Sixty years of Communist rule in China

How many did Mao kill? I am not talking about wars, but killing his own people. How many did he kill in order to establish and maintain his iron rule? Why are today's leaders Communists?

Political scientist R. J. Rummel at University of Hawaii has spent his career tallying "death by government," that is, when governments kill their own people. His figure for Mao Tse Tung is:

Civil War-Sino-Japanese War 1923-1949 = 3,466,000 murdered

Rule over China (PRC) 1949-1987 = 35,236,000 murdered

At that time, I did not include China’s Great Famine, 1958-1961. From my study of what was available in English then, I could not define it as democide. However subsequent research has convinced me that it should be included. This changes Mao’s total to 76,692,000 (rounded off to 77,000,000) murdered.

So why would we celebrate the cause that killed almost 77 million of the people it represents? Rummel on his blog says that it would be like celebrating the Holocaust (of the Jews by Hitler).

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