Read Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation for Free Online

ensuing famine, more than 30 million people died. It became the single most devastating famine in human history. Mao, however, remained nonplussed. “Deaths have benefits,” he said. “They can fertilize the ground.” And here’s the real stunner: While China starved, Mao continued to export grain.
    There were other ideas, of course, that didn’t turn out so well. Mao’s cult of personality found its most intense expression during the Cultural Revolution, a calculated madness in the late sixties and early seventies designed by Mao’s most ferocious supporters to consolidate power and cripple his rivals. Even Deng Xiaoping, who would one day rule China, was sent into exile in distant Jiangxi Province, where he toiled in a tractor factory. But this was no mere power struggle, and the phrase cultural revolution doesn’t quite do justice to the terror of that time. It was a war against the “Four Olds”—Old Customs, Old Ideas, Old Habits, and Old Culture—carried out by brainwashed, rampaging teenagers, the so-called Red Guards, bands of youths suddenly given free rein to release their inner sadists. “Be Violent,” Mao had instructed them, and they did their best to comply. The police and soldiers were told to not interfere as the youths set about beating and torturing their teachers and anyone else suspected of having “rightist” tendencies.
    “Peking is not violent enough,” Mao said of Beijing, using the name by which the capital was then known, during what came to be known as Red August. “Peking is too civilized.” Nearly 2,000 people would die in Beijing alone that month. Mao abolished school and instructed that his Red Guards be given free travel, and soon all of China trembled at the sight of psychopathic gangs of teenagers in homemade olive uniforms and red armbands. And it is no wonder. In Guangxi Province, not only did the Red Guards torture and kill their teachers, they ate them too. In the lunchroom, no less. “Smash old culture,” Mao commanded. Paintings were destroyed, books set ablaze. Anyone caught with a musical instrument was likely to be tortured and even killed. Thousands of historical monuments were destroyed. China was seized in a paroxysm of terror as Mao sought to obliterate Chinese history.
    In the end, the horror of that age only really came to a close with Mao’s death in 1976. Roughly 70 million people are believed to have perished under his reign, a feat that allows him to seriously compete with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin for the title Baddest Person Ever. But what makes contemporary China just a little odd is that even today one can’t escape his porcine face. I think it is fair to say that on the day Hitler killed himself in his bunker, surrounded by a shattered country and a million Soviet troops, most Germans were probably quite ready to move on, to take their leave of Adolf, and indeed that is what they did. Of course, they really didn’t have any say in the matter, but thirty years after his death, there couldn’t have been more than a handful of cretinous skinheads who could muster a Heil Hitler with any enthusiasm. When Joseph Stalin, born Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (say it fast), died on a gloomy night in 1953, it wasn’t long before he was denounced by Nikita Khrushchev, who proceeded to undertake an intense program of de-Stalinization. Communism lingered on for nearly another forty years, but one would have been hard-pressed to find a statue or portrait of Uncle Joe.
    Contrast this with China. Whenever I opened my wallet, I was greeted by Mao Zedong, looking serene and confident as his visage graced every paper yuan. Nearly every city of consequence has a Renmin Guangchang, or People’s Square, and the vast majority are still dominated by a colossal statue of Mao, looking proud and heroic. An enormous portrait of the Great Helmsman dominates Tiananmen Square, and more creepy still, his gaze is directed toward his mausoleum, where even today he