Real Dictators - Mao Zedong Part 3: The Cultural Revolution

Episode Date: August 11, 2020

Mao’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ sets out to purge the minds of an entire population. Meanwhile, the Supreme Leader himself leads a life of debauchery and excess - as his former doctor remembers. The Chairman seems invincible. But as his health deteriorates, his legacy is anything but assured. Eyewitnesses to his brutality reflect on what Mao means to China today, more than 40 years after his death. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

None of his feelings were for the tragedy he brought for the Chinese population and for the death of well over 70 million Chinese in peacetime. So he was basically saying, I can lose half of my people to get what I want. I'm ready to take that risk. Almost every act, every utterance is being criminalized at the very height of the Cultural Revolution. You speak out about the weather, you bring an egg to market, you might be condemned as a counter-revolutionary. There are those who argue that had he been examined by a trained psychiatrist, you would

have found in Mao, as you would in Hitler, say, aspects of personality disorder that might classify him as being clinically disturbed to the point of insanity. I mean, customarily we say that in the league tables of horror, he comes top, then Stalin, and then Hitler. In July 1959, the leaders of China's Communist Party ascend Mount Lu. It's a forested peak in Zhangji province, in the southeast of the country. Hidden away amongst the trees, in a resort called Lushan, they hold a conference. Well, it's called a conference. But to their supreme leader Mao Zedong's mind,

Well, it's called a conference. But to their supreme leader Mao Zedong's mind, this meeting is simply an occasion to rubber stamp the expansion of his great leap forward. Everything seems to be going to plan. But what happens next takes everyone by surprise. My name is Paul McGann, and welcome to Real Dictators, a series that explores the hidden lives of tyrants such as Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao, and Joseph Stalin. In this episode, we return to China, and the story of the peasant's son turned supreme leader, Mao Zedong. From Noisa Podcasts, this is Real Dictators. The Communist Party of China are gathered in the mountain resort of Lushan.

They've been summoned here by their leader, Chairman Mao, to sign off on the expansion of his great leap forward. This economic revolution has turned life in China's countryside upside down. Mao wants to push it even further. But, unbeknownst to the chairman, his second-in-command, a man called Liu Shaoqi, is preparing to make a decision of extraordinary personal bravery. He's about to do the unthinkable and challenge the supreme leader. and challenge the supreme leader.

Chung Chang is an author and academic based in London, England. She grew up in China. Chairman Mao casts a long shadow over her and her family. Liu Shaoqi was a hard man. Otherwise, he wouldn't have become Mao's number two. But even he felt that Mao was too extreme. It was intolerable. Liu went back to his home village and saw how the peasants were starved,

how everybody hated the communists, and how his sister, his brother, you know, his family were dying and so on. And so Liu made the most courageous act in his life. At this party congress, he was going to make a speech. In his private quarters in the resort, Liu pens a speech that will truly put the cat amongst the pigeons. And Mao was so convinced of Liu's obedience

because Mao had promoted Liu and Liu had always told Mao's line. So Mao didn't expect Liu would pull a fast one, shall we say. And before that, Liu wrote a kind of draft. It wasn't a whole speech. It was basically outline. And Mao read it. Mao was pleased because there was nothing against his policies. So Mao even said, oh well, then you don't have to read this speech. You can improvise. As Liu rises to his feet in front of the gathered party workers, he prepares to veer wildly off script. Liu Xiaoqi then went to speak and he said something completely different from his draft speech. He said the Great Famine wasn't because of bad weather and it wasn't because of other reasons.

It was a human mistake and we must stop it. And Mao was furious because he hated to be outsmarted. After Liu Shaoqi's speech, the 7,000 party cadres in the conference hall, my father was one of them, I mean, they were all excited that Liu had said these things. This is not just a disagreement over policy.

Liu is attacking Mao himself. Professor Frank de Cotta is based in Hong Kong and reports on modern China. He spent years studying China's archives to build up a picture of life under Mao. To say that there'seman may disaster is actually a direct attack against the whole vision proposed by Mao with the Great Leap Forward. To the party chairman, this is the ultimate betrayal. Never again will Mao assume his party underlings are on board with his ideas.

