Mao's Darwinist Tyranny

The theory of evolution is closely related to all the disasters Mao brought upon China. As we have seen, the great famine of 1958-61 resulted from the application of Lysenko's model of "evolutionist science." Meanwhile, Mao and the Communist establishment ruled China with incredible cruelty and mercilessness. What kind of horrifying thinking lies behind a policy that deliberately leaves people to starve and forces them into cannibalism?

No doubt this relates to the whole Communist view of human nature. Earlier, the idea that human beings are animals lay at the basis of Soviet terror, and the same applies to China was mentioned. With Darwinist prejudice, Mao viewed those opposed to Communism as "animals" and so, Maoists were not at all touched by the anguish of people they regarded as a herd. To them, this was a logical, normal operation of nature. After revealing how low harvest levels had fallen in the Great Leap, The Black Book of Communism gives Mao's view in this regard:

Mao, in the tradition of Chinese leaders, but in contradiction to the legend that he encouraged to grow up around him, showed here how little he really cared for what he thought of as the clumsy and primitive peasants.77

James Reeve Pusey also stresses Mao's Darwinist philosophy: "The thought of Mao Tse-tung was and remains a powerful mixture of Darwinian ironies and contradictions."78

Elsewhere, he writes:

Mao Tse-tung in an angry moment (as late as 1964) swore that "all demons shall be annihilated." He dehumanized his enemies, partly in traditional hyperbole, partly in Social Darwinian "realism." Like the Anarchists, he saw reactionaries as evolutionary throwbacks, who deserved extinction.The people's enemies were non-people, and they did not deserve to be treated as people.79

Whoever views humans as animals has no qualms about performing experiments on them. During the Great Leap, new ways of nutrition were considered and mercilessly tested on people who were starving:

In 1960, after one year of famine, ...the survivors were reduced to searching through horse manure for undigested grains of wheat and eating the worms they found in cowpats. People in the camps were used as guinea pigs in hunger experiments. In one case flour was mixed with 30 percent paper paste in bread to study the effects on digestion, while in another study marsh plankton were mixed with rice water. The first experiment caused atrocious constipation throughout the camp, which caused many deaths. The second also caused much illness, and many who were already weakened ended up dying.80

The "Great Leap" was actually a kind of experiment in natural selection. Mao forced the Chinese into the most difficult conditions in order to eliminate the weak and those opposed to Communism. On the one hand, he tried to brainwash the peasants by starving them so as to make them dependent on him and the Communist organization. This basis of this attempt was Darwinism. At the same time as he began the Great Leap, Mao also initiated a "leap in education." The dialectical materialism and Darwinism played the main roles in this education campaign. In a speech from this period, Mao revealed the principles supporting his savagery when he said, "The foundation of Chinese Socialism rests on Darwin and the theory of evolution."81

Immediately after the Great Leap, on January 30, 1962, Mao explained the parallels between the Chinese Communist Party and Darwin in a speech delivered before members of the Party:

In history doctrines of natural scientists such as Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin were for a very long period not recognized by the majority of people, but instead were thought to be incorrect. In their time they were in the minority. When our Party was founded in 1921 we only had a few dozen members; we were also in the minority, but these few people represented the truth and represented China's destiny.82

In these words, Mao compared his party's efforts to Darwin's enterprise and expressed his respect and admiration for him. At first, he stated, few accepted his Communist Party's ideas, just as few people accepted the theories of Darwin. But that would not change the validity of either man's ideas. But just as in Darwin's case, Mao's ideas were all myths.

In the Great Leap, between 30 and 45 million people died because of the famine. Many peasants who resisted collectivization died of torture. Tens of thousands, because they showed the slightest negative attitude towards Communism, were labeled "class enemies," arrested and tortured. Chinese prisoners were treated like animals and finally executed.

In these prisons, the savagery of Chinese Communism was especially evident.

The Influence of "Evolutionist Science" in Mao's Famine

In the years between 1958 and 1961, as a result of Mao's Great Leap policy, all of China suffered what's accepted as the greatest, most deadly famine in history. It is estimated that as a result, as many as 40 million died. (Such numbers equaled and even surpassed the entire population of many countries of that time.)

What was the cause of this disaster? As mentioned above, Mao's militants forced the peasants into collectivization and founded communes of between 100 and 300 families—which greatly reduced agricultural productivity. In some areas, Maoist administrations punished peasants with deliberate starvation.

