![\"\"](\"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/IMG_20171003_074059.jpg\")
<\/a>Mao Zedong in Dandong, China \ud83c\udd2f Photo by Kim Petersen<\/p><\/div>\n
The young, likable Dr. Li, chosen by Mao as his physician, eventually became a trusted confidant and witness to the daily travails of the Chairman. And Mao, an insomniac and hypochondriac, required constant attention (although he often enough ignored the doctor\u2019s advice and indulged in health-threatening, even reckless, habits.)<\/p>\n
Dr. Li, who in his first years on the job continued to revere the Great Leader, would only gradually become disillusioned and even shocked by Mao\u2019s detached indifference to the real living conditions of the Chinese people. In the first years, Mao comes across as a calm, generally reasonable and good-humored leader, pragmatic and tolerant in resolving the inevitable disputes and rivalries among his subordinate officials (such as Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping). Dr. Li finds it easy to be open and candid with him\u2013even regarding the intrigues and jealousies of Mao\u2019s neglected wife, Jiang Qing.<\/p>\n
Although Mao, like Lenin, claimed to disapprove of any \u201ccult of personality,\u201d he quickly adopted the traditional Confucian role of the wise Ruler who \u201cis never wrong.\u201d1<\/a><\/sup> Thus, within a few years, he voluntarily relinquished the position of Chairman of the Republic to a rival, Liu Shaoqi, in order to aggrandize his primary role as Party Chairman (wise ruler and guiding ideologue). And like Lenin and Stalin, he had little interest in the rights and needs of actual individuals per se<\/i>, but rather dealt in collective abstractions (\u201cthe peasantry,\u201d or at most, \u201cthe people\u201d). (Marx, who had barely any human contact with actual workers, wrote abstractly about the \u201cproletariat-class,\u201d and likewise the intellectual theorist Lenin subsumed real persons into the faceless, abstract \u201cmasses.\u201d) Such collective labels would have fateful consequences for millions of real individuals.<\/p>\n As with all single-party, autocratic regimes, the governing bureaucrats maintained their status, not through demonstrable managerial skill and competence, but through unswerving loyalty to, and agreement with, the Ruler. And Mao personified the limitations of the visionary ideologue, remote from real social and economic facts, who charismatically offers an imaginative goal of pure communitarianism, wherein ordinarily intractable individuals joyfully submerge themselves into an enthusiastic, collective effort to attain economic equality and advancement. (One is reminded of the proto-communist Jean-Jacques Rousseau\u2013a fateful influence on Robespierre\u2013who imagined an ideal republic in which patriotic citizens would willingly submerge themselves into a \u201cgeneral will.\u201d) <\/p>\n Mao\u2019s dreamed-up conception of a \u201cGreat Leap Forward,\u201d in which each village and town across the nation would collectivize their accelerated efforts, thereby dramatically increasing crop yields, proved inefficient and disastrous. But when Mao, on his periodic tours of the country, visited such villages, local officials erected a facade of successful grain-surpluses\u2013so as not to displease him. The collective, nationwide \u201cLeap\u201d also included, bizarrely enough, everyone pitching in to increase steel production by melting discarded iron implements (and such) in backyard smelters\u2013instead of building steel mills! Overall, objective historians, as well as Dr. Li himself, estimate that the \u201cGreat Leap\u201d programs resulted in massive famine: the starvation and death of tens of millions. But when more pragmatic officials (economists, agronomists) criticized the plan, they were quickly labeled \u201cbourgeois\u201d counter-revolutionaries (with the usual outcome). <\/p>\n When popular dissatisfaction and unrest finally climaxed in the Sixties, the revered Leader ruthlessly sidelined political rivals and blamed the government itself (i.e., corrupt bureaucrats) for all the disasters (sound familiar?)–thereby unleashing a violent Cultural Revolution of youthful, fanatically devoted Red Guards determined to purge the society of any suspected \u201crightists,\u201d \u201ccounter-revolutionaries,\u201d or even those maybe backsliding a bit into \u201cbourgeois\u201d tendencies. This movement, at first politically expedient for Mao, soon became uncontrollable and disastrous for national stability and morale.<\/p>\n Dr. Li\u2019s highly absorbing and factual narrative reveals a megalomaniacal Mao, convinced of his own genius and thus entitled to hedonistic pampering, such as the endless sexual favors elicited from dozens of naive, awestruck young girls (whom, despite Dr. Li\u2019s objections, Mao had no compunction about infecting with his multiple STDs). Like autocrats since time immemorial, Mao became psychologically dependent on the endless luxuries and pleasures provided by an ever-changing coterie of female devotees.<\/p>\n Nonchalantly indifferent to the deaths of countless millions as a result of his utopian fantasies, Mao is revealed\u2013in Dr. Li\u2019s probing, incisive portrait\u2013to be a sociopathic narcissist, entirely unconcerned with massive human suffering and tragedy. Even when cautioned about the dangers of a possible nuclear war, Mao remained unperturbed: \u201cChina has many people\u2026. The deaths of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The title of this acutely perceptive memoir is perhaps misleading: the American reader has come to expect lurid, \u201ctell-all\u201d biographies which spare no graphic details of the subject\u2019s debaucheries and scandals. Some such unsavory details are of course revealed, but the author\u2013Mao\u2019s personal physician for the remaining 22 years of Mao\u2019s life (1954-1976)\u2013had a more [\u2026]<\/p>\n The post Ideology, Autocracy, and Dystopia<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410,190,442,58994,33076],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035394"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/281"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1035394"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1035737,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035394\/revisions\/1035737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1035394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1035394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1035394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}