Now more than ever, Mao's tactics of manipulation and coercion will be key. From that moment onwards, the chairman becomes extremely suspicious and thinks that he has found the very man who will denounce him after his death. He's found the man who will destroy his legacy, destroy his reputation. Mao cannot tolerate defiance. His power relies on sycophantic subservience. Liu Shaoqi must be punished. But all in good time. Mao can't turn on Liu immediately Within the party Liu is well known and well liked

Mao will move slowly and carefully Dr Michael Lynch is an historian and biographer of Mao There seems to be, dare I say, a decency about him you don't find in Mao Liu was moved, was hurt, was pained by the famine When he realised how many had died. And he pointed out publicly before the comrades that that policy obviously had gone wrong and had to be adjusted. Mao was outraged because, well, you didn't do this, you didn't openly challenge. Now, Mao was wise enough still to know that Liu was still very

useful as an administrator. So he keeps him on, but he is a marked man from then on. This will be revenge served exceptionally cold. Mao's plan to destroy his second-in-command will unfold over a decade. By 1965, Chairman Mao is 71 years old. He's been Supreme Leader of China for 16 long and painful years. While his people toil, the chairman lives a rarefied existence in the capital, Beijing. Years later, his private physician, a man called Dr. Li Zijui, will write a book detailing the decadence he witnessed firsthand.

Dr. Li lives with his wife and two children in the chairman's compound at the heart of the Forbidden City, the center of Chinese state power. He is often summoned in the early hours of the morning to attend to Mao's illnesses, to his whims. He accompanies the chairman on trips around the country and abroad. Mao is a man who avoids friendship. To him, people are subjects or slaves. He's an insomniac, often rising late and working into the night. When he's not working, he relaxes in his private swimming pool or pursues young women. Mao believes that sating his voracious sexual appetite keeps him young, prolonging his life. In fact, according to Dr. Li, Mao is riddled with sexually transmitted diseases. But he refuses to be treated.

Instead, he passes them on to the countless women who share his bed. Li claims some of the women are even proud to be infected. It becomes a sign of status, a symbol of closeness to the chairman. Mao never washes his hands or face. His bodyguards wipe him down with hot towels. Like many peasants in China, Mao's teeth have garnered a green patina over the years, the result of washing his mouth with tea and eating the tea leaves. Li suggests using a toothbrush. Mao responds, a tiger never brushes his teeth.

Mao may be living a life of luxury beyond the comprehension of many of his subjects, but he's not as secure as he once seemed. The great leap forward, his cack-handed policy to modernize the Chinese economy overnight, has proved disastrous. Famine is rife, and for the first time there are murmurs within the Communist Party that perhaps the great helmsman should be replaced. Rather than wait for his enemies to come at him, Mao decides to seize the initiative. Jonathan Clements is author of Mao Zedong, Life and Times. Mao was worried about capitalist roaders. He was worried that the Chinese were losing sight of the communist utopia that everyone was aiming for.

And he thought that China needed to go through a severe period of self-criticism, of self-realization, to stop people from developing a love of capitalist things, of material objects. He was determined to remind people that, in his words, a revolution is not a dinner party. We are going to have to break some heads. We are going to have to be very tough on ourselves in not succumbing to the temptations of what he called the capitalist road. Mao is planning another revolution every bit as devastating as the Great Leap Forward. But it will be more sinister and intangible in its execution. He calls it the Cultural Revolution.

From his perch at the top of the party, Mao has been watching and learning. He believes he's being held back by the way the Chinese people think. They're not ready for Maoism. People are too comfortable, they're too set in their ways, too tempted by Western ways of doing things, Western ways of thinking. Mao is determined to purge China of these bourgeois thoughts he claims linger in the minds of an older generation.

Mao wants all 600 million Chinese to practice what he terms true communist right thinking. It goes without saying that he will be the person to dictate what this right thinking is. Dr. Michael Lynch. Mao said that beauty was a capitalist notion. So when you listen to, say, Beethoven, and many Chinese loved Western classical music by that time and in the Conservatoire they learned Beethoven and Mozart, he said that that's where corruption begins because those two great artists, great artists inverted commas, were capitalist constructs and their works were a way of portraying and extending and dominating the true world through capitalist cultural values. So destroy it. You can't afford to have capitalism in a proletarian society.

