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spitzig's review
3.0
I'm not enough of a historian to judge the accuracy of the book. The personal insults the author continually made at Mao make me distrust her impartiality a little.
I was not aware that Mao did hardly nothing to HELP China. He unified China. A lot of that was by torture and fear. He built hardly nothing. He tried to build an arms industry. But, he didn't want to bother with the infrastructure to back it up. He didn't bother to maintain equipment. It was like a robot with the command "MAKE WEAPONS".
He would be the extreme politician side of politician/statesman. He didn't care about "the people". There were almost .5 billion people in China, so a nuclear war would leave lots of Chinese people for him to rule over. He cared about those in power-making sure they were tightly under his control.
It took me forever to read this book because there was hardly nothing HAPPY in it. It was lots of executions, torture, political maneuvering-not in a good way.
I was not aware that Mao did hardly nothing to HELP China. He unified China. A lot of that was by torture and fear. He built hardly nothing. He tried to build an arms industry. But, he didn't want to bother with the infrastructure to back it up. He didn't bother to maintain equipment. It was like a robot with the command "MAKE WEAPONS".
He would be the extreme politician side of politician/statesman. He didn't care about "the people". There were almost .5 billion people in China, so a nuclear war would leave lots of Chinese people for him to rule over. He cared about those in power-making sure they were tightly under his control.
It took me forever to read this book because there was hardly nothing HAPPY in it. It was lots of executions, torture, political maneuvering-not in a good way.
glennrj's review
4.0
Gets behind the Mao propaganda, the Little Red Book, etc., and absolutely exposes the man's brutality and inhumanity and the terror state he created. After reading this, it has been hard to stomach seeing Mao's face still prominently displayed throughout China during the Olympics.
lindseysparks's review
4.0
I knew going in to this that Mao was responsible for the deaths of about 70 million of his citizens and that a lot of the deaths were from starvation, but I had no idea that he set up limits on what people could eat and for peasants purposely allotted less than what was needed for subsistence. Those were the people growing the food!!! People in the cities were given more and China exported a ton of food. When people began hoarding food, he had their stoves and woks broken so that they had to go to the state-run canteens to eat. He abandoned his children during the Long March. He made doctors of his staff members report to him and in one case refused to let them tell his right-hand man that he had cancer, which at that time would have been treatable.
The author of this biography was born during Mao's rule and left China shortly after his death. She interviewed many people who knew him personally and who lived under his rule. It's extremely in-depth, which is also it's downfall. The first half of the book was just too detailed. I could tell as I was reading that part that I wouldn't retain much of the information. It was just too in the weeds and was before he came to power. It felt like she was just seeing every fact she knew instead of editing down to the meat. The writing was also a bit repetitive in places and could have been more engaging. I've seen numerous reviews of people who gave up and would recommend skipping forward to the Long March if you want to know more but find the first part too much of a slog. The second half is a four-star read and well worth the effort.
The author of this biography was born during Mao's rule and left China shortly after his death. She interviewed many people who knew him personally and who lived under his rule. It's extremely in-depth, which is also it's downfall. The first half of the book was just too detailed. I could tell as I was reading that part that I wouldn't retain much of the information. It was just too in the weeds and was before he came to power. It felt like she was just seeing every fact she knew instead of editing down to the meat. The writing was also a bit repetitive in places and could have been more engaging. I've seen numerous reviews of people who gave up and would recommend skipping forward to the Long March if you want to know more but find the first part too much of a slog. The second half is a four-star read and well worth the effort.
scheu's review
3.0
Not exactly read; I got to page 120 or so before I came to this conclusion: I don't find mass murderers fascinating.
tittypete's review
4.0
This books was wild. I took notes and tried to assemble them into a sorta synopsis for my own reference. TL;DR Mao was an absolute piece of shit.
First sentence: “Mao Tse-Tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader.” Ok, I’ll bite. He was born in to a peasant family in Hunan. his dad was a farmer, his mom had no name. At 14, Mao was arrangement-married to a person called “Woman” who died 2 years later. Mao demanded to go to school because he didn’t want to work for a rice salesman.
So he goes to school and reads a lot. He reads ‘A System of Ethics’ by Friedrich Paulsen and figures out his personal ethos: “I” above everything else. There’s a good quote on pg 13 but it’s real long. Essentially he’s like ‘fuck everything but my own self-interest. And fuck a legacy and the future because it doesn’t do any good for me now, mane.’ Turns out he wasn’t super into communism. It was a new thing being pumped out of Russia and the CCP was just firing up so he joined. Married his professor’s daughter but then fucked around on her. The Chinese nationalists AKA the Kuomintang, and Sun Yat Sen overthrow the old timey imperial shit and Mao is like ‘this guy is on to something.’
