Who is the most evil man in human history? What evil did he do? Where did he make his evil?

 

Who is the most evil man in human history? What evil did he do? Where did he make his evil?

Photo by Jonathan Mabey on Unsplash

The most evil would be the man responsible for the most deaths. These deaths are particularly horrendous because they are the deaths of his own people. Although one might think of Hitler or Stalin the winner of the most evil person is Mao Zedong from China. Ironically, Hitler comes in third after Stalin in second.

Background and Context

Mao’s story is one of those things where there was a perfect storm or an unfortunate chain of events which put him in a position of dictatorial and unchecked power with arguably completely delusional ideas blinded by his own self-image of grandeur, and he surrounded himself with sycophants.

Mao’s story started in full after Chiang Kai-Shek and his Nationalist government gave way to Mao taking over with his Communist group in 1949. Kai-Shek’s Nationalists had loosely been in power since the late 1920s. Up until this point, China had been fragmented and ruled by various warlords. The Nationalists would take control of the territories.

The Nationalists were harshly opposed to Chinese Communism, and their hard line against it would be the cause of the Chinese civil war. The fall of the Nationalists would then be one of the catalysts that fueled the United States fears of Communism and the spreading of it to Japan in the Domino theory. The irony here is that Mao initially went to the United States and asked them for support with his intentions of unifying and controlling the country.

Mao was initially open to any style of government really, and it was Democracy turning their back on him and Communism offering to supply advisors and support which were the main drivers for his Communist party. Had the US supported him, he still would have likely implemented some type of dictatorship, but there would have been a lot of influence the West would have had on whatever system was put in place. Snubbing him off would lead to the flawed Domino theory, which was a main driver within the Cold War.

The Domino theory was fear that Asia would turn to Communism, and it’s this theory that had the US try to draw a line in Vietnam. The fear was that if all the countries around Japan became communist, then Japan would as well. The US feared another war against Japan in the worst way. World War II scared them.

What did Mao do that put him at number one?

The first thing to note is that these numbers are estimates as many records were either kept secret, destroyed, or were never kept, so precise numbers have been difficult to ascertain. Conservative numbers have the death toll caused by Mao over 45 million. [1]

There was recently a Chinese former official who had indicated with what he knew of the time period that there would have been 80 million that died. With that said, Mao’s ruling casualty list started with his first campaign of land reform had landowners lose their title to land. He enforced this by killing up to four million people. [2]

Then combine that with his murdering of people viewed as counter-revolutionaries (about a million people) in the first years, and he basically started with a death toll of 5 million people all together by the opening of the 1950s. [3]

After Mao seized power, he sought to modernize China to play catch up, so to speak. Thinking everyone was of like-minded and would be blissfully happy with his doctrine, he decided to put out a call for ideas. It was a people’s movement and the people should have a voice in what would be called the Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1953.

Hundred Flowers

The countries brightest and most educated people submitted their ideas of reform and criticisms of communism etc. Mao was not expecting to see that there were critics of communism, and he immediately saw a risk. So he had ordered the death of every person that submitted an idea or criticism. In essence, Mao wiped out all the educated thinkers in one fell swoop, which was under a million people.

The open murder of the intellectuals certainly sent a message across the country. People knew that they had best not criticize and best go along with things. These were a very weary group of people that had endured years of warlords, then Japanese occupation from the early 1930s until 1945, a civil war and now a murderous dictator. Suffering and scraping by were all that they had known, and so to them, Mao’s entry was more of the same. [4]

Great Leap Forwards

Mao would put forward an initiative called the Great Leap Forwards 1958–1962. The GLF was a poorly planned, poorly executed, example of what happens when delusional thinking is put into a power position and has no check or balance. The two bungling campaigns showed what happens when desperate, idiotic despots get control. [5]

By killing off the educated and killing off anyone who dared whisper a criticism towards him, he created a vacuum that was absent of logic and surrounded himself with bobble heads that would agree with whatever he said. He had suppressed independent thought, by executing everyone who had a different opinion and so no one would tell Mao what he didn’t want to hear.

That and the previous murder of the countries intellectuals would open up the door for the worst campaign ever conceived. The very people that could have saved his campaign and kept people from starving to death had all been executed and instead he had only people that would tell him how great his ideas were surrounding him.

Mao had initially a lot of success as he followed 5-year plans towards modernization. He started off slow, and his policies were actually quite successful at first. By 1957 life expectancy rose 20 years from when he took over in 1949. They had higher output and were modernizing at an extremely fast rate. [6]

He had been introducing the beginning of farming collectives, and on a small scale these were largely formalization of practices that were already happening in rural communities. It was when he went for the large scale collectivization and removed individual property owners making all property owned by the collective itself, which had 250 families each, is where the major cracks began to show. [7]

Still, despite the lesson that he could have learned from the Soviet Union about the dangers of collectivization when 9 million people starved to death, Mao decided to go with the Great Leap Forward’s plan. Mao’s demands had placed high quotas on the farmers who ended up starving to death while the grain stores remained full. The insane plan of backyard furnaces which were meant to increase steel production somehow by melting iron, meant that to meet quota’s farmers had to melt down their tools so they were left without grain and without tools. [8]

The idea of the GLF was to produce more than Great Britain, the grandfather of the Industrial Revolution, as well as to achieve Communism before the Soviets did in order to show how China was the best. He became jealous of the Soviet Union during his visit there because the launching of Sputnik overshadowed what he’d accomplished thus far, he felt. The initiative was meant to make China have the highest output, but instead it killed one in twenty people from starvation, or an estimated 40 million people had perished of starvation. [9]

Cultural Revolution

The last step was the Cultural Revolution in China, which again was to assert his authority over the Chinese government, as he believed the Communists leaders were taking China and the party in the wrong direction. Mao called upon the nations’ youth to purge impure elements of Chinese society to revive the revolutionary spirit of twenty years past when they had their period of successes. [10]

The Cultural Revolution would last from 1966 to 1976 and is estimated to have had 1.5 million to 5 million deaths, Mao told the youth to take their current leaders to task for taking on Bourgeois attitudes. Students formed Paramilitary groups and became thugs and enforcers in a devout cult of personality like Josef Stalin had with the mandate of getting rid of old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. [11]

So to sum up, no one has accurate records or has had access to the records because of them being classified, destroyed, or never even kept and historians don’t agree on the total amount killed during this period, but it appears to be at very least 40 million people. Perhaps, though, the most accurate numbers bay be from the former Chinese official who indicated the total dead during the full period is closer to 80 million dead.

It is for the aforementioned ruthlessness, neglect, and apathy that Mao is responsible for the most deaths ever caused by one man, and it makes him the most evil man in history.

[1] Who killed more: Hitler, Stalin, or Mao

[2] GENOCIDE AND MASS MURDER

[3] DEATH AND REPRESSION UNDER MAO

[4] DEATH AND REPRESSION UNDER MAO

[5] Mao’s Catastrophic Great Leap Forward in China

[6] DEATH AND REPRESSION UNDER MAO

[7] DEATH AND REPRESSION UNDER MAO

[8] Who killed more: Hitler, Stalin, or Mao

[9] Who killed more: Hitler, Stalin, or Mao

[10] The Cultural Revolution: all you need to know about China’s political convulsion

[11] Cultural Revolution — Definition, Effects & Mao Zedong | HISTORY