All culture must be proletarian because we are proletarians. And he said, and I think few people dispute this, that all cultures take their character from the class structure in which they exist. Obviously, it's an interesting debate you could have. But certainly, Western classical music and art and sculpture is a product of capitalism. So socialist realism, you don't have abstractionism,

either in music or in art or painting or sculpture. It's got to tell a story in itself. It's got to have a narrative to it. And so it's a rejection of culture in the way it had developed in other areas through the 20th century. Extraordinary piece of destruction. Mao's hypocrisy is blatant to those in his orbit, but hidden from the country at large.

While Western culture is denounced, the chairman hosts debauched dance parties in his private rooms. Party secretaries, specially selected for their looks, are brought to these soirees, then encouraged into the great helmsman's bedroom. Mao needs a wingman to help him execute his cultural revolution. With the great leap forward, Mao made the mistake of trusting his party deputies. He does not intend to repeat that mistake. This time, he turns to the one person he can trust absolutely. His fourth wife, Zhang Qing, the woman known as Madame Mao.

Zhang Qing is a former actress from Shanghai. She first became Mao's lover during the 1940s. Madame Mao has been by her husband's side as he's gone from strength to strength. Jonathan Clements. The big woman in Mao's life, the famous woman in Mao's life, was Jiang Qing, who was an actress from Shanghai who became his lover in Yunnan around 1940. They'd basically fallen out with each other by 1942, but they stayed together in some way for the rest of their lives. Jiang Qing was a relatively minor actress who was suddenly in a position of fantastic power. And as Mao rose through the party, Jiang Qing adopted a role

as a kind of cultural secretary. She began to initiate cultural policies. She began to say what plays were worth performing and what films were worth performing. And she started to enact an increasingly invasive role. In 1961, she actually came to Mao and said, there's a play called Hideaway, Dismissed from Office, which I'm very suspicious about. I think it's an attack on you. And at the time, Mao said, oh, no, I'm sure it's fine. It was only later on during the Cultural Revolution that he decided that it was an attack on him, that it was a coded reference to his dismissal of Peng Dehuai and that the author ought to be purged. During the Cultural Revolution, Jiang Qing actually defines what the canon of performable operas should be. And there's a bunch of pretty awful unwatchable plays and

ballets which are designed to instill party virtue they're still performed today but even at the time they were originally put on they had trouble filling the theaters in these later years of the regime madame mao is more powerful and manipulative than ever. As she got older, she became increasingly neurotic and increasingly hypochondriac. She began to control Mao or control her position within the party by feigning illnesses all the time. She was always in bed saying that she was ill. If there was ever anything she disagreed with, she'd say that it had given her conniptions. She described herself as Mao's dog when he said, bite, I bit.

But the others called her the white-boned demon. Together, Chairman and Madame Mao make a formidable pair. Mao begins his new cultural revolution with an approach so vague, it can be moulded at his whim to any purpose. Professor Frank de Cotta. It can be molded at his whim to any purpose. Professor Frank de Cotta. By 1968-69, there are campaigns that are so vague as to pretty much make any statement and any activity a counter-revolutionary crime.

You speak out about the weather. You bring an egg to market. You might be condemned as a counter-revolutionary. You might be denounced by a neighbor. There are provinces where one in 50 people, two percent of the population, gets swept up by these campaigns in 1968, 69, 1970. So almost every act, every utterance is being criminalized at the very height of the Cultural Revolution. To not speak properly about the chairman, to not bow properly, to not listen respectfully to the local cadre, to not work hard enough, anything is open to criticism. Anything could lead a person to being denounced, persecuted, sent to a labor camp,