A propaganda poster for the Great Leap depicts Mao as an agricultural genius in a rich field. However, Mao's reliance on and implementation of Lysenko's methods resulted in an agricultural disaster.

Another important reason for this calamity is that Mao tried to adapt to Chinese agriculture the "Lysenko model" applied in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 40s. When he forced these experiments on the peasants, the result was huge losses in agricultural production.

We examined Trofim Lysenko before. As a result of the nonsensical "proletarian science" of the Stalin era, Soviet biology was entrusted to Lysenko, an ardent evolutionist. Lysenko rejected the science of genetics adopting instead a theory by Lamarck, a leading Darwinist who believed in the "inheritance of acquired traits." When Lysenko's myth was applied to Soviet agriculture, the losses were immense.

But Mao did not learn from this disaster of the Stalinist period—on the contrary he and his supporters, educated from their youth on a strict Darwinism, continued to believe in "proletarian science" and to distort real science, according to the requisites of the theory of evolution. The Great Leap imitated Lysenko's model, and Chinese peasants were forced to perform agriculture according to principles of "evolutionist science."

Jasper Becker, Beijing bureau chief of South China Morning Post, in his book entitled Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, relates in detail the Lysenkoist agricultural enterprise put into effect during the Great Leap. These attempts, each of which resulted in a separate disaster, were: 

Close Planting: Lysonko, thinking that seeds evolve by adopting to their habitat, declared that planting seeds very close together would create "socialist solidarity" among them. The Maoists undertook to apply this myth. Until that time, in Southern China, about 1.5 million seeds were sown on any one acre of land. In 1958, the Communists ordered this amount to be increased to between 6 and 7 million seeds. In 1959, they again increased the amount, to between 12 and 15 million. As a result, a very large number of seeds went to waste, and agricultural production suffered a severe decline.

Deep Plowing: One of Lysenko's assistants, Teventy Maltsev, claimed that deep plowing would allow plants to establish better root systems. Chinese Communists adopted and applied this Lamarckist claim. During the Great Leap, Chinese peasants were ordered to plow their fields to a depth of 1.5 meters. As a result, tens of millions of peasants were forced to spend months hoeing. Again, the outcome was great loss of production, resulting in famine.

The Sparrow Hunt: Mao initiated a campaign to eliminate various species of animals that damaged agricultural production. Sparrows became the main target of this campaign. Special methods were employed to hunt and kill sparrows throughout the whole of China. But as a result, there was an explosion in the number of insects and other pests that the sparrows had been eating, and they damaged agricultural production much more than the sparrows ever had.

Agriculture Without Fertilizer: Following Lysenko's recommendations, Chinese Communists stopped using chemical fertilizer. (It was imagined that when seeds were deprived of fertilizer, they would "evolve" by adapting to this new situation thus ensuring the same yield without the use of fertilizing additives.) This experiment caused yet another great loss in agricultural production.

All these initiatives, relying as they did on Lysenko's myth of evolution, caused the greatest famine in history. But although millions were dying of starvation, no one dared criticize the regime or the calamity it caused. One individual, General Peng Dehuai, the defense minister, wrote Mao a letter in which he tried to describe this disastrous famine. Later he was accused of being a "rightist" and was eliminated. During the famine, official reports all falsified the situation by saying that brilliant results had been achieved in agricultural production. Moreover, in order to convince the world of this lie, China exported vast amounts of grain. While people were dying of starvation in some areas of the country, grain and rice were being kept in warehouses, later to be exported.76

Later, the same agricultural policy was put into effect in Communist Cambodia and North Korea, with the same results: a great lack of productivity, famine and mass death. Blindly and without awareness or intelligence, Communists applied Lysenko and Stalin's "Communist leap in agriculture," because the theory of evolution at the base of their materialist philosophy demanded it.

The "Great Leap Forward" and the Great Famine

Until 1949, Mao had conducted a long guerilla war, organizing a campaign in the countryside and in the mountains against the central administration, which controlled the large cities. In order to do this, he established good relations with the villagers, promising them land and freedom and assuring them that once Communism was established in China, they would enjoy great prosperity and happiness. The peasants believed him and supported him and his guerillas.

But after Mao came to power, everything changed. In the first years after the revolution, he wanted to take over the whole of China and set up Communist authorities in every area. In the meantime, thousands were arrested as "class enemies" and hanged in public. In the mid-fifties, Mao designed a system similar to Stalin's collectivization and put it into effect in 1958. This was called the "Great Leap Forward," but all it succeeded in doing was to bring torture and a great famine upon the Chinese people.

