Mao Zedong. (Getty Images)
Like the Soviet Union and its gulag prison-work camps, Mao established the laogai prison system in 1949. Eventually, an estimated 1,000 laogai prisons operated nationwide. “Hitler had his concentration camps, Stalin had his gulag, and the Chinese Communist Party had the laogai,” said Harry Wu, activist and former political prisoner.
According to the Black Book of Communism, “The most varied and sadistic tortures were quite common” in the laogai, “such as hanging by the wrists or thumbs. … One camp commander assassinated or buried alive 1,320 people in one year, in addition to carrying out numerous rapes.” Since its inception, 40–50 million Chinese were imprisoned in the laogai; an estimated 20 million Chinese died in the prisons.
Between 1958 and 1962, Mao and the Chinese Communist Party implemented the Great Leap Forward — a nationwide plan to boost China’s economic output beyond that of Great Britain within 15 years. “In the pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivized,” reports Frank Dikotter in his book, Mao’s Great Famine. “[C]oercion, terror, and systematic violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward.” This national plan produced a massive famine that killed 45 million people.
It was “one of the most deadly mass killings of human history,” says Dikotter, for which Mao “bears the main responsibility.” The famine led to cannibalism in many Chinese villages. Children were sold and “[h]uman flesh, like everything else, was traded on the black market.” In addition to starvation, approximately “6 to 8 percent of the victims were tortured to death or summarily killed—amounting to at least 2.5 million people.”
Source: Michael Chapman, Cato HT: David Henderson