or somehow punished in one way or another. So it's not so much the death rate, it is the sheer extent of these campaigns that are meant to cower the population. Dr. Michael Lynch. And he then, paranoid, and I'll use the word carefully there, fearful that in his old age, and he's now in his 70s, fearful that his revolution will not outlive him. He determines to destroy all elements of possible opposition, real and imagined, within China. And so he launches what becomes known as the Great Proletarian People's Revolution. It's really a way of removing any possible hint of criticism. But it goes beyond that, because what Mao said was, if we're going to be truly socialists, big S, communist, socialist, we must be absolute in this. We can't play at it. And therefore, comrades, we must remove

from positions of influence or authority anyone who will delay or slow down the process of revolution. So let's attack what he called the four olds. Old ideas, old ways, old customs, old pursuits. Now that covered everything. It's one of those blanket four olds. So anything he disapproved of came under attack. So anything he disapproved of came under attack. As a guide to his thinking, Mao publishes a hold-all primer of Maoist principles. It's called Little Red Book, and it's exactly that.

It's Mao's version of Marx's Communist Manifesto. As a collection of over 400 of Mao's sayings, it's a window into the mind of a violent dictator. War is the continuation of politics, he writes. War is the highest form of struggle. It is up to us to organize the people. Where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself. Let us hold their banner high and march ahead along the path crimson with their blood. Shifting over a billion copies, the Little Red Book is a blockbuster. It's one of the most printed volumes in history. Mao's

intention is to capture the minds of his people. He targets one particular demographic, those he can mould most easily, the young. Maus is the voice that is heard repeatedly. It's Maus' writings and Maus' thoughts, and this becomes much more important later on when you have an entire generation who is raised on the thoughts of Maus Adam. A generation of children raised on the Little Red Book becomes a compliant personal army, ready and willing to enforce Mao's will. The chairman creates and organizes a vast force of student paramilitaries.

They're known as the Red Guards. Within the Communist Party, Mao may be facing muted opposition from people his own age, but he has cornered the youth market. In an extraordinary twist, Mao incites his teen army to rise up and overthrow their elders. He does a very clever thing psychologically. He calls on the young to be the instruments of this. The Great Gathering in Tiananmen Square, a million plus perhaps are packed in. Youngsters between 14 and 23, we think. And Mao and Lin make this great appeal to them.

You are China. You are the future. Your fathers, your grandfathers, they tried, but they didn't succeed fully. You alone can do it. You are the future. Young people, rise up. Do as we suggest you do. Purify our society

from all those corrupting elements. Zheng Cheng was herself a child in China at the time. The Cultural Revolution was basically Mao's revenge against his party colleagues and the party. But the party was this gigantic machine that had been running China. You know, Mao's wishes were imposed on the population by the party. So how did Mao get the population to punish the officials? And so he wanted to create a gigantic terror, to terrorize the population, and to make people see that he, Mao, alone, wanted them to do nasty things to the party officials the population had been fearful of.

And so he, Mao, then created this, again, this gigantic terror campaign. And this was Mao's standard procedure. When he wanted to do something, he always created terror. The Red Guards' first target is carefully chosen. The adults at the top of the hit list are the children's teachers. In 1966, he first used schoolchildren to create terror. Mao understood teenagers, particularly teenage

boys, very well. And he stopped schooling. And Mao said, you know, now they have no schools to go to. What do they do? They create violence. And in order to create this violence, Mao needed victims. And so he made the school teachers the primary targets to generate violence and atrocities from these teenagers. Mao did not particularly hate these children. He did not even particularly hate the teachers. He regarded himself as a teacher. But his calculation was in order to generate the terror, so he could overthrow his party enemies.

He needed these teenagers. And then he needed victims to feed them, to feed the perpetrators of violence and atrocities. So it was a completely cynical calculation. Across China, in scenes so dystopian they can hardly be believed, thousands of teachers are assaulted by pupils who once looked up to them. In Beijing alone, hundreds are murdered. Zheng Qiang remembers the scenes all too well.

