How Mao Slaughtered 10% of China's Population

Mao Zedong is often praised by young, feckless youths as a great man who built China from almost nothing to a world power. The PRC is still the world's only high-functioning Communist state. But here is a touch of the cost:

It is difficult to look dispassionately at some 45 million dead. It was not war that produced this shocking number, nor natural disaster. It was a man. It was politics and one man's vanity. The cause was famine and violence across rural China, a result of Mao Zedong's unchecked drive to turn his country rapidly into a communist utopia and a leading industrial nation. The dead were in effect victims of Mao's determination, at the end of the 1950s, to push the Soviet Union off its perch as leader of the world communist movement following Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin. Khrushchev had boasted in May 1957 that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States as the world's leading industrial and agricultural power within 10 years. Mao sought a similar goal for China, but over a much shorter period. In "Tombstone," Yang Jisheng quotes the words of Mao, which became a rallying call: "go all out, aim high, and achieve greater, faster, better and more economical results in socialist construction."

Mao made Hitler look like a dime-store dictator.

In 1958, Mao launched the "Great Leap Forward," a manic and coercive mobilization of China into "Peoples Communes"—giant collective farms and administrative units. Almost overnight, China was transformed into 26,000 communes. Armies of peasants, prisoners and city dwellers were dragooned to build vast power and irrigation projects that were either not completed or were improperly constructed and failed. The countryside was militarized and regimented into work battalions and work brigades.

Hit the link above for the mass crimes of the twentieth century's greatest genocidal maniac---although Stalin and Hitler are not far behind....