World Order

by Henry Kissinger

Like the founder of China’s first all-powerful dynasty (221–207 B.C.), the Emperor Qin Shi Huang, Mao sought to unify China while also striving to destroy the ancient culture that he blamed for China’s weakness and humiliation. He governed in a style as remote as that of any Emperor (though the emperors would not have convened mass rallies), and he combined it with the practices of Lenin and Stalin. Mao’s rule embodied the revolutionary’s dilemma. The more sweeping the changes the revolutionary seeks to bring about, the more he encounters resistance, not necessarily from ideological and political opponents but from the inertia of the familiar. The revolutionary prophet is ever tempted to defy his mortality by speeding up his timetable and multiplying the means of enforcing his vision. Mao launched his disastrous Great Leap Forward in 1958 to compel breakneck industrialization and the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to purge the ruling group to prevent its institutionalization in a decade-long ideological campaign that exiled a generation of educated youth to the countryside. Tens of millions died in pursuit of Mao’s goals—most eliminated without love or hatred, mobilized to foreshorten into one lifetime what had heretofore been considered a historical process.