She was right there. In my school, there was tremendous violence. My headmaster couldn't stand it and he was trying to commit suicide by slashing his neck. A gardener in the school, I think he had been a nationalist officer, so he was singled out and beaten to death. Mao also had said that cultivating flowers and grass was a bourgeois habit, and he said, get rid of the flowers. In fact, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution,

in the school, we had to go out and remove the grass from the school lawn. And so this gardener was killed. I saw teachers being abused and beaten, and it was absolutely horrible. With the teachers decimated, Mao turns his attention to his envoys of terror themselves, the children. The adults have been purged. Now it's time for the youth to turn on each other. Also one thing that I think made me feel Mao was so unforgivable was that he used the children as victims. All children were put into different categories.

And there were the red, and there were the black, there were the gray. And because my parents were communist officials, I had been regarded from a red category. The children whose families were designated sort of undesirables, were called the blacks. And when the Cultural Revolution started, the reds' children were encouraged to abuse the black and the gray. In one case, I think there was a girl who was deemed to have come from a gray sort of family background, and she was tormented by her fellow pupils and so she jumped from a third floor window. She didn't die but she broke her legs. The next time I saw her she was on crutches but I caught that moment because I was on the campus and of course I was a long distance away and there were trees between us

but I just saw this vague image vague you know body just sort of on the air I can't tell you how much sort of psychological trauma that caused me it's not just teachers and students who are targets for violence anyone or anything associated with art, literature, music, anything with faintly Western cultural influences. It's all fair game. In Mao's eyes, these pernicious aspects of Chinese life need to be ruthlessly exterminated. Pretty soon, China has become a cultural desert. Mao's power over China as a whole is based on his power within the Communist Party. If he reasserts his authority over the Party, then he will be more secure as China's supreme leader.

So, in the fall of 1967, Mao orders his devoted Red Guards to extend their reign of terror to his political opponents. voted Red Guards to extend their reign of terror to his political opponents. The purge of the party unfaithful is Mao's way of settling old scores. The method of surgery was used. You've got to cut out the cancer in order for the body, body politic, to recover. So violence is not simply a means to an end. It's an absolute requirement in any revolutionary situation.

Violence is a definition of revolution. Before punishment is meted out, the enemies of Mao are paraded around town squares with sacks over their heads and boards around their necks, labelling them as traitors. Hundreds of thousands of party officials are sent to labor camps, driven to suicide, or simply murdered on the spot. For many, the only crime they've committed is expressing reservations about their leader. Maoist order in the party is restored. Mao now has the room to move in on his primary target, his second in command, Liu Shaoqi. The man who once dared to stand up to Mao is about to pay the price. It's 1968, and Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, intended to crush the thoughts of all who oppose him, is reaching its endgame.

Mao is well into his eighth decade, but while he may be elderly, he's more determined than ever to hang on to power. The twilight years are often the prime time to take down a dictator. When physical frailty sets in, all those wronged over the years gather to wreak vengeance. Mao is determined to preempt any attempts on his authority or his life. The man in his crosshairs is his own deputy, Liu Shaoqi. Liu is popular within the ruling Communist Party. Mao needs to prepare the ground for this biggest of takedowns.

So the chairman begins a campaign to undermine Liu's credibility. Mao wanted to punish his party enemies, from Liu Shaoqi to party officials. But all the time, he was also trying to be, you know, the good guy. I mean, nobody would have any sympathy for him if he spelled out the real reason why he hated Liu Xiaoqi. So he had to create all sorts of accusations like Liu had been a traitor,

you know, had betrayed the trade unions, betrayed the party, and so on. And also, he still wanted to keep this facade that he was doing something ideologically purer and regarding Liu and the party officials to be pursuing a capitalist road, which was why he could maintain this deception, which was why his portrait could still be on Tiananmen Gate. His corpse could still be in the center of the Chinese capital for people to worship. His face is still on every Chinese banknote because he avoided making the real issue

of the difference between him and Liu and the other party officials, public. The state propaganda machine obediently whirs into action. In a salvo of pamphlets, public statements and newspaper headlines, Liu's reputation is destroyed. Then, like millions of his countrymen and women before him, Liu is publicly accused and assaulted. These people were then subjected to denunciation meetings. Typically, they would be stood on the stage facing hysterical crowds, and their arms were ferociously pulled to the back, and their heads were ferociously pushed down and they were kicked and beaten and tortured and made to kneel on broken glass, being paraded in the streets and then eventually

