Chongqing, September 3, 1945. At the Victory Day dinner, Chiang Kai-shek personally toasts Mao Zedong, the head of the Chinese Communist Party, while Mao shouts long live Chiang Kai-shek.
If history is fixed at the moment when Mao Zedong climbed the Tiananmen Tower on October 1, 1949 to announce the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the image of Mao Zedong as “wise and great” and Chiang Kai-shek as “a dictator and a traitor” will be branded into history. In fact, this day was the turning point in their lives. In fact, this day was a turning point in the lives of both men. From this moment on, these two historical figures inadvertently switched directions, each going in the opposite direction from the original.
The Chinese political arena of the twentieth century can be described as a battleground between the two historical figures, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, in a sense. On the occasion of the Chinese Communist Party’s solemn commemoration of Mao’s birth anniversary, it makes sense for us to look at Mao Zedong against Chiang Kai-shek.
An architect is evaluated not by what he demolished, but by what he built. Similarly, a political figure should be evaluated not by what he has destroyed, but by what he has built, and what he has brought to the country and the people.
A comparison of two “gardens
An article about the Communist Party being more authoritarian than the Kuomintang cites the example of Hu Jiwei, who ran a “progressive” journal (a journal controlled by the Communist Party) in the National Unification Area, which was banned for criticizing the Kuomintang. Hu changed the name of the publication and continued to publish it, and it was banned again. In total, ten titles were changed and the publication continued. This would have been a miracle under the Communist rule.
Perhaps Chiang Kai-shek was after all a military man, interested in commanding the army and the country, not in literature and art. Therefore, the literary garden in Taiwan under his rule was able to have some room to grow, and independent private newspapers and journals were allowed to exist, including the Free China founded by the oppositionist Lei Chen. In the history of Chiang Kai-shek’s rule in Taiwan, there was only one “literary incident”: in 1965, the magazine Wen Xing was suspended for a year for publishing an article protecting freedom of the press.
In contrast to Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong was unusually enthusiastic about literature and the arts. From the early days of the founding of the country when he criticized the movie “Wu Xun Zhuan”, Mao Zedong’s machine gun aimed at the literary position never stopped sweeping: review of “Study of the Dream of the Red Chamber”, Hu Feng’s anti-Party group, Ding Chen’s anti-Party group, “Liu Zhidan” anti-Party novel case, review of “Hai Rui Strike” ……, and finally the climax of the Cultural Revolution.
Obviously, Chiang Kai-shek’s garden in Taiwan was much more colorful than Mao Zedong’s garden of literature and art.
The Vision under the Dictatorship
The “New China” created by Mao Zedong not only failed to bring the people the happy life it promised, but on the contrary, from 1949 onwards, Chinese people lost their freedom of speech, their right to strike, to protest and to demonstrate, and their right to own private property; the peasants’ newly allocated land was taken away by the Communists; the people had no freedom to choose their jobs and no freedom to move.
The household register, the grain book, the unit dependency system, the file system, the neighborhood committee, and the secret police were woven into a tight net for one purpose: to tightly control every Chinese person and prevent him from “talking and moving around”.
In Mao’s time, except for Mao Zedong, no Chinese could defend his rights and dignity, from Liu Shaoqi, the second most important person in the country, down to Zhang Zhixin, a commoner. Mao Zedong turned the whole China into a big prison.
Chiang Kai-shek was certainly a dictatorial autocrat in politics as well, but except for sensitive issues like the Communist Party and Taiwan independence, the Taiwanese press was very free to denounce the national and local governments. Taiwanese have economic freedom and can live a beautiful and happy life as individuals or families as long as they do not get involved in politics.
Then, from a personal perspective, compare the personal character of Chiang and Mao. Compare Chiang Kai-shek’s and Mao Zedong’s breadth of mind and heart!
How did Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong treat their comrades, comrades in arms, and rivals within the Party?
Chiang Kai-shek was “black again”, but not to the extent of physically eliminating or throwing into prison those who disagreed with the party. During the Taiwan period, the two people who had the greatest conflicts with Chiang Kai-shek: Wu Guozhen, the governor of Taiwan, and Sun Liren, the army commander, were only forced to resign by Chiang Kai-shek’s ploy, and were not deprived of their freedom of life, much less thrown into prison. Wu Guozhen went to the United States, where he spent his later years in freedom and was able to publicly denounce Chiang Kai-shek. Like Yan Xishan, Li Zongren, Tang Shengzhi, Bai Chongxi, Chen Jitang and others who repeatedly made trouble, he never retaliated, but gave them promotions.
The biggest offense to Chiang Kai-shek in his life was to Zhang Xueliang, who had violated the law with his troops. Chiang Kai-shek neither gave him a death sentence nor threw him into prison. Although under house arrest, Zhang’s daily life was quite relaxed and pleasant. In the recently published oral history of Zhang Xueliang, he also mentioned that Chiang Kai-shek was still very concerned about him.
