In Mao's China, there was no such thing as a private life.
When the Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot sang, "I heard you talking in your sleep," he was just a few months away from dying. "That secret I wasn't supposed to know came out of your mouth," he said. He was talking about cheating on a spouse.
Not long after Chairman Mao took power in China, optimistic college students learned that the most important thing they could do was be loyal to Mao and the Communist Party. At every meal and in every dorm room, there were members of the Party or the Youth League. In his book The Tragedy of Liberation, historian Frank Dikotter wrote, "These Communists kept track of what each student did during the day and at night. Even a student's sleep-talking words were written down and looked at from a political point of view."
Even though history has taught them many hard lessons, young Chinese people are once again drawn to Mao's totalitarian gospel. They see Mao "as a hero who speaks to their despair," One tech editor, who is 23 years old, said that Mao's work "offers spiritual relief to small town youth like me." In a previous poll, 85 percent said that "Mao's good qualities outweigh his bad ones."
Some people think "thought crimes" should be watched while people sleep, even though it's not done yet.
Under the name Xiao Li, a Chinese-American academic wrote about the links between Mao's Cultural Revolution and America today. He said, "Many of the Red Guards in 1968 came from wealthy families." Mao told these Red Guards to "go out and try to get rid of imaginary class enemies from within." Bullies picked on Li's father "because he was related to counter-revolutionaries," and his only job was to pick up cow dung.
Li said, "Today, the West's revolutionary vanguard is also made up of young, well-educated people, with a disproportionate number coming from elite educational institutions and working in elite professions." These people are looking for "secret racists."
Li noticed another scary similarity: "In China, no book, whether it was about astronomy or sewing patterns, could be published without an opening praising Chairman Mao and quoting from his collected works. In the same way, [Western] businesses that sell anything today feel like they have to bend the knee to protesters."
Before going any further down this Maoist road, we should look back at where it all started. There was never a honeymoon time, and Mao was never a good guy whose revolution went horribly wrong. Mao was always a cruel, all-powerful dictator. Tens of millions of lives were lost, but it wasn't by accident or by chance.
Yenan (Yan'an) was the heart of the Chinese Communist Revolution in the 1940s. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday wrote a harsh history of Mao in which they talked about how young volunteers with good ideas were treated in 1943. Mao and his spy boss "came up with a blanket accusation" that made "almost all of the young volunteers suspects of espionage." All of these people who might be "spies" were put in jail for "screening."
Chang and Halliday explained that Mao “went far beyond anything either Hitler or Stalin achieved: he converted people’s colleagues into their jailers, with former colleagues, prisoners and jailers living in the same premises.” Mao’s terror “innovation” resulted in an enormous increase in repression:
In this way, Mao not only drove a massive wedge between people working and living side by side, he greatly enlarged the number of people directly involved in repression, including torture, making the orbit significantly wider than either Stalin or Hitler, who mostly used secret elites (KGB, Gestapo) that held their victims in separate and unseen locales.
Communism's main product wasn't goods or services; it was "interrogations and terrifying mass rallies" where young volunteers were forced to admit they were spies and name others in front of large, frenzied crowds.
When communists were in charge, "fear" was the most common feeling, and Chang and Halliday said it was awful.
If you weren't being questioned or shouting slogans "hysterically" at protests, you were "pounded flat at indoctrination meetings." When you were alone, you "spent" your time writing "thought examinations." Mao said, "Tell everyone to write their thought examination, and have them write it three times, five times, over and over again... Tell everyone to come clean about everything they have ever kept to themselves that is bad for the Party."
Everyone turned into an informant, even themselves. Chang and Halliday said, "Everyone was told to write down information that was passed along by other people informally. The government called these "small broadcasts." One person who lived through the revolution said, "You had to write down what X or Y said, as well as what you said that wasn't so good."
The standards for "not so good" were "vague," so "out of fear, people would err on the side of including more."
Progressives in the United States look through tweets to find "small broadcasts." If you like a "not so good" social media post, you could lose your job.
Mark Tykocinski, the president of Thomas Jefferson University and head of its medical school, liked tweets that questioned COVID vaccines, gender reassignment surgery for children, and university diversity offices. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Susan Snyder wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer about what she thought were Tykocinski's mistakes. She didn't care about freedom of speech.
On American college campuses today, students are told to call "bias response teams" if they want to say something bad about other students, teachers, or guest speakers. They haven't killed a professor or speaker yet, like they did in Mao's China, but they do interrupt speakers and threaten to do so.
The Minnesota House has passed a bill that would watch what people say for "biased" content that is said to make people hate and be afraid of each other.
People in America say, "I have nothing to hide," even though the government has been caught spying on its own people. These people have no idea that they are giving up their liberty.
Chang and Halliday said that in Mao's China, "the idea of privacy could not be brought up because a Communist had to reject the private." Any sign that a person didn't want to be reported was seen as "proof" that they were a spy, because "if you are innocent, there shouldn't be anything that can't be reported to the Party."
As Mao's orders were being carried out at one college, a guy joked, "Do we have to write down what we say to our wives when we go to bed?" Soon, everyone at his college, except for one teacher or administrator, was thought to be a spy.
Chang and Halliday reported how Mao broke the bonds of trust and prevented the exchange of views:
By suppressing “small broadcasts,” [Mao] also plugged what was virtually the only unofficial source of information, in a context where he completely controlled all other channels. No outside press was available, and no one had access to a radio. Nor could letters be exchanged with the outside world, including one’s family: any communication from a Nationalist area was evidence of espionage.
Under Mao, people could no longer think for themselves. "Indoctrination and fear turned the lively young volunteers...into robots," said one historian.
Irony, comedy, and humor were all against the law. The crime for doing these things was called "Speaking Weird Words." Mao wanted to make robots. Chang and Halliday said, "He didn't want active, willing participation (after all, willingness can be taken away). He did not want helpers. He needed a machine whose gears would all work together when he pushed a button."
When writers were let into Yenan in 1944, one of them said it had "an eerie uniformity." The writer wrote, "If you ask twenty or thirty people, from intellectuals to workers, the same question about any subject, their answers are always more or less the same... Even when it comes to love, it seems that meetings have decided on a point of view."
These eager volunteers and students "denied vehemently and as a group that the Party had any direct control over their thoughts." In the same way, some Americans don't care about free speech and invasions of privacy.
During the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, which were still to come, tens of millions of people would die. Ten years after the events in Chang and Halliday's book, Mao's plan for a totalitarian China was put into place across the whole country. Dikotter said, "Ideological education became the norm, with daily sessions of self-criticism, self-condemnation, and self-exposure, until all resistance was crushed and the individual was broken and ready to serve the collective."
Everyone had to say things about family and friends that were very bad. Dikotter said, "Even fleeting impressions had to be caught and looked at, because they often showed the bourgeois that was hiding behind a mask of socialist conformity."
Hatred joined fear as the dominant emotions; love and compassion were crowded out. Dikötter described the sad reality of a Maoist country made mad by hate:
[Buddhist] monks, like teachers, professors, engineers or entrepreneurs, had to reform themselves, denounce each other, abandon their ‘feudal ideology’ and demonstrate their hatred towards class enemies. Gone was the idea of compassion and kindness extended to all living beings.
Without freedom of thought, progress is impossible. When human beings have no freedom to flourish, hatred triumphs over love. Maoism brought death and destruction; today’s Maoists will do the same.
