and the latest biography, 'Mao: The Unknown Story,' by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, has been banned in China. Without knowing much about Mao's rule, and in the face of unbending propaganda from the Communist Party, many Chinese still venerate Mao."

ITEM: Reuters reported on March 16, "Doing good deeds, volunteering on building sites and obtaining Chairman Mao's autograph are some of the objectives of 'Learn from Lei Feng,' a new online game starring the Chinese Communist Party's legendary hero. The plot revolves around Lei Feng, a humble, selfless People's Liberation Army soldier." The developer of the game said it "was aimed at providing students with the tools to learn the pleasures of helping others, [official state agency] Xinhua said."

CORRECTION: The actual legacy of Mao Tse-tung, the former dictator of Communist China, is so horrific that it is truly astonishing to see it applauded or to have his criminal record minimized or, perhaps worse, treated as a joke.

Simply calling him a mass murderer hardly does Mao justice. Over decades, he and his communist followers and cronies triggered an appalling amount of agony and grief, causing the deaths of nearly one in every 20 Chinese men, women, and children. The Chinese communists also attempted to control the personal beliefs of hundreds of millions of Chinese by, among other actions, running the largest prison system of all time and perpetrating history's greatest famine. Fear, torture, and brainwashing became the stock in trade of Mao's China. Children were recruited to inform on their parents and each other to the police state. Legions of brainwashed youths joined the Red Guard, a group that persecuted anyone accused, or suspected, of having pro-capitalist or anti-Mao views.

A former Red Guard named Wei Jingsheng wrote about the period called the Great Leap Forward when Mao's policies led to excruciating suffering, and famine brought many to the point of cannibalism. As the Red Guard recalled: "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 ...