In the list of the biggest mass murders in human history:
1.) Joseph Stalin, Communist, Soviet Union, 1929-1953, 42,672,000
2.) Mao Tse-tung, Communist, China, 1923-1976, 37,828,000
3.) Adolf Hitler, Fascist, Germany, 1933-1945, 20,946,000
4.) Chiang Kai-shek, Militarist/Fascist, China, 1921-1948, 10,214,000
The few thousand or ten thousand he killed in Taiwan could not really help him to get a better rank. Hitler was just one number to big for him. But at least Chiang –Kai – shek could die peacefully and wealthy, knowing his son would do a good job.
He receives congratulations in every local Memorial Hall (but he dislikes Democracy Memorial Halls).
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1 year ago
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Can you detail for me a little about how you came up with this high number for Chiang Kai Shek.
I am not a fan or enemy of his so I have no real vested interest in defending him; I am just surprised the number is so large and would like to learn more.
Thanks,
The numbers are for civilian victims in democides (the sum of genocides, political murders, …), so soldiers killed in wars are not included.
The numbers are quite conservative, rooting in publications in the late 80th and early nineties. If you google for words like mass murder or democide in combination with relevant names, you will get a number of results.
There have been discussions about this numbers, leading to usually higher estimations for the number of victims especially in the case of Mao (up to the order of 70 million) in newer publications, while the numbers for Hitler (20-21 Million) and Chiang Kai-shek (about 10 Million) are in most publications up to 0,5 Million the same.
So even if the exact numbers are wrong, there is no doubt that the number of victims of Chiang Kai-shek is in the order of millions.
Included in this numbers are for example the victims of the opening of the yellow river dykes (depending on the sources about 0,5 to 1 Million). Actually he killed much more people during his fight against the Japanese, than the Japanese did.
Just have a look and you will find lots of publications. I think the number 10 million was the estimation used in my history textbook long time ago in Germany.
If you have the chance, you should try to compare publications in different languages, for example Mandarin, English, German and French.
German texts are usually very sensible for any little tendency to a dictatorship (which might in English publications be understood as necessary for the greater good) and what is called an incident in political correct English is often named a massacre in German (as a result of German history).
On the other hand some Taiwanese people like to glorify Chiang Kai-shek as the big hero against the bad communists and bad Japanese.
A lot of people do not know the history of the KMT. For example that it was once a Leninist party until CKS changed in his raise to power to a fascistic regime and that its leaders were educated in the Soviet Union (later killed by CKS like other people between him and the way to total power).
Karl Marx, the great German philosopher, one of the fundaments of Sun Yat-sen’s KMT (Leninism and the 3. Principle: State Socialism) became forbidden until short time ago.
This is interesting, as he was teached during decades of cold war in West German schools and universities and even in the western part of the divided Berlin streets have been named after him.
So someone might argue, that actually Chiang Kai-shek was himself the KMT and abolished all its former ideology to have a better control over country and party and not to fight the communist party.
The modern KMT has nothing to do with its roots, but is just a product of a death dictator, a cult. The memorial hall is in some way a proof of it. (There is some parallel to the Lenin mausoleum in Moscow.)
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