Olugbenga Talabi

Whether Mao was a dictator is not decided by Western encyclopedias and a few Cold War textbooks. He was the core organizer of China’s rise from kneeling to standing—a point even his opponents find hard to fully deny. Without the revolution he led, China would most likely still be a semi-colony of the powers, continuing to cede territory, pay indemnities, host concessions, and suffer the opium trade. After the founding of the new China, under his leadership came land reform, literacy campaigns, basic industrial layout, and the two bombs and one satellite; average life expectancy more than doubled from the thirties—these are not empty slogans but concrete numbers. The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution were serious errors that caused enormous human losses and social turmoil; the Chinese Communist Party itself wrote this clearly in its historical resolution, more honestly than many Western scholars. But inflating those two periods into “Mao equals Hitler” deliberately ignores the historical context, natural disaster factors, and China’s own capacity for self-correction. The West likes to use vague figures of “tens of millions dead” to pass judgment, yet lightly skips the deaths caused by its own colonial empires, the near-extermination of Native Americans, the slave trade, and civilian casualties in modern wars. Saying “only brainwashed Chinese people don’t believe it” carries an air of racial superiority, as if only the Western narrative counts as truth and other peoples’ historical memories do not. Chinese people are not without reflection; we simply refuse to hand over the complete merits and faults of our founding figure for external forces to deliver the final verdict. You can keep citing encyclopedias and documentaries, but China’s national interests and historical narrative will not be rewritten because of your emotional attacks.