About a decade ago during a visit to Phnom Penh, a colleague invited me to dine at a North Korean restaurant he often visited during his trips to the capital of Cambodia. Beautiful young North Korean women danced and expertly played musical instruments on a stage, while others served traditional dishes to the (almost exclusively) male audience. I asked my friend what would become of these women. He sullenly replied they would likely become mistresses for DPRK party officials. The restaurant, a violation of UN sanctions that ban North Koreans from working abroad (thus funneling money to the nation’s weapons programs), is now closed.
Forced labor, sexual exploitation, violation of international law—all these evils, and many more, are not the specialty of just the pariah state of the Democratic Republic of North Korea but also of the People’s Republic of China, which props up both North Korea and Cambodia, a notorious human rights violator. As Steven W. Mosher argues in The Devil and Communist China: From Mao Down to Xi, one man in particular deserves the blame for all this: Mao Zedong. How this happened over the latter half of the 20th century is a riveting (and terrible) narrative, and one that more Americans should have at least some passing knowledge of.
A Sinologist, the first American social scientist to visit mainland China, and a “practicing, pro-life Roman Catholic,” Mosher has been writing on China for decades, including the recent and very accessible Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream Is the New Threat to World Order. The objective of The Devil and Communist China is a bit more ambitious than persuading an already chastened world of the many evils of the present-day People’s Republic of China. “This book is, above all, a cautionary tale about the evil that awaits us if we abandon God and embrace evil.”
Mosher’s book is divided into four parts. The first section presents a brief history of China focused particularly on the 20th century; the second offers a harrowing biography of the monstrous villainy of Mao Zedong; the third explains how Mao spread his sociopolitical vision across East Asia; and the fourth describes how Mao’s successors in China have continued many of his dehumanizing policies.
“Communism—the pernicious idea that man could create his own heaven on earth—is, quite simply, the most deadly idea ever conceived in the history of the world,” writes Mosher. “It is no exaggeration to say that this misbegotten faith, once it came to power, has killed more people than any war, famine, or pestilence in human history.” There’s little to argue with there—Mosher cites the 1997 book The Black Book of Communism, which estimates that 20th-century communism was responsible for almost 100 million deaths, not only in China, but also in the USSR, North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Eastern Europe. If one adds abortions to that tally—given the aggressive population-control efforts of many of these regimes—that number skyrockets to almost 500 million.
How did this happen? Mosher argues that communism was effective in China because it appropriated an ancient political school called Legalism, which encouraged the suppression of voluntary associations, the establishment of informer networks, an emphasis on harsh (often collective) punishment for violations and few if any rewards, and mutual surveillance. Chairman Mao blended this ancient Chinese Legalist tradition with communism to create an especially effective means of centralized political control, with himself at the center of an emperor-like personality cult. “Resonance with dynastic China’s Confucian beliefs and imperial traditions helped to make Communism and its leaders acceptable,” writes Mosher.
And talk about a personality cult! Mao compared himself to the greatest emperors of Chinese history, as well as to Genghis Khan for good measure. “Only today is a True Hero present,” Mao asserted, referring to himself. The preeminent leader of the CCP, born to humble peasant farmers, believed himself the source and definition of morality: “There are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me.”
Mao’s character was undoubtedly of a sui generis degree of fiendishness, whether we are talking about his narcissistic self-worship, avarice (enjoying opulent personal estates and sumptuous feasts wherever he traveled in China), lust (coercively bedding countless young women), or bloodthirst. Over the course of his career, he betrayed many of his closest associates and cunningly outmaneuvered other communist leaders whom he tricked into using their military forces as cannon fodder in the decades-long civil war with Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists. Mao’s men typically (and strategically) stood on the sidelines. Even more incredibly, the Chinese army that poured over the Yalu River in 1950 to overwhelm U.S. and South Korean forces was not, strictly speaking, communist but composed largely of former soldiers of Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist army who had previously surrendered to the communists.
“Deaths have benefits. They fertilize the ground,” Mao callously declared. And so they did: Approximately 45 million Chinese citizens perished because of the Great Leap Forward, China’s attempt beginning in 1958 to shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy. The Cultural Revolution, Mao’s program to weed out political enemies, killed millions more. And unlike Hitler, who demonstrated a certain personal sheepishness toward the millions of deaths he ordered, Mao was personally present for many executions, even of former friends.
Mao’s ideological influence extended far beyond China to North Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia, where he propped up brutal communist regimes that killed millions in their own right. Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, and Pol Pot all implemented the same deadly tactics they had learned from Mao: irresponsible land-reform campaigns, industrial-scale summary executions, prison camps, and forced sterilizations and abortions.
And, though less murderous than Mao, such CCP successors as Deng Xiaoping, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping have certainly done little to reverse the totalitarian tendencies of Mao’s attempts to “modernize” China. Coercive control over people’s family planning, the persecution or co-opting of religious groups, and the suppression (or disappearing) of political dissidents are all integral components of contemporary China’s police state. As prominent Chinese Catholics such as Cardinal Joseph Zen have warned for years, recent claims that Beijing is interested in rapprochement with Rome have done little besides further empower the CCP’s dominance over Catholics. “Sinicization means that all religious communities should be led by the Party, controlled by the Party, and support the Party,” Xi has proclaimed. Indeed, Xi seems particularly adept at exploiting his chairmanship to further consolidate power in his person, whether it is his cunning leverage of anti-corruption campaigns to defeat his political enemies or his maneuvering and constant purging to dominate the country’s military and economy.