Just think, if Zhang Xueliang had been fighting against Mao Zedong instead of Chiang Kai-shek, would he have survived to this day? Would he have ended up better than Peng Dehuai and Liu Shaoqi? All those who were considered by Mao Zedong to be against him, none of them had a good end. Would Chiang Kai-shek have brutally tortured to death Liu Shaoqi, his own palanquin bearer and the man he personally promoted as his successor?
Look at the tragic fate of these founding fathers of the Communist Party of China: Liu Shaoqi, the president of the country, was criticized with three tubes stuck in his body and died without even a pair of shorts; Liu Ren, the vice mayor of Beijing, was shackled and handcuffed and could not put on clothes in winter, so he died of cold in Qincheng prison; Wu Han, an expert in Ming history, had his hair pulled out and his ribs broken, but no one knows when and where he died; Marshal Peng Dehuai had three ribs broken at once and was not allowed to moan; He Long was forced to lick the porridge that was poured on the floor; the truth-teller met Roque and lost his life; Zhang Zhixin, who insisted on the truth, had his throat slit.
Zhang Zhixin, who merely opposed the defeat of Liu Shaoqi, was taken into prison by Mao and subjected to horrific and heinous persecution, including stripping Zhang naked and throwing him into a male prison cell, where he was gang-raped by more than 20 inmates, causing his uterus to break and rot. When Zhang Zhixin was shot, he was afraid that he would shout slogans, so he pressed his neck against a brick and cut off a section of his throat without using anesthetic.
On the verge of collapse and taking off
During the twenty-seven years of Mao’s rule in “New China”, what did it bring to the people’s living standards?
“The national economy is on the verge of collapse” is the official conclusion of the Chinese Communist Party for the Mao era, and it is no longer possible to cover up for Mao.
When Mao brought China to the brink of collapse, what did Chiang Kai-shek do in Taiwan? He sincerely implemented “the plowman has his own field”. Mao and Chiang both started with the peasants, but went in opposite directions.
Chiang Kai-shek started with the liberation of the peasants and self-sufficiency in agriculture, and moved along the line of “agriculture for industry”, then focused on shifting from agriculture to industry, “processing and exporting”, and developing an “export-oriented economy”, leading to economic take-off. In 1963, Taiwan’s industrial output exceeded that of agriculture for the first time. In 1968, the growth rate reached 223%, ranking first in the world. When Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975, Taiwan’s annual per capita income had reached US$697, second only to Japan in the whole of Asia.
And what was the economic situation on the mainland when Mao died in 1976? That year, I was expelled from the city by Mao to the countryside, where “there is a wide world to be explored”. In my first year, after deducting the monthly rice advance from the production team, my total income for the year was only thirty-five yuan.
Another more noteworthy issue is that Chiang Kai-shek paid special attention to the “equalization of wealth” while developing Taiwan’s economy. The more developed the economy, the smaller the gap between the rich and the poor. Today, the gap between the rich and the poor in mainland China is getting wider and wider.
We should thank God for leaving Taiwan, a small island of historical significance, as an opportunity for the Chinese nation to be reborn and to move towards democracy, so that for the first time the Chinese people have the privilege to compare the two regimes. The Kuomintang was first ahead of the Communists in terms of economy and in raising the living standards of the people. It was only thirty years later that Deng Xiaoping, a second-generation Communist, followed in Chiang Kai-shek’s footsteps. The second generation of Taiwan’s leader, Chiang Ching-kuo, had already entered the first historic democratic process in Chinese history. In the fourth generation of the mainland regime, the hope of democracy is still far away.
In all areas of politics, economics, and literature, Mao has set the most astonishingly dark historical record in Chinese history. It was this darkest era in Chinese history that sang the most resounding chant in Chinese history, which has a long tradition of chants for thousands of years; it was this “tyrant” who crowned himself with the most “great” laurels in history, and for the first time wanted to transcend It was such a “tyrant” who crowned himself the most “great” crown in history and for the first time wanted to transcend national boundaries and become “the red sun in the hearts of the world’s people.
Later, Mao’s position was placed from “greatness” to “thirty-seven” by Deng Xiaoping. During the twenty-seven years of Mao’s rule in “New China”, all his proud achievements became his crimes. Is this Mao’s “seven out of seven achievements”?
Another popular saying comes from another high official of the Communist Party, Chen Yun, who said that Mao had “merits in building the country, mistakes in ruling it, and sins in the Cultural Revolution”. If the founding of the state was to start a series of human disasters and commit a series of crimes, is this “founding of the state” still a “merit”? To whom did this “founding of the country” serve? He only owed it to the Communist Party. It was Mao Zedong who led the Communist Party to seize power, sit on the mountain, and establish the Communist Party’s one-party world, and he “owed it all” to the Communist Party.
However, from the day Mao “founded the country”, it was the beginning of a new slavery to the Chinese people, the beginning of a more authoritarian and darker history, was this founding a “merit” or a “sin” to the people? Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang was overthrown because it was dictatorial, corrupt and dark. If you knew that Mao’s Communist Party would be even more dictatorial, corrupt and dark than Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang once it took power, would you still welcome this “liberation” and this “nation-building”? Mao’s so-called “nation building” was a complete reversal of history.
