On Being Black in China

1960 to 1970 was when China actually came out of darkness (life expectancies rising from 45 to over 60). You could argue that this was because Deng (and other reformers, when Deng was purged) had managed to seize enough control that Mao couldn't do too much damage. The Cultural Revolution (which is the time period we are talking about) was bad for the people who were targeted, but China just didn't have that many educated people that trying to kill them all would make an appreciable dent in life expectancies. China would probably have developed a lot faster if it hadn't destroyed its education system, but it still grew pretty quick (even during the Cultural Revolution).

So basically, over Mao's life China went for a life expectancy of 35 to a life expectancy 60. Much of this was probably Deng fixing up the things that Mao broke.

Maoism is a terrible system of government, but it turns out it's streets ahead of feudalism. Really, the heads of the Qing dynasty should really go down as the worst leaders ever (imagine a century of people dying at the same rate as the Great Leap), with Mao as a runner up.

Whoa, that's way unfair, particularly to Nietzsche, who deplored anti-semitism and mocked it (along with Germans in general, for that matter—if there's any group he picked on it was them), and who would surely have been the first person to repudiate his thuggish sister's Nazification of his work. Nietzsche's sensibility was far too refined for him to deserve lumping in with Nazi intellectuals. I'd go so far as to say that anyone who understands the first thing about him would have to agree, though I'm far from a Nietzsche scholar and shouldn't say such things.

Wagner you can have.

Heidegger is a complex case. As far as I know the jury is still out about the relation between his philosophy and Nazism. It's certainly not obvious. (And his personal behaviour is a different question.)

Schmitt, sure, except he was born in 1888 and hardly predates Hitler.

The majority of German artists and intellectuals weren't aligned with the Nazis, so I don't think your argument is very strong here, though of course it's not true that Hitler was a lone bad apple or whatever.

Don't mistake xenophobia where the "other" at that given moment and place just happens to be, for example, a black with racism toward blacks.

I'm no expert but, first of all, the peasants who died weren't a different ethnic group or a social class antagonistic to Mao, they were the ones who swept him to power.

Second, AFAIK Mao didn't intentionally set out to kill people, the famine was the result of cockamamie policies of indigenous industrialization to be made possible by massive planned increases in farm productivity freeing up labor.

And the leadership was blinded by ideology and convinced themselves it was working, and the political climate was such that no one dared contradict Mao, everyone reported massive production, so even as people were starving they exported food to get industrial products. They didn't set out to kill people, it just happened due to incompetence, a bad system with bad incentives, and ideological hubris.

Mao was a nutty tyrant, and yet he gave the peasants literacy, medical care, and paved the way for modern China. He was preferred by those peasants to Chiang, who conscripted/enslaved peasants, sent them to fight the Japanese, but 40% died of disease and starvation before they saw action. Even with American support (admittedly tepid since they knew him well) Chiang couldn't beat Mao. (Google 'Chiang February 28' for more about what a great guy he was).

Estimates of excess deaths in Iraq, are done doing a similar methodology, range from 400,000 to a couple of million. If those were due to bad policies and ideological hubris, do those constitute genocide?

Anyway, history is quite complicated, we don't judge the Brits just by the famines in Bengal either, although the 'g' word sometimes comes up.

It's a good article about a black American's perspective on China, so of course it's from a very specific point of view, and in order to get a perspective on Mao and blacks, it doesn't need to say he was also responsible for the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.