Mao Tse Tung was transforming China—the lives of five hundred million Chinese and their way of thinking. His aim was to produce a society which would be a model for all communist countries. He put an end to chaos, squalor and corruption. The cost of this transformation, in human terms, was no doubt high but no one had an inkling of this in the 1950s. It is only now we know that Mao was responsible for the murder of seventy million Chinese. One could, as a detached observer, complete an entire encyclopaedia of suffering under Mao.