The Great Leap began with slogans about doubling all of China's agricultural and industrial production. Working hours were increased, and machines worked endlessly. Workers weren't permitted to inspect or repair the machines, and within a short time they began to break down.

Agriculture suffered disaster from lack of intelligent planning. With the idea that the "abolition of private property would increase production," all peasants were forced to surrender their land to cooperatives. The confiscations of Stalin's Russia were repeated. Moreover, Mao punished peasants in some parts of China for not accepting collectivization voluntarily. Their punishment was being starved to death.

Mao's "Great Leap Forward" was a senseless,cruel project that paralyzed the county's agriculture and economy. Over 30 million died of starvation. In Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, Jasper Becker—who was the Beijing bureau chief of the South China Morning Post—gave a detailed account of the famine.

Within a short time, the Great Leap disintegrated into a great famine.  Like the famine that Stalin fabricated in the Ukraine, this famine was also man-made. The Black Book of Communism comments on China in the period of the Great Leap:

The fact that the famine was primarily a political phenomenon is demonstrated by the high death rates in provinces where the leaders were Maoist radicals, provinces that in previous years had actually been net exporters of grain… Like Mao himself, Party activists in Henan were convinced that all the difficulties arose from the peasants' concealment of private stocks of grain. According to the secretary of the Xinyang district (10 million inhabitants), where the first people's commune in the country had been established, "The problem is not that food is lacking. There are sufficient quantities of grain, but 90 percent of the inhabitants are suffering from ideological difficulties." In the autumn of 1959 the class war was momentarily forgotten, and a military-style offensive was launched against the peasants, using methods very similar to those used by anti-Japanese guerrilla groups. At least 10,000 peasants were imprisoned, and many died of hunger behind bars. The order was given to smash all privately owned cutlery that had not yet been turned to steel to prevent people from being able to feed themselves by pilfering the food supply of the commune. Even fires ware banned, despite the approach of winter. The excesses of repression were terrifying. Thousands of detainees were systematically tortured, and children were killed and even boiled and used as fertilizer—at the very moment when a nationwide campaign was telling people to "learn the Henan way." In Anhui, where the stated intention was to keep the red flag flying even if 99 percent of the population died, cadres returned to the traditional practices of live burials and torture with red-hot irons.72

Mao began with the slogan of "peasant socialism." Before coming to power, he'd promised Chinese peasants land, food, and protection. But his power subjected them to levels of pain and torture never to be seen in modern history:

A Communist Party militant delivering Communist propaganda in the years of the Great Leap.

This campaign took on the proportions of a veritable war against the peasantry… Deaths from hunger reached over 50 percent in certain villages, and in some cases the only survivors ware cadres who abused their position. In Henan and elsewhere there were many cases of cannibalism (63 were recorded officially): children were sometimes eaten in accordance with a communal decision.73

The death rates accross the country reached to incredible levels:

For the entire country, the death rate rose from 11 percent in 1957 to 15 percent in 1959 and 1961, peaking at 29 percent in 1960. Birth rates fell from 33 percent in 1957 to 18 percent in 1961. Excluding the deficit in births, which was perhaps as many as 33 million (although some births were merely delayed), loss of life linked to famine in the years 1959-1961 was somewhere between 20 million and 43 million people…This was quite possibly the worst famine not just in the history of China but in the history of the world.74

In the years of the Great Leap, many Chinese who resisted Mao's savagery were brutally executed. Many were killed by a bullet to the back of the head.

In the course of the Great Leap, an eighteen-year-old Red Guard, who was pursued by the authorities and took refuge with his family in a village in Anhui, described Maoism's cruel face:

We walked along beside the village. The rays of the sun shone on the jade-green weeds that had sprung up between the earth walls, accentuating the contrast with the rice fields all around, and adding to the desolation of the landscape. Before my eyes, among the weeds, rose up one of the scenes I had been told about, one of the banquets at which the families had swapped children in order to eat them. I could see the worried faces of the families as they chewed the flesh of other people's children. The children who were chasing butterflies in a nearby field seemed to be the reincarnation of the children devoured by their parents. I felt sorry for the children, but not as sorry as I felt for their parents. What had made them swallow that human flesh, amidst the tears and grief of other parents—flesh that they would never have imagined tasting, even in their worst nightmares? In that moment I understood what a butcher he had been, the man "whose like humanity has not seen in several centuries, and China not in several thousand years": Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong and his henchmen, with their criminal political system, had driven parents mad with hunger and led them to hand their own children over to others, and to receive the flesh of others to appease their own hunger. Mao Zedong, to wash away the crime that he had committed in assassinating democracy, had launched the Great Leap Forward, and obliged thousands and thousands of peasants dazed by hunger to kill one another with hoes, and to save their own lives thanks to the flesh and blood of their childhood companions. They were not the real killers; the real killers were Mao Zedong and his companions.75

How did Mao Become a Communist?

