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Sorry, the Chinese DID boil babies to make fertiliser (Yes, for once,(Daily Mail Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)THE most frightening thing I ever read when young was written by Rudyard Kipling, about the Chinese quarter of Penang: 'I saw cold boiled babies on a plate being carried through the heart of town. They said it was only sucking-pig but I know better. Dead sucking-pig don't grin with their eyes open.' I consoled myself with the thought that it was just fantasy, like the witch in the fairy tale who used to have boiled babies for supper. But not any longer. None other than the Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, has told a rally of his Forza Italia party in Naples that communists boiled babies. 'Read the Black Book on Communism,' he declared, ' and you'll discover that under Mao the Chinese don't eat babies. They boiled them to fertilise the fields.' Italian elections are imminent and Mr Berlusconi is lagging behind his rival Romano Prodi, a former Christian Democrat, who threw in his lot with former communists when they transformed themselves into the Democratic Party of the Left. He could be accused, not for the first time, of creating controversy to put himself in the public eye. But he has stood by his words, calling them historical facts, and 'it is not possible that we cannot speak about facts'. But are they facts? Could the Chinese, even under Chairman Mao, have been capable of such unbelievable, lunatic atrocity? Communism will probably always be recognised as the most murderous political system ever invented because it had the means and the manpower to starve or otherwise murder unprecedented numbers of people. Lenin and Stalin between them were responsible for the deaths of at least 50 million Soviet men, women and children. Under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, two million people were killed - a devastating proportion of the small country's population. Mengistu and his Marxist tribunes in Ethiopia, after overthrowing Emperor Haile Selassie, killed millions more. YET put all those deaths together, and they still amount to fewer than one man in China achieved. Nearly 75 million people died as a direct result of a communism so radical that it turned into an unthinking, unfeeling, mass-murdering machine. Mao's atrocities were numberless. In 1950, within a year of gaining absolute power in China, he instituted a wave of terror against 'landlords' which in 12 months led to the deaths of three million people by execution, mob violence or suicide. At rallies, people were shot in the head wholesale and the trucks carrying away their corpses dripped blood. Officials were persuaded to step up Mao's campaign against 'embezzlers' by having their testicles crushed in bamboo pliers. In Shanghai, so many people jumped from skyscrapers that they acquired the nickname ' parachutes'. They jumped into the street rather than in the nearby river which might carry them away, because if the officials did not have a corpse they would accuse the suicides of having escaped to Hong Kong and their families would suffer. During the Great Leap Forward, when Mao needed money to make China a nuclear power, he seized the peasants' crops to sell abroad. 'Half of China may well have to die,' he declared. It very nearly did. Famine was so widespread that whole villages died of blocked intestines as a result of desperately eating earth. The communist cadres had to stop peasants 'stealing' their own harvest, and punished offenders by cutting off their noses, burying them alive or strangling them. In one village, two children who tried to steal food had wires run through their ears and were hung up by the wire from a wall. It was to this time, in 1959-60, that Silvio Berlusconi's comments apply. While the state granaries were bulging with food, the Chinese people were literally crazed with hunger. One county in Anhui province recorded 63 cases of cannibalism in the spring of 1960 alone. In a region of central China, where one-third of the population died, one old man, the sole survivor of his family, told journalists, 'So many people in the village have eaten human flesh See those people squatting outside the commune office, sunning themselves? Some of them ate human flesh.' Baby killing was frequent: it was one mouth fewer to feed. And was it right that so much potentially nutritious food should be buried and go to waste when it could keep other members of the family alive? The author Jung Chang, who was eight at the time, writes in her autobiography Wild Swans about the three-year-old daughter of her aunt's neighbour, who went missing: 'A few weeks later, the neighbour saw a young girl playing in the street wearing a dress that looked like her daughter's. She went up and examined it: it had a mark which identified it as her daughters. She reported this to the police. It turned out that the parents of the young girl were selling wind-dried meat. They had abducted and murdered a number of babies and sold them as rabbit meat at exorbitant prices.' The couple were executed and the case was hushed up, as were almost all the cases of cannibalism at the time. In that year, 1960, 22 million people died of hunger. As Jung Chang and Jon Halliday write in their biography of Mao, this was the largest number in one year, in any country, in the history of the world. public demonstrations to show a terrified population the sort of torture they could expect if they opposed the regime. Cannibalism broke out again: country people made 'human flesh banquets' of people who had been executed. After victims were slaughtered, choice parts of their bodies, hearts, livers and sometimes penises, were cut off, often before the victims were dead, and cooked on the spot. Mao died 30 years ago, but his communist legacy of absolute control by the state, and a corresponding submission to its diktats, lived on. Five years ago, a TV documentary, The Dying Room, highlighted a situation in China which was wholly Maoist in its cold, brutal efficiency - the effects of a State edict that permitted only one child in every family. The reason for the policy, instituted in 1979 after Mao's death, was to prevent a population explosion. But the consequences were grim. If the mother gave birth to a male child, it could bring money into the family; if she produced a girl, that chance was lost. All over China, girl babies were killed or left to perish: the film showed a room in a state-run orphanage in which rows of abandoned female babies were simply left to die. Villagers were visited at random and their methods of contraception checked. Parents hid away from 'child-catchers' - officials sent to enforce the one-child rule. In 2000 this newspaper reported the case of one mother, on her third pregnancy, who was forcibly injected with a saline solution in an attempt to kill the baby in her womb. The boy survived, but when his mother returned from hospital, five officials wrenched the baby from his mother's arms, took him to a nearby rice-field and drowned him. Children were deliberately starved or frozen to death. Across the country terrible scenes were played out as mothers had their newborn babies plucked out of their arms, and hospital nurses were forced to kill the new-born. As recently as 2000, administering a lethal injection of iodine into a baby's skull as it emerges during childbirth was classed as a legal abortion. In 2000, the senior commander of a military hospital in the province of Guangdong told a Western reporter over a cup of tea that 400 babies a year were given such injections. The policy has reportedly been relaxed. Some of the orphanages have been cleaned up and a more effective adoption system is under way. But the enforcement of this policy has been a legacy of Mao's dictatorship in which people were dehumanised and every citizen turned against his neighbour - and starvation was such that, as Silvio Berlusconi suggested, even babies were killed and eaten. That legacy of the most extreme of the communist dictators has left a spiritual emptiness in the Chinese people which may take generations to eradicate. |