China’s increasingly shrill and desperate efforts to prove itself tough and fearless against President Donald Trump’s tariffs hit a new low on Thursday, when Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning decided to post old footage of Mao Zedong, the founder of the Chinese Communist Party – and the worst mass murderer in history.
Mao Ning’s tone-deaf decision to post 72-year-old footage of Mao declaring his determination to “fight” until we “completely triumph” against President Eisenhower illustrates how badly the Communist elite has sunk into the revisionist history pushed by the ruling Party.
No sane person on Earth, outside of the Communist elite, thinks Mao is an admirable model of leadership. Germany might as well have run some old footage of Hitler to declare its opposition to Trump’s tariffs.
We are Chinese. We are not afraid of provocations. We don’t back down. 🇨🇳 pic.twitter.com/vPgifasYmI
— Mao Ning 毛宁 (@SpoxCHN_MaoNing) April 10, 2025
Of course, Chinese Communist apparatchiks are not taught to be ashamed of Mao’s mountain of corpses, or his economic policies, which inadvertently starved almost as many people as Mao killed on purpose.
Mao’s deadly “Great Leap Forward” began about five years after he gave the speech posted by Mao Ning. The Chinese leader established a system of communal agriculture and rigid ideological conformity that comprehensively failed to feed the swelling postwar Chinese population.
Mao thought it would be a good idea to literally melt down advanced farming equipment and slaughter draft animals so that agriculture would become more dependent upon human labor. Karl Marx grumbled about giving control of the means of production to workers. Mao destroyed the means of production, so nobody would own anything. Bending swords into plowshares may bring peace, but melting tractors down into plowshares brings starvation.
Among the many reasons why deliberately primitivizing a workforce is a bad idea is that the economic system has no ability to absorb unforeseen setbacks or calamities. China has a long history of droughts and floods, which continues to this day. When droughts and floods hit Mao’s communist agricultural system, the corpses really started to pile up – and when brave Chinese dissidents spoke out against the Great Leap Forward, the corpse mountain grew higher.
The higher-end estimates say Mao killed 55 million people, while the median estimate from histories is about 30 million.
As they would later demonstrate during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party is not great about keeping records of its cataclysmic failures or helping international investigators determine the truth.
File/USSR premier Nikita KHRUSHCHEV and Mao ZEDONG, leader of the People’s Republic of China, dining together in a relaxed atmosphere in 1959. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)
China’s failure to deal honestly with the horrific legacy of Mao Zedong, like its refusal to look squarely at the monstrous evil of Tiananmen Square, should repel decent people around the world.
China’s current dictator, Xi Jinping, has worked to erase the legacy of his predecessor Deng Xiaoping and establish himself as the most important in Chinese Communist history, second only to Mao – and maybe not even second to Mao. Deng was the leader who revolutionized China’s economy by industrializing and “opening up” to the West.
Deng’s old quotes about “opening up” are heard with growing frequency in modern China and the Chinese people made a folk hero out of the last great disciple of Deng, former premier Li Keqiang. Li supposedly died of a sudden heart attack in 2023 at the relatively young age of 63, but some Chinese believe Xi had him eliminated because a political counter-culture was forming around him.
If the message Mao Ning wanted to send is that her tyrannical government is ready to impoverish or kill an unlimited number of Chinese people to protect the unfair trade practices that made Communist mandarins rich, then she picked the right poster boy.
If China really wants to attract allies for its trade-war showdown with the United States, it was foolish of her to remind the world of the true nature of the Chinese Communist Party. She would have been better advised to use a clip of Deng Xiaoping, or maybe Li Keqiang – but that would have been an unthinkable insult to Xi Jinping’s vanity. If she wanted to show an example of courage and defiance, she could have used the courageous Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters of 2019, but that would have gotten her shipped off to a re-education camp.