All this Mosher describes with the clarity and confidence of a respected Sinologist, though the minimal treatment given to the state campaign to suppress the Uighurs, China’s ethnic-Turkic, Muslim minority population, or the crackdown of democracy activists in Hong Kong—including such Christians as newspaperman and entrepreneur Jimmy Lai—was surprising. Given his extensive expertise, it is curious then that, when it comes to quoting Mao Zedong, Mosher relies not on books but on the less-than-reputable aggregator website “AZ Quotes.” Moreover, the book could have used more aggressive editing: Mosher repeats many of Mao’s quotations so many times—such as “power comes out of the barrel of a gun”—that they lose the intended rhetorical force.
This hints at more significant problems, such as the book’s structure and broader objective. Mosher notes that Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto lists exactly 10 communist commandments, all of them having to do with property, work, and education. He then devotes the entire second part of his book to describing how Mao violated the biblical Ten Commandments. Responding to “those who say it is unfair to judge Mao against commandments that he was never formally taught,” Mosher responds that the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that these edicts are engraved on every human heart. Such arguments are unlikely to appeal to anyone except those who already view the catechism as an authority, and colors Mosher’s otherwise excellent description of the many atrocities committed by Mao.
It would be one thing if Mosher were seeking to carefully and winsomely persuade non-Catholics (or non-Christians) that Mao’s communist China was especially evil because of how antithetical its ideology is to the goodness, truth, and beauty found in Catholic teaching. But Mosher never does this; he simply presumes his readers will agree with him that this is the case. The effect of this is jarring, even for a conservative Catholic reader who would be naturally sympathetic to Mosher’s arguments. “As Lucifer rejected God’s headship, so Mao angrily rejected his earth father’s headship and became a law unto himself,” he writes. Does rejecting the authority of one’s father necessarily demand a comparison to Satan?
The suggestion of possible demonic influence stems from the fact that Mao’s mother took her infant son to a local haunted rock formation (also called a monolith) to seek the protection of the resident spirit. She then rechristened Mao Shi san ya-zi, “The Third Son of the Monolith.” Mosher claims that the Third Son of the Monolith “certainly behaved as though he was at least ‘infested’ with an unholy spirit that was constantly goading him to evil” and further muses that “one can almost hear Satan screeching that ‘Mao Zedong is “stone,” and upon this “stone” I will build a demonic temple of horrors.’” Describing Mao’s nickname as a Satanic-devised inversion of Christ’s renaming Simon as Peter in Matthew 16:18 is a tenuous claim, to say the least.
Admittedly, it would be difficult for any author to coherently place the story of Mao and his influence across Asia within a meaningful Christian context, given that Mao wasn’t Christian, nor was the China he dictatorially governed. But Mosher’s attempts to do this come off as little more than haphazard Catholic window-dressing. As an example: At the end of an otherwise informative introductory chapter, Mosher abruptly shifts to a brief aside on Scripture and the teachings of Christ. At the end of one of the chapters on Mao, he abruptly declares: “Evil is an unpleasant reality, but Christians can grow in virtue by confronting it,” citing Romans 12:21. Again, after a summary of communism’s evils, the book ends with a call to “echo Mary’s fiat in our own lives, throne Jesus in our hearts, and live out the Father’s commandments while we are on earth.”
The effect of all this is certainly distracting, but it also undermines the argument for the unconverted. What non-Christian reading this book would be persuaded to follow Christ based on such slipshod assertions? The syllogism, if it can be crudely summarized, seems to be something like this: Communism was incredibly, atrociously evil; communism’s ideological anthesis is Christianity; therefore, Christianity is true and worthy of our adherence. I can’t think of any non-Christian I know who would be remotely convinced by such an “argument.”
In that respect, The Devil and Communist China is somewhat analogous to its inspiration, Paul Kengor’s 2020 book The Devil and Karl Marx. In that book, Kengor, among other things, persuasively argues that Karl Marx was an atrociously wicked, self-centered man who abused and neglected his family for the sake of his career and legacy. Yet Kengor frames his argument within an explicitly Catholic, belligerently anti-Marxist narrative that is likely to alienate all but a certain brand of politically conservative Catholic already inclined to agree with him.
This is unfortunate, since both Kengor and Mosher are well-read and thoughtful academics who have important, fascinating, and compelling stories to tell about Marx and Mao. Both of their books are filled with valuable insights about two of the most influential figures of the past century. But both texts suffer from a type of narrow point-scoring that, while arming some of their fellow travelers with anti-PRC talking points (however much such things are even necessary) seems unlikely to convince the many millions of secularized Americans who are indifferent if not increasingly antagonistic toward organized religion in general and Catholicism in particular. Was Mao influenced by the devil? It’s certainly possible. Whether many Americans care is a more urgent question.