Mao becomes Moscow’s bag man but he was still playing along with the nationalists. He got sick and became obsessed with pooping. There’s a lot of poop and fart quotes attributed to the ol boy.
Early on it’s clear he’s a fucking sociopath with zero regard for his fellow Chinafolk. With Russian support he went around the countryside with his gang of bandits, burning and looting towns and publicly executing landlords. He was taking over parts of the army and roping in peasants. He really liked killing people and getting others to kill too. This meant there was no going back for them. They were in.
Eventually some reactionaries execute his second wife who he’d abandoned. Her old poems were dug up and reveal that she was sad. Finding out she got her head cut off made Mao sad too.When he becomes the head honcho of the commie party and starts a bloody purge killing every one who opposed him and having their wives vaginas burnt. There’s a lot of torture. Needles and wires through dicks and balls.
Then Mao wanted to fight with Chaing Kai Shek who is now in charge of the nationalist side of the burgeoning Chinese civil war. Moscow helps out and as the commies take over. Life gets shittier for everyone. The commies take everything from everyone and then make people work to death in forced labor. Yay!
A lot of people lost their kids during the revolution because mothers were encouraged to sell their children to raise money for the communist cause.
Mao starts consolidating power. His doctor gives his rivals poison prescriptions for their hemorrhoids and constipation. Lysol enemas, man.
WW2 comes and goes but the civil war still isn’t solved. Russia is helping the Chinese commies fight Chaing kai Shek. Even Japanese pows are helping to train the Chinese red army. The red army is pretty shitty at the moment and never really learned to fight since their main tactic had been to retreat. Anyway Mao doesn’t want to be beholden to Stalin so he says we’ll give you guys a bunch of food in exchange for military support. As result, a bunch of Chinese people in the commie areas starve to death. Smooth move.
The Korean war was basically a move by Mao to get Stalin to give him the means to build up his military. If he picked a fight with the Americans, the Soviet Union would have to help out with arms and shit. The Soviets were jazzed to test out their gear on the yanks too but didn’t want a direct confrontation. So Mao tells Kim go ahead and invade the south and we’ll back you up with a million screaming Chinamen. Most of which were Nationalist soldiers who surrendered to the commies at the end of the Chinese civil war. Shrewd dude, this Mao.
Then there’s the Superpower Program. Mao really wants the bomb so people will listen to him as a global player. He wanted the bomb and was actually jazzed to use it and start a nuclear war with everyone because, odds wise there’d probably be some Chines people leftover to takeover the ashes. Fucked.To pay for the technological and industrial advances required, he sells the only thing China has, its food. And then of course lots of people starve again. He wasted all the people’s shit making shitty stuff that didn’t work. Fucked up tanks and planes, bad steel. The author says 4 year leap was unique because “Mao worked everyone to the bone unrelentingly then took everything, then squandered it.” Other shitty dictators didn’t try to fuck their own people so hard.
He had a crafty move of letting the artists and intellectuals speak up briefly in order to find out who was critical of them and then took them out. Denounce 100,000. Arrest 10,000. Kill 1000. Mao didn’t like doctors because they were saying people were sick because they were starving. In 1960 22 million people starved to death. He was also of the opinion that the population had to be kept dumb. Culture was bad and they needed to get rid of it. So they have a cultural revolution which let teachers be killed by their students, then the students went after their neighbors and writers. And when everyone was sufficiently terrorized Mao went after any official who ever criticized him. The killing gets out of control. Charged up commies are eating their victims dicks in a show of savagery because Mao has stirred up the hatred so much. One guy has gun powder stuffed up his nostrils and set alight.
The whole Nixon meeting Mao bit was mystifying. Kissinger just gave China all kinds of intel and a UN seat on the security council. Taiwan got kicked out. All just so Nixon could visit with a ping pong team. The whole time Mao is trying to be the number one anti-american guy in the world. The US just sucked his dick. Nixon just got insulted. Not sure what we gained from it.
Mao let his number two guy Chou En Lai suffer from cancer just because he was an asshole. Mao’s wife was a cunt and nobody liked her. Then he gets old and sick and dies. Deng Xiaoping takes over and tries to be less of a fucking monster.
The dude sucked. As in, if you think Chinese lives are equal to everyone else’s, the worst fucking person in modern history. I guess the west didn’t really care because all the terror and famine was being done within China and not outwardly to anyone we cared about at the time.
First sentence: “Mao Tse-Tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader.” Ok, I’ll bite. He was born in to a peasant family in Hunan. his dad was a farmer, his mom had no name. At 14, Mao was arrangement-married to a person called “Woman” who died 2 years later. Mao demanded to go to school because he didn’t want to work for a rice salesman.