sent to the camps. Liu endures over a year of torture and humiliation. Only after that, in a prison cell, comes death. But it's no mercy. This final chapter of Liu's life is planned personally by Mao, to be as slow and excruciating as possible. He and his wife are arrested, publicly humiliated. Then Liu Xiaoshi suffers an appalling fate. He was a diabetic by that time, and Mao denies him the right to treatment,

the medicines he could have had. And he said he died lying on a prison cell, lying in his own filth. It's a grim story, because he's a man who, from the long march on, had been Mao's greatest associate, in a way. Mao's depravity is left in no doubt. He demands Liu's slow and painful death is filmed for his personal pleasure.

Crazy, and I mean that not in a loose sense. There are those who argue that had he been examined, you would have found in Mao, as you would in Hitler, say, aspects of personality disorder that might classify him as being clinically disturbed to the point of insanity. Easy to throw in as an idea, not provable. But he is so extreme, and we mentioned earlier, I think, this unwillingness to listen to anybody else, and unwillingness to tell him what he should know. The great leaders become detached from reality.

What he should know, that great leaders become detached from reality. The demise of Liu Shaoqi is a high-water mark of Mao's cultural revolution. It's a revolution that has decimated Mao's rivals, both real and imagined. In all, two million of China's best-educated citizens are murdered. Millions more are sent to labor camps. Far from creating a utopian society, Mao has melded China into a country built on terror and state control. His legacy of needless deaths is so great in number, the exact total may never be known. In the early 1970s,

as he approaches his 80th birthday, Mao's health begins to deteriorate. But he still has energy enough to work the crowds and press the flesh. When he met VSP, we met people like Nixon in 72 and others later, and they said that

he was still very conscious and very alert. Didn't speak easily, but could understand and could respond through interpreters. But that capacity decreases. So the last year of his life, he is often comatose. But again, nobody moves until he's gone. In 1974, Mao is silenced by a degenerative condition. It makes him unintelligible to all but his personal nurse. He lost the power of speech the last two years.

He burbled. And one of the extraordinary details there is, one of his train journeys, he saw a pretty girl out of the window. He called her in and made her one of his girls, one of his harem. And because of her personality and cheekiness, she rises to the top and becomes his confidant. And he'd speak to her, and she would then translate his mumbling, dribbling utterances to officials who'd write it down. So this tea girl, as she began, she's selling tea

on the platform when he first saw her, within four years, five years, she's become the voice of Mao, almost literally. Nonetheless, despite his feebleness, the Communist Party chairman remains untouchable. The fearful discipline he's instilled into his party and his populace means that even though he's become incapable of leading the country, he is still unquestionably number one. All the time, as he is aging through the Koch revolution,

they know he's going to die at some point, we all have to go, and he becomes quite ill. In his last five years, he got very doddery, probably Parkinson's, Alzheimer's. But as long as he was alive and moving, nobody could move against him. Beneath the surface, Mao is ravaged by an increasing sense of paranoia.

He was in power for 27 years and he lived as though he was in a war zone, ready to flee all the time. On the eve of taking power in 1949, his old friend went to see him and was told that Mao would shake like a leaf, as they say, if he set eyes on a stranger. This guy was about to take power in China,

and he was of intense fear. Perhaps it's a psychological punishment for his total lack of empathy for other people's lives. In the Cultural Revolution, you know, Mao had these villas. The security was so incredible. I visited these villas and saw their security. There would be a railway line going into his villa,

and a car would drive Mao into basically a sitting room and the gates on both sides would come down before Mao got out. And he was ready to flee at the drop of a hat. He often slept on his special train, which was parked on the military airport so he could take off anytime there was a danger. He had this intense fear inside him so he never dared to announce Liu Shaoqi's death or his other opponent's death and you know most people would dance on the enemy's grave. But he was in such fear and he wasn't even able to indulge a celebration.