The biography of Chiang Kai-shek published by the Communist Party could not deny Chiang Kai-shek in its entirety, but it was forced to affirm Chiang Kai-shek’s achievement in developing Taiwan’s economy. What, then, can be affirmed in the biography of Mao Zedong published by the Kuomintang?
In Mao’s time, the Chinese people had to wash their ears every day to this hymn: “He worked for the happiness of the people; he was the great savior of the people.” In Mao’s life, which of these things did he do “for the happiness of the people”? Was he the “Great Savior” or the “Great Calamity” of the people? Mao Zedong probably did “work for the happiness of the people” once in his life, and that was the “land reform”. Mao Zedong spent most of his life in the countryside before he entered Zhongnanhai, and the success of his revolution depended on the peasants. He knew the peasants best and knew what they needed. When his revolution needed the peasants to fight for him, he thought what the peasants wanted and carried out “land reform”, “fight the landlords and divide the land” to win the support of the peasants. Once he won the world, he began to deprive and oppress the peasants. It can be seen that Mao’s “land reform” was only a means to fight for the world, only a use of the peasants. Just as he used the Red Guards and the rebels to fight for him at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, once the success was achieved, the rabbits died and the dogs were cooked.
Chiang Kai-shek, on the other hand, was a total urbanite, and according to the Communist Party, his class base was bureaucrats, landlords, and capitalists, the enemies of the peasants. However, ironically, it was Chiang Kai-shek who really carried out the “land reform”, and it was Chiang Kai-shek, the enemy of the peasants, who really cared about solving the problems of the peasants’ life instead of Mao Zedong. Chiang Kai-shek’s “land reform” in Taiwan was learned from Mao Zedong’s “land reform”.
Success is sometimes not a good teacher. The success made Mao Zedong smug, unbeatable, confident that “invincible”, and finally to “collapse”; failure made Chiang Kai-shek awake, so that he really thought about doing something for the people, so that he climbed back up from the ground, crawling towards economic takeoff.
Mao Zedong had a chance to build a career for the Chinese nation, and that was the war against Japan. This was the only opportunity in Mao’s life to be a national hero. But this great man, “the number of people, but also look at the present day”, has no intention to be such national heroes. The Chinese Communist Party, which is good at singing the praises of Mao Zedong, has made many films for him, the most classic and masterful being a trilogy called “Armageddon”, which depicts the three battles in which Mao Zedong led the Communist Party to annihilate Chiang Kai-shek’s army, showing Mao Zedong’s majestic talent and the style of a great man of his generation. But why didn’t the Chinese Communist Party make a film showing Mao Zedong’s “greatness” and “greatness” in the “Armageddon” against The Japanese invaders in the war against Japan?
The Chinese Communist Party, which is good at making up lies, did not dare to make up the lie that Mao Zedong fought against Japan. During the entire war period, Mao Zedong was the supreme leader of the Chinese Communist Party. Why did Mao Zedong, with his “military genius”, not command a single battle against Japan during the long eight-year war, and use his “military genius” to fight against the Japanese invaders? At the moment when the Chinese nation was about to sink into slavery, what did Mao Zedong do? Mao Zedong was so calculating to play the “wisdom” of preserving strength, expanding the army and expanding the base areas. Once the Japanese surrendered, Mao Zedong, who had never fought a “great battle” with the Japanese, would be like a tiger on the next mountain, and Chiang Kai-shek launched a “great battle” with rainbow momentum. During the resistance period, the only battle led by the Communist Party against Japan – the Battle of the Hundred Regiments, or Peng Dehuai against Mao Zedong’s instructions to take the initiative of the results. This anti-Japanese merit later became Peng Dehuai’s crime repeatedly liquidated by Mao Zedong.
The Chinese Communist Party propagated how dark and infamous Chiang Kai-shek was. But Chiang Kai-shek finally cared about and solved the “livelihood” problems of Taiwan. Mao Zedong never cared about the people’s livelihood in his life, ignoring the people’s hardships and treating their lives as grass. From Mao’s life, we can’t find a single achievement that “he worked for the happiness of the people”.
Mao Zedong spent his life pursuing only one thing – power, the supreme power, the power of those who obey me, those who disobey me die. Thus, Mao Zedong devoted his life to only one thing, in his own words, “the joy of fighting with others”. First, he fought with the party leaders, and took them out of power one by one, so that he could become the party leader. Then he fought with Chairman Chiang Kai-shek, in order that he would ascend to the throne of the emperor, the “Great Savior” of the people, the “Red Sun”, the king of the world, the four seas to one. Now the world will be peaceful, right? But the emperor still can not sleep, the power is coveted nightmare lingering. The great leader does not fight with people, do not play power, will lose “its joy”, not to show its greatness and correctness, eloquence and wisdom. So, Mao Zedong continued to “fight” people, fighting off one revolutionary comrade after another, taking pleasure in persecuting one “close comrade” after another, fighting off a group of intellectuals, fighting to make the Chinese land dark. A history of the Chinese Communist Party is the bloody history of Mao Zedong’s “fighting with people, the joy of it.
It is concluded that Mao Zedong’s life is just a saboteur, a complete destroyer.
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