Up to now, we've examined the change in ideas that prepared China for Maoism. But a personal dimension of this also needs to be examined: Mao himself.

Mao Tse-tung was born in 1893 to a family in a southern China village. From his childhood he always wanted to see Beijing and imagined living there. At age fifteen, he began to read young people's magazines published in the capital, and especially liked New Youth, a publication of the New Culture movement. This magazine was filled with articles by Darwinist ideologues such as Yen Fu and Ting Wen-chiang.

In 1918, Mao visited the city he always wanted to see. There he made friends with Yang Changzhi, a teacher from Beijing University who recognized the young man's talent and got him a job at the university library. Mao began his job of cataloguing and dusting the books and cleaning the rooms. He became friends with Li Dazhao, the director of the library, whose articles in New Youth he had read and liked. Li Dazhao had Communist ideas; for this reason, the university library became known as the Red Room. Chinese Communist theoreticians often met there, where Mao heard the names of Marx, Engels and Lenin for the first time.

After reading Darwin, Mao became an ardent Communist

He inherited Darwinist ideology from Sun Yat-sen.

But the man who brought the young Mao to embrace Communism was not from Beijing. After spending a few months at the Beijing library, Mao went to Shanghai and metChen Duxiu, a classical scholar and a friend of Li Dazhao who had made a special study of Darwin.68 This Communist leader's most striking feature was that he was an ardent Darwinist. He can be considered as China's most important advocate of Darwinism and became Mao's most important tutor. Years later, Mao was to say, "He had influenced me more than anyone else."69

In her book Mao, Clare Hollingsworth, a historian at the University of Hong Kong said that Mao was greatly influenced by the Darwinist views of Chen Duxiu and even in the 1970s he looked back nostalgically to the studies of Darwin he did in his youth.70

Chen Duxiu educated Mao in the scientific aspects of Darwinism; on the political level, he was influenced by Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese leader of the time. Interestingly, Sun Yat-sen, regarded as the founder of modern China and of the Kuomintang (the Nationalist Chinese Party), was also a Darwinist. In an article in The New Republic, the American researcher Jacob Heilbrunn writes:

After a bloody revolution, Mao announced the establishment of the People's Republic of China.

...[I]t was the great Chinese revolutionary and nationalist Sun Yat-sen who decisively influenced Mao. Sun held that the Chinese had to embrace nationalism in order to defeat the Western powers, and he preached a doctrine of political Darwinism: "although natural forces work slowly, yet they can exterminate great races."

As a young organizer for the communists in Hunan in the early 1920s, Mao supported Sun, who was the patriarch of the Kuomintang (KMT). Sun created a temporary alliance beween his nationalist party and the communists, and, in 1926, Mao was even briefly given control of the KMT's propaganda department.71

Brainwashed by the ideas of Darwin and Marx, Mao became an active, passionate Communist from 1920 onward. With eleven friends who thought as he did, he founded the Communist Party in Shanghai in 1921. Afterward, he strengthened the Communist Party by various alliances, skirmishes, guerilla battles and propaganda. For a while, the Communists under Mao cooperated with the Nationalist Party, but in the second half of the 1920s, each side became hostile to the other. Mao relocated his militants in Jiangxi province in southern China and there formed a "liberated zone" outside the central authority.

The struggle between the two sides lasted for years. After World War II, the Communist "liberated zone" continued to grow, to the point that it encompassed almost all of China. In 1949, Mao and his Communists entered Beijing and proclaimed the "People's Republic of China." With this, the world witnessed the second Communist Revolution after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917—a second revolution at least as bloody as the first.

