Reinvigorating Mao.

ITEM: "After three decades of free-market economic reforms, China's leaders are re-emphasizing the study of Marxism and urging ruling party members not to turn their back on the communist ideology that's guided the nation since Mao Zedong's day," reports the Knight Ridder Service in the (Vermont) Times Argus for February 26.

ITEM: The San Francisco Chronicle for February 26 reported: "Thirty years after Mao Zedong 's death, Mao kitsch is the new cool, and young men are wearing Mao T-shirts as a sure way of getting admiring looks from young women. 'I think it shows the man is thinking, questioning Mao and China,' said a 19-year-old woman who asked to be identified as Lu. 'Our generation did not see Mao, so we have to make up our own image of him.' " Communist authorities, acknowledged the Chronicle account, "have never allowed an honest appraisal of Mao 's legacy, and the latest biography, 'Mao: The Unknown Story,' by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, has been banned in China. Without knowing much about Mao's rule, and in the face of unbending propaganda from the Communist Party, many Chinese still venerate Mao."

ITEM: Reuters reported on March 16, "Doing good deeds, volunteering on building sites and obtaining Chairman Mao's autograph are some of the objectives of 'Learn from Lei Feng,' a new online game starring the Chinese Communist Party's legendary hero. The plot revolves around Lei Feng, a humble, selfless People's Liberation Army soldier." The developer of the game said it "was aimed at providing students with the tools to learn the pleasures of helping others, [official state agency] Xinhua said."

CORRECTION: The actual legacy of Mao Tse-tung, the former dictator of Communist China, is so horrific that it is truly astonishing to see it applauded or to have his criminal record minimized or, perhaps worse, treated as a joke.

Simply calling him a mass murderer hardly does Mao justice. Over decades, he and his communist followers and cronies triggered an appalling amount of agony and grief, causing the deaths of nearly one in every 20 Chinese men, women, and children. The Chinese communists also attempted to control the personal beliefs of hundreds of millions of Chinese by, among other actions, running the largest prison system of all time and perpetrating history's greatest famine. Fear, torture, and brainwashing became the stock in trade of Mao's China. Children were recruited to inform on their parents and each other to the police state. Legions of brainwashed youths joined the Red Guard, a group that persecuted anyone accused, or suspected, of having pro-capitalist or anti-Mao views.

A former Red Guard named Wei Jingsheng wrote about the period called the Great Leap Forward when Mao's policies led to excruciating suffering, and famine brought many to the point of cannibalism. As the Red Guard recalled: "I understood what a butcher he had been, the man 'whose like humanity has not seen in several centuries, and China not in several thousand years': Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong and his henchmen, with their criminal political system, had driven parents mad with hunger and led them to hand their own children over to others, and to receive the flesh of others to appease their own hunger."

Revelations in recent biography

The Mao "kitsch" affectation said to be growing in popularity is particularly incongruous since the chairman even attempted to banish humor where he held sway. The new book Mao: The Unknown Story, for instance, describes a period when Mao not only "banned irony and satire" but also invented a new crime termed "Speaking Weird Words." This offense was a catch-all phrase under which everything "from skepticism to complaining to simply wise-cracking could lead to being labeled a spy."

The "legendary" Lei Feng, the "hero" of the online game referred to by Reuters, is also alluded to in the new book. The authors note that the soldier called Lei Feng was created as a role model for the Chinese public in 1963 after he was "safely dead." After Feng's death, Chinese prop agandists "unearthed" his diary, which told of the joy Feng gained through giving complete loyalty to the Communist Party and through doing everything in his meager power to help the Party: darning socks, washing his comrades' feet, and serving food and tea, etc. In his supposed diary, Lei Feng also "allegedly recorded how he was inspired by Mao to do good deeds, and swore that for Mao he was ready to 'go up mountains of knives and down into seas of flames.'" The authors also point out that Lei Feng was used as a propaganda tool to help demonize their alleged enemies and concentrate their own power: "Apart from symbolising total loyalty to Mao, soldier Lei Feng exemplified another vital point: the idea that hate was good, which was drilled into the population, especially the young." While the book has its flaws, Mao: The Untold Story does demolish many trumped-up tales propagated about Mao and his comrades.

Behind the propaganda facade

During Word War II, Mao expressed hopes that China would be carved up by the Soviets and Japanese, as Poland had been by the Soviets and Nazis. Indeed, Mao's outright collaboration with Japanese intelligence is also detailed, showing how he stabbed Chiang Kai-shek in the back while the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang were fighting the invaders from Japan.

Though these disclosures don't fit postwar revisionism in Beijing (and in many liberal Western circles), such revelations are edifying. "Mao ... did not see himself on the same side as Chiang at all. Years later, he was to say to his inner circle that he had regarded the war as a three-sided affair. 'Chiang, Japan and us--Three Kingdoms.'" The war became a way to destroy Chiang.

After World War II, some Japanese visitors apologized to Mao for Japan's invasion of China. As the authors recount, Mao "told them: 'I would rather thank the Japanese warlords.' Without them occupying much of China, 'we [the communists] would still be in the mountains today.' He meant every word."