So he goes to school and reads a lot. He reads ‘A System of Ethics’ by Friedrich Paulsen and figures out his personal ethos: “I” above everything else. There’s a good quote on pg 13 but it’s real long. Essentially he’s like ‘fuck everything but my own self-interest. And fuck a legacy and the future because it doesn’t do any good for me now, mane.’ Turns out he wasn’t super into communism. It was a new thing being pumped out of Russia and the CCP was just firing up so he joined. Married his professor’s daughter but then fucked around on her. The Chinese nationalists AKA the Kuomintang, and Sun Yat Sen overthrow the old timey imperial shit and Mao is like ‘this guy is on to something.’
Mao becomes Moscow’s bag man but he was still playing along with the nationalists. He got sick and became obsessed with pooping. There’s a lot of poop and fart quotes attributed to the ol boy.
Early on it’s clear he’s a fucking sociopath with zero regard for his fellow Chinafolk. With Russian support he went around the countryside with his gang of bandits, burning and looting towns and publicly executing landlords. He was taking over parts of the army and roping in peasants. He really liked killing people and getting others to kill too. This meant there was no going back for them. They were in.
Eventually some reactionaries execute his second wife who he’d abandoned. Her old poems were dug up and reveal that she was sad. Finding out she got her head cut off made Mao sad too.When he becomes the head honcho of the commie party and starts a bloody purge killing every one who opposed him and having their wives vaginas burnt. There’s a lot of torture. Needles and wires through dicks and balls.
Then Mao wanted to fight with Chaing Kai Shek who is now in charge of the nationalist side of the burgeoning Chinese civil war. Moscow helps out and as the commies take over. Life gets shittier for everyone. The commies take everything from everyone and then make people work to death in forced labor. Yay!
A lot of people lost their kids during the revolution because mothers were encouraged to sell their children to raise money for the communist cause.
Mao starts consolidating power. His doctor gives his rivals poison prescriptions for their hemorrhoids and constipation. Lysol enemas, man.
WW2 comes and goes but the civil war still isn’t solved. Russia is helping the Chinese commies fight Chaing kai Shek. Even Japanese pows are helping to train the Chinese red army. The red army is pretty shitty at the moment and never really learned to fight since their main tactic had been to retreat. Anyway Mao doesn’t want to be beholden to Stalin so he says we’ll give you guys a bunch of food in exchange for military support. As result, a bunch of Chinese people in the commie areas starve to death. Smooth move.
The Korean war was basically a move by Mao to get Stalin to give him the means to build up his military. If he picked a fight with the Americans, the Soviet Union would have to help out with arms and shit. The Soviets were jazzed to test out their gear on the yanks too but didn’t want a direct confrontation. So Mao tells Kim go ahead and invade the south and we’ll back you up with a million screaming Chinamen. Most of which were Nationalist soldiers who surrendered to the commies at the end of the Chinese civil war. Shrewd dude, this Mao.
Then there’s the Superpower Program. Mao really wants the bomb so people will listen to him as a global player. He wanted the bomb and was actually jazzed to use it and start a nuclear war with everyone because, odds wise there’d probably be some Chines people leftover to takeover the ashes. Fucked.To pay for the technological and industrial advances required, he sells the only thing China has, its food. And then of course lots of people starve again. He wasted all the people’s shit making shitty stuff that didn’t work. Fucked up tanks and planes, bad steel. The author says 4 year leap was unique because “Mao worked everyone to the bone unrelentingly then took everything, then squandered it.” Other shitty dictators didn’t try to fuck their own people so hard.
He had a crafty move of letting the artists and intellectuals speak up briefly in order to find out who was critical of them and then took them out. Denounce 100,000. Arrest 10,000. Kill 1000. Mao didn’t like doctors because they were saying people were sick because they were starving. In 1960 22 million people starved to death. He was also of the opinion that the population had to be kept dumb. Culture was bad and they needed to get rid of it. So they have a cultural revolution which let teachers be killed by their students, then the students went after their neighbors and writers. And when everyone was sufficiently terrorized Mao went after any official who ever criticized him. The killing gets out of control. Charged up commies are eating their victims dicks in a show of savagery because Mao has stirred up the hatred so much. One guy has gun powder stuffed up his nostrils and set alight.
The whole Nixon meeting Mao bit was mystifying. Kissinger just gave China all kinds of intel and a UN seat on the security council. Taiwan got kicked out. All just so Nixon could visit with a ping pong team. The whole time Mao is trying to be the number one anti-american guy in the world. The US just sucked his dick. Nixon just got insulted. Not sure what we gained from it.
Mao let his number two guy Chou En Lai suffer from cancer just because he was an asshole. Mao’s wife was a cunt and nobody liked her. Then he gets old and sick and dies. Deng Xiaoping takes over and tries to be less of a fucking monster.
The dude sucked. As in, if you think Chinese lives are equal to everyone else’s, the worst fucking person in modern history. I guess the west didn’t really care because all the terror and famine was being done within China and not outwardly to anyone we cared about at the time.