You call Mao a lunatic because you measure him by the comfort of your own peace.
But you forget the world he inherited, a land torn apart by foreign invasion, warlord anarchy, mass starvation, and a Western blockade designed to strangle it before it could stand.
When Mao took power in 1949, China was not the "great historical nation" you describe in nostalgic abstraction.
It was a graveyard of empires.
A country with an average life expectancy of thirty-five years, a literacy rate under twenty percent, and a population so exhausted by war and famine that even survival seemed theoretical.
There were no universities worth the name, no unified army, no functioning industry, and no sovereignty.
The "resurgence" you take for granted began not with markets or reforms, but with survival, the hard, dirty, collective rebuilding of a society left for dead.
You say he "drove China into an agrarian grave."
China was an agrarian grave.
It had been for centuries, impoverished, fragmented, enslaved by foreign powers who took its ports, dictated its tariffs, and flooded its markets with opium.
What Mao did was force that agrarian grave to awaken, to industrialize by its own hands rather than under Western masters.
Yes, it was brutal.
So is surgery after centuries of infection.
You talk about "millions dead" as though famine and war were new inventions under socialism.
But the century before Mao, from the Taiping Rebellion to the Japanese invasion, killed far more Chinese than any single policy of the People’s Republic.
The difference is that before Mao, they died in silence and servitude.
After Mao, they died struggling to be free.
And in the span of one generation, life expectancy doubled, infant mortality collapsed, and a starving, illiterate people stood upright again.
You call it "an unnecessary delay."
A delay compared to what?
Compared to the postwar reconstruction of Europe, bankrolled by the Marshall Plan, protected by American guns, and supplied with colonial plunder?
China rebuilt itself while under embargo, encircled by enemies, and cut off from the world’s markets.
And still it endured.
By the time Mao died, China had achieved industrial self-sufficiency, universal basic literacy, and sovereignty for the first time in two hundred years.
You mock "a colonised Chinese mind possessed with bitter garbage from a bearded European."
But you misunderstand what Marxism meant to a colonized world.
It wasn’t "European ideology." It was a weapon, a framework to reclaim dignity, to break feudalism, and to end the centuries when Europe dictated the meaning of progress.
Marx may have been German, but the revolution that rose from his words was Chinese.
You’re right about one thing, this is China’s time.
But it didn’t come from luck, or from the benevolence of the West, or from some sudden wisdom that fell from the sky in the 1980s.
It came from the foundation laid by a generation that refused to stay on its knees, that built steel from the ruins, dams from famine fields, and a state from chaos.
The skyscrapers you see today stand on bones, but those bones are the price of sovereignty, not conquest.
You don’t have to like Mao.
But if you speak of China’s rise, you speak of his shadow.
Because without him, there would be no nation left to rise.
Mao was a communist lunatic intent on driving China into an agrarian grave, until he realised later how stupid that strategy was - probably compelled by others and weakened by old age.
And when he changed his approach, China took off.
The fact is, his ideological obsession with austere Communist nonsense doomed his country for decades, and millions died as a consequence.
It was an unnecessary delay in the inevitable resurgence of a great historical nation.
The fact is that China's life expectancy, literacy, and industrial development would have accelerated far faster and far sooner with a wiser head in charge instead of a colonised Chinese mind possessed with bitter garbage from a bearded European - you know, the ones you rail about so much😉!
As for all the 'if it takes a few million dead, then so be it' notions... It doesn't, and it never had to, and if you were one of them, I'm pretty sure you'd instantly agree! Death is only casually dismissible when it happens to other people, especially those long gone.
Separately, as a European from a small European country, you will not find me apologising for the history of European Empires. China has no clean hands with respect to its own history, internally or externally. Brutality spans the entire spectrum of all human history and all human societies.
The fact that China did not leverage its scientific, military, and naval capacities and its sheer scale is a matter for itself - take that up with your former rulers. If China had done these things, perhaps I would be on X posting complaints about the unfairness of it all.
The fact that China might choose to leverage that power in the future may YET be a matter for us - but so be it!
You won't find me on X appealing to some nebulous moral/historical/non-existent reference point to claim we were hard done by.
As for Europe, we are led by Platinum Grade, Five-Star, Exemplar idiots of the most disappointing and strategically incapable kind!
So, take it from me. This is YOUR time!
Quit whining about it!