A fairly interesting article about the legacy of Mao Zedong in the latest issue of the California Monthly, the official mag of Cal’s Alumni Association.

For starters, let’s recall what Mao did:

During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, Red Guards sent millions to reeducation camps in the countryside to spend their days doing hard labor and learning the teachings of Mao. Others were jailed and executed. In a new biography, Mao: The Unknown Story, authors Jung Chang and Jon Halliday use previously unreleased material to show in detail how Mao concocted his reputation as a peasant hero in a tyrannical quest for absolute power. Mao sacrificed armies to foil Communist rivals and sold food for arms during one of China’s most devastating famines. According to the authors, Mao said he was willing for half of China to die for the country to become a global military and nuclear power. They estimate that Mao is responsible for more than 70 million deaths.

So what is this article about? How people still defend this bastard:

Yun Shi M.A. ’99, a 31-year-old graduate of Berkeley’s Asian Studies program, is one of the restaurant’s patrons. She grew up in the Shandong province singing songs about Mao and studying his teachings. Like her mother, Shi feels strongly about Mao’s contribution to modern China, particularly his programs to redistribute land. While acknowledging Mao’s crimes, she still stands by his goals and recites his famous declaration in 1949, when communists prevailed in China’s civil war, that “the Chinese have stood up.”

On Shi’s trip to China last year, her 80-year-old great-aunt gathered several family members and revealed a secret she’d carried for more than 50 years. She and her husband had once owned land in the province. “People just showed up at their door one day and demanded that they leave immediately,” Shi says. “My aunt stood under a tree and watched villagers carry their stuff away. They found a woodshed and lived there for a year eating whatever they found, at times resorting to begging.” […]

But among some Chinese here and in China, Mao’s status as a hero and liberator, and as a symbol of the country’s rising international power, remains potent. The new biography has provoked defensive reactions on Chinese-language Internet message boards. A typical post read, “Mao did what he set out to do and freed China from foreign humiliation once and for all.” Although Shi was moved by her great-aunt’s story, she says, “It never crossed my mind to feel guilty about how I feel about Mao. While I don’t like the way it was done, I still support an idea of a fair society.”

Disgusting. Also of interest is how some Chinese restaurants offer dishes such as “Chairman Mao’s Red Cooked Pork Pot.” I wonder if German restaurants have a “Hitler dish” or Russian places have a “Stalin dish” on their menus… The other part that I want to point out is when L. Ling-chi Wang, of Berkeley’s “ethnic studies” department, asks: “Why are Americans still forgiving of Nixon for what he has done?” I agree, I don’t like Nixon for many reasons and the rest of America shouldn’t either. But is Mr. Wang equating the crimes of Nixon with those of Mao!? I’m sorry, but I’ll take a couple of Watergates over millions of deaths any day of the year.