"China And Charles Darwin"

Darwinism's influence on 20^th century China was so great that the famous Harvard historian, James Reeve Pusey, devoted a book entitled China and Charles Darwin to this one subject. In this book he relates how Darwin's Origin of Species, published in England and translated into Chinese 36 years later in

1895, spread with incredible speed among Chinese intellectuals, with immense social and political effects. in the preface to his book, Pusey writes:

"The weaker go down before the stronger" – After 1895, the Japanese-Chinese translation of the famous Spencerian slogan, "the survival of the fittest,"yu sheng lieh pai (the superior win, the inferior lose), ...was to force its way into a thousand essays and dominate for a time the Chinese editorial mind as the argument for almost any course of action.65

In China and Charles Darwin, Harvard University historian James Reeve Pusey explained that Darwinism had great influence in China and prepared the foundation for both Communist and Fascist ideas.

In the same book, Pusey examines the currents of thought developing in China in the first half of the 20^th century and tells how they established the foundation for Maoism. One of the people he considered was Liang Chi-chao, was a well-known writer of the time who was captivated by Darwinism and materialist philosophy.

He [Liang Ch'i-ch'ao] mentioned idealism and materialism at least as early as the October 16, 1902 issue of the Hsin min ts'ung pao [a Chinese journal]. Probably he had mentioned them somewhere before, for he gave no explanation of their meaning, and yet he did imply that materialism was the better and that it was winning out over idealism, thanks to Darwin. "How great," he wrote, "is the world of the last twenty-four years, a world belonging to the theory of evolution. Materialism has arisen and idealism has cowered in a corner..."66

China and Charles Darwin relates how Darwinism was responsible for establishing China's disputatious revolutionist culture and its great influence on bringing Maoism to power:

Darwin helped inspire a true renaissance of Chinese thought by specifically challenging (or seeming to challenge) certain favorite traditional ideas and by discrediting all ancient authority...But it was cut short—by the early imposition of a neo-orthodoxy, the Thought of Mao Tse-tung.

That "imposition," of course, also owed much to Darwin. For Darwin had legitimized violent change and revolution. Surely that was one of the most momentous things Darwin did to China... At any rate, those Chinese who were convinced that China needed rebellion were desperately in need of some legitimizing theory, for without the Mandate of Heaven rebellion for three thousand years had been one of the two cardinal sins (the other being filial impiety). It was that powerful sense of sin that Mao Tse-tung, Wu Chih-hui, Sun Yat-sen, and even Liang Chi'i-ch'ao combated so strenuously in all their Darwinian protestations that revolution was legitimate. Mao Tse-tung finally claimed that Marxism-Leninism could all be boiled down to one sentence, tsao fan yu li—"To rebel is justified" ...[That expression] meant that rebellion was a natural law, and that lesson had been taught to Mao Tse-tung not by Marx but by Sun Yat-sen and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, who had learned it, rightly or wrongly, from Darwin.

Darwin justified revolution and thereby helped the cultural revolutions of Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, Hu Shih and Mao Tse-tung (and, of course, so many others), and the political revolutions of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang K'ai-shek, and Mao Tse-tung....

Marxists I assume, would not like this analysis. They would probably say that Social Darwinists were not responsible for their victory... There was indeed "people power" at work at the end of the Communist Revolution, people power generated by landlord oppression, capitalist exploitation, and imperialist (at the last, Japanese) aggression. But that people power could have been tapped by many forces. (The Nationalists could have tapped it.) It  was tapped by Marxists because there were Marxists ready to tap it. But the Marxists were intellectuals. ...Marxism converted intellectuals—but intellectuals who were already converted to Darwinism. If the intellectual Marxists were the "prescient," the hsien chich hsien chueh, who awakened the masses, China's earlier Social Darwinists, Yen Fu, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, Sun Yat-sen, Li Shih-tseng, Wu Chih-hui, were the "prescient" who awakened the Marxists....

The question remains, "In fitting China for Marxism and the Thought of Mao Tse-tung, what did Darwin do to China?" This question must be asked.67

His analysis clearly shows how Darwinism became the basis of Chinese Communism. For thousands of years, China had been an isolated empire. In a matter of ten years it became Red China, and the motive power behind this change in thinking was Darwinism.

But what did Darwinism do to prepare China for Maoism?

Darwin's Visit to China

Communism is really a European ideology, first proposed by European philosophers and put into effect for the first time by European activists. It's really nothing more than the result of the materialist hostility towards religion that took root in Europe. It is curious that this ideology reached and took root in an isolated country like China, so distant from Europe in every way. But if we look at China's recent history, a familiar pattern emerges: the coming of Communism to China meant the coming of atheism which took root thanks to Darwinism.

