Mao the mass murderer by Jonathan Mirsky

It is impossible to imagine official homage in Germany for Hitler or in Russia for Stalin. And yet Mao was a destroyer of the same class as Hitler and Stalin. He exhibited his taste for killing from the early 1930's, when, historians now estimate, he had thousands of his political adversaries slaughtered. Ten years later, still before the Communist victory, more were executed at his guerrilla headquarters at Yan'an.

Hundreds of thousands of landlords were exterminated in the early 1950's. From 1959 to 1961 probably 30 million people died of hunger - the party admits 16 million - when Mao's economic fantasies were causing peasants to starve and he purged those who warned him of the scale of the disaster.

Many more perished during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao established a special unit, supervised by Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, to report to him in detail the sufferings of hundreds of imprisoned leaders who had incurred the chairman's displeasure.

One of the chairman's secretaries, Li Rui, wrote recently, "Mao was a person who did not fear death, and he did not care how many were killed." The writers of the Kaifang article tell us what this meant for China: "Mao instilled in people's minds a philosophy of cruel struggle and revolutionary superstition. Hatred took the place of love and tolerance; the barbarism of 'It is right to rebel!' became the substitute for rationality and love of peace. It elevated and sanctified the view that relations between human beings are best characterized as those between wolves."

yep.