With offense being taken by Beijing at the reaction by soccer player Kylian Mbappé to a meme depicting Mao (or as, he put it, “a Chinese dictator,”) I thought I’d dust off this article I wrote in 2008. It was written after I had seen an exhibition of art from China’s Cultural Revolution in New York City, an exhibition that made clear that “dictator” was too mild a word to describe the nature of Mao’s role. Here are a couple of extracts:

With so much cruelty to choose from, it’s difficult to identify the moment when Mao’s long despotism reached its appalling nadir, but there is something about the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that makes, to use the official euphemism, its “ten-year turbulence” (roughly 1966–76) a repulsively unique period in Chinese history. Far fewer perished (perhaps somewhere between 500,000 and a million; others reckon far more) than in the course of some of Communist China’s earlier horrors, but the scale of its ambitions were more total, and their implications more sinister, than anything seen before or (outside the Khmer Rouge’s copycat Kampuchea) since. Yes, it’s true that the early years of the Soviet revolution were marked by a similar belief that the very essence of man could be refashioned, but, with the exception of the onslaught against religion, the attempts of the Bolshevik intelligentsia to turn millennial delusion into quotidian reality did not survive the ascendancy of Stalin, a cynic who saw a return to cultural conservatism as a way of buttressing his power. The no-less-cynical Mao took the opposite tack, inciting a revolution from below (“bombard the headquarters”) to eliminate any possible opposition within a leadership increasingly concerned that the Great Helmsman was steering their regime onto the rocks. To the tough Communist apparatchiks at the top of the Chinese party, a charnel-house was, within limits, perfectly acceptable; a mad house was not. Mao appealed over their heads to the educated and semi-educated young with a........

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