Until the end of the 18^th century, China was an inward- looking society, isolated from Western culture. The coming of English merchants in the 19^thcentury, brought many changes to the country. With them, these merchants brought a substance called opium, unknown in China before. Consumption of opium spread like an epidemic in Chinese society and was the cause of two wars between England and China. Finally, England preponderated over China. Hong Kong and other important Chinese cities fell under English influence.

Darwin, Huxley and Galton were three influential evolutionists who led some of the Chinese intellectuals to Fascism and Communism.

In this way, English imperialism entered China and with it, came Darwinism that gave imperialism scientific support. In the 19^th century, the materialist and Darwinist ideas that had dominated Europe began spreading quickly among Chinese intellectuals. In The Encyclopedia of Evolution, Richard Milner writes:

During the 19th century, the West regarded China as a sleeping giant, isolated and mired in ancient traditions. Few Europeans realized how avidly Chinese intellectuals seized on Darwinian evolutionary ideasand saw in them a hopeful impetus for progress and change. According to the Chinese writer Hu Shih (Living Philosophies, 1931), when Thomas Huxley's book Evolution and Ethics was published in 1898, it was immediately acclaimed and accepted by Chinese intellectuals. Rich men sponsored cheap Chinese editions so they could be widely distributed to the masses.57

Just as young Turks were captivated by Western materialist ideas at the end of the Ottoman period, so in China, ideologues appeared who adopted materialism and Darwinism. As a result, the Chinese Empire that had lasted thousands of years was abolished in 1911 and replaced by the Republic of China. Those who founded the republic, no matter how anti-Western their rhetoric and policy may have been, adopted the same racist and Social Darwinist understanding that had justified Western imperialism. In an article in the American magazine New Republic, senior editor Jacob Heilbrunn writes:

The idea of using Western ideas and inventions against the West was at its zenith in those days. In the wake of the famous May 4, 1919, demonstrations in Beijing, calls for modernity and patriotism, science and democracy, gained currency among intellectuals. ..."Lurking behind the scenes," as Tu Wei-ming [a professor of Chinese History and Philosophy] has pointed out in the winter 1996 issue of Daedalus, "was neither science nor democracy but scientism and populism.... [I]nstrumental rationality and Jacobin-like collectivism fundamentally restructured the Chinese intellectual world in the post-May Fourth period." Reformers, such as Liang Qichao, who edited a clandestine journal, were influenced by a debased but popular version of Darwin and Spencer. They saw race war as the key to progress.58

The racist thinker Herbert Spencer, mentioned in the quotation above, was a contemporary of Darwin, whose theory he adapted to social science. Among other violent, unjust and cruel ideas, Spencer proposed the superiority of the European races and the need for continual conflict among races and nations, suggesting that society should not assist its poor and weak members.

Darwinism fostered Communism and Fascism in China.Fascist leader Chiang Kai-Shek was influenced by Darwinism..

Among Chinese intellectuals influenced by Darwin and Spencer were Yen Fu and Ting Wen-chiang, whose ideas greatly influenced the foundation of modern China. In Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, the American historian Benjamin Schwartz emphasizes Yen Fu and his Darwinist ideas significantly. According to Schwartz, Yen Fu takes the Western ideologies and theories he reads such as Spencer, and sees them as prescriptive ways to transform society and achieve the goal of wealth and power.59 Schwartz states that Darwin's theories do not merely describe reality. They prescribe values and a course of action.60

Ting Wen-chiang was another important Chinese ideologue and leader in Communism, whose views were founded on nothing other than Darwinism. Ding was the most important representative of the "New Culture"movement that influenced China in the 1910s and '20s. This movement's most important feature was its opposition to Confucianism, the religion of the Chinese people, and its seeking to replace it with a materialist world view. (Ironically, the New Culture movement was a leading inspiration of both Mao's Communism and its rival, Chiang Kai-Shek's Fascism.)

In Ting Wen-chiang: Science and China's New Culture, the American historian Charlotte Furth examines Ting Wen-chiang, the dean of the New Culture movement, in considerable detail. According to her, Wen-chiang merely translated the ideas of evolutionist ideologues such as Darwin, Huxley and Spencer into Chinese. For this reason, Furth even refers to Ding as the "Huxley of China."61 (Huxley, Darwin's biggest supporter, was known in his day as "Darwin's bulldog.")