In his final years, Mao cannot avoid the knowledge that his party believes he's failed. But by then, of course, the work has been done. The destructive work has been done. Whether he was happy with it is another matter. When Nixon said to him, what is your great achievement? He said, I have none. Now, whether that's just being self-effacing in interview, I don't know. It's rather poignant in its way. The thing is, you know,

Mao was extremely selfish man. I think that's probably the most single, most important character in him. In his last month, he was very sentimental. He was full of self-pity. He often cried, cried like a fountain. Anything that would remind him of his past glory, like conquering China, would make him cry because he felt he was a failure. He hadn't fulfilled his dream of building China into this military superpower so he could dominate the world.

He didn't feel satisfied. He was full of self-pity. But none of his feelings were for the tragedy he brought for the Chinese population and for the death of well over 70 million Chinese in peacetime. In 1976, the elderly chairman suffers three heart attacks. It's hardly surprising. He's been a chain smoker for much of his life. A few days after the third cardiac arrest, on September the 9th, 1976, after 27 years in power, Mao Zedong, supreme leader of China, dies. The Communist Party marks his passing with hysterical scenes of national mourning.

One million people pay their respects to his embalmed body, on display at the Great Hall of the People, draped in a Communist Party flag. Millions more exhale with relief at the passing of Chairman Mao. In the years after his death, Mao's ideology is almost entirely spurned. Many of those he imprisoned become the country's future leaders, as China embarks on a 40-year flirtation with state-sponsored capitalism. But the chairman's legacy remains a difficult thing to navigate. The imprint of his Cultural Revolution runs deep for a generation raised on nothing but Maoism.

Though a sadist and a despot, today his portrait remains everywhere. The legacy of course one still debates. Many Chinese today say the reason why we have great industrial growth but we lack culture is because we destroyed it 30, 40 years ago, and we're only now piecing it together. And we're still run by a communist party, which technically still honor the name of Mao. They may have reversed his policy, but he's still never been destroyed in the way that Stalin was destroyed in the Soviet.

So what Mao began is one of his greatest legacies, the Cultural Revolution. And it's a destructive legacy. That's the great tragedy. Mao is the man who united China under a central government and modernised its economy, but killed unthinkable numbers of his own people in the process. Various estimates are still being produced about the number of deaths in Mao's time. I mean, customarily we say that in the league tables of horror,

he comes top, then Stalin, and then Hitler. Pol Pot's the worst in terms of proportion, because he killed a quarter of the Cambodian population. But Mao's record is pretty grim. Exact figures we can never have. I mean, I've seen 40 million quoted and justified. I've seen 20 million on a more conservative estimate. Somewhere between those two, you might say, would be the reasonable conclusion.

But I don't think it's the numbers in the end. It's the fact that so many of those deaths were avoidable. He's inescapably central to the history of the world's most populous country. But for those who suffered under Mao's reign of terror and escaped it, any attempt to qualify his cruelty or rehabilitate his image in any way is a total non-starter. More than 40 years on from his death, he still looms large in the Chinese collective psyche. Mao didn't try to build a nation. I mean, Mao destroyed a nation. He still looms large, the destructor. I mean, he said so himself.

Mao was in the league of Hitler and Stalin. Next time on Real Dictators. In 1945, a young American trained doctor touches down on the tarmac. He's home. Haiti is where he was born and bred. His name is Francois Duvalier. He will become better known by his nickname, Papa Doc. In a few short years, Papa Doc will have used modern medicine to fool the people of this tropical Caribbean nation

into believing that he is a voodoo god. He'll become the bloodiest dictator the country has ever seen, and a constant thorn in the side of the United States and its allies. We'll tell you the story of how he did it. That's next time on Real Dictators. Real Dictators is presented by me, Paul McGann. The show is created by Pascal Hughes, produced by Joel Doudel, edited by James Tyndale and Katrina Hughes. The music was composed or assembled by Oliver Baines from Flight Brigade.

The strings were recorded by Dory McCauley. The sound mixer is Tom Pink. The sound recordist is Robbie Stamm. Real Dictators is a Noiser and World Media Rights co-production. If you haven't already, we'd love you to follow us wherever you listen to your favourite shows or check us out at realdictators.com.