Ting Wen-chiang studied zoology and geology at Glasgow University in Scotland. Returning to China in 1911, he exerted great efforts to spread materialist and Darwinist ideas in the newly-founded Chinese Republic, even supporting the theory of eugenics proposed by Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin.62  (Eugenics proposed the disposal of those within a race who were sick or disabled, thus ensuring so-called universal advancement by the "mating" of the healthy ones. This theory was applied most widely in Nazi Germany.)

James Reeve Pusey, a Harvard professor of history and an important commentator on the New Culture movement, says:

The New Culture Movement's cries were all cries Darwin had backed before, and he now backed them again in the same old way. He [Darwin] was the patron saint of the New Culture Movement.  .  .  [H]is theory, so the New Culture Movement's leaders still insisted,  "proved".  .  . that "the present surpasses the past, and the future surpasses the present." That was the faith behind the Anarchists' injunction to tsun chin po ku (respect the present and belittle the past) and the Communists' later injunction to hou chin po ku (extol the present and belittle the past). 63

As a result of the spread of Darwinism in China, the emergence of this kind of Chinese ideologues at the beginning of the 20^th century gave birth, first, to the Chinese nationalist Kuomintang party with its fascist tendencies, then to Chinese Communism. In an article written in the periodical New Scientist, Michael Ruse, a Canadian philosopher wrote:

These ideas took root at once [In China], for China did not have the innate intellectual and religious barriers to evolution that often existed in the West. Indeed, in some respects, Darwin seemed almost Chinese! …Taoist and Neo-Confucian thought had always stressed the "thingness" of humans. Our being at one with the animals was no great shock…Today, the official philosophy is Marxist-Leninism (of a kind). But without the secular materialist approach of Darwinism (meaning now the broad social philosophy), the ground would not have been tilled for Mao and his revolutionaries to sow their seed and reap their crop.64

Red Terror in Asia

Though born in Europe, Communism's first revolution took place farther east, in Russia. In the first half of the 20^th century, it moved even farther to eastward until 1949, when China—the world's populous country—fell to guerillas led by Mao Tse-tung. For ten years, Mao's militants engaged in attacks against government forces across China to bring about the world's second largest Communist revolution. The results of this second revolution were the same as in the original Bolshevik revolution: criminal assaults, mass murders, torture, famine, impoverishment, degeneration, resulting in an introverted, depressed society of fear.

After Lenin, Mao brought the second important change to Communist theory, bringing innovations to Marxism in three important areas:

1) Marx and the Communist ideologues following him laid great importance on the idea of the "working class" proletariat. But Mao believed that the peasant class was the true leaders of the revolution and proposed the idea of "peasant socialism."

2) Instead of following Lenin's idea of a Communist party demonstrating in city centers to prepare the way for revolution, Mao established a "guerilla war" and organized a Communist party based in the countryside and in the mountains.

3) In place of the movement toward internationalism, the foundation of Marxism that Lenin adopted, Mao favored nationalism and developed the idea of "National Socialism."

The reason behind these three different approaches was the conditions in which Mao found himself. In China, where almost the whole population was composed of peasants with a conservative, nationalist frame of mind, Mao had no other choice than to establish "nationalist peasant socialism." Unavoidably, Mao gave priority to the peasants, applied the model of the "country guerilla," and organized among the peasantry.

One of the millions of victims
of Mao's guerilla war.

Chinese Communism developed and came to power with Stalin's support. But Red China's brutality was worse than Stalin's.

This explains not only why Maoism was different from Leninism, but why it became an even more savage, barbarous and rigid ideology. The advent of Maoism added to Communism—which was already pitiless and bloodthirsty—a greater degree of ignorance, fanatic nationalism and hostility to culture and civilization. Total calamity was the result. Maoism was the worst kind of Communism; in fact we can say it was the worst of the worst.

Maoism influenced not only China but later passed to Cambodia (in the time of the Khmer Rouge), North Korea, and even Albania. Maoism gained power with Stalin's help, and Soviet-Chinese relations were very good in Stalin's day. But this relationship fell apart in the 1960s, and the two countries became enemies. Sino-Soviet rivalry divided the Communist world, separating allies of China from those allied with the Soviet Union.

What Maoism brought upon China, and those Communist countries that followed China, was as dark and bloody as the Russia of Lenin and Stalin. But as the "worst of the worst," Maoism created much more terrible regimes.

In the following pages, we'll examine the red savagery that embraced Asia.