1. Mao Zedong
People’s Republic of China
Years in Power: 1945-1976
Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, was the founder of the modern-day People’s Republic of China in 1949. Immediately after taking power, he introduced land reforms in which numerous landlords were beaten to death and launched the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries in which rebels were executed or sent to labor camps. He also launched the three-anti and five-anti campaigns to target capitalists, and potential victims were so fearful of punishment that there were hundreds of thousands of suicides. However, this was just the beginning. The Hundred Flowers Campaign followed, in which the government encouraged political freedom, only to revoke their words and crack down hard on dissidents. Next was the Great Leap Forward from 1958-61, in which the government allotted grain targets to various provinces which they were not able to meet, as a result of which officials shipped all the grains away, leading to famine on an enormous scale. The last most important event of his rule was the decade-long Cultural Revolution, which was an attempt to revive the political spirit that had led to the formation of the country. Instead, it led to widespread killings, persecution, and elevation of Mao to godlike status, and ended only when Mao died in 1976.
Mao might not have had a direct hand in a significant percentage of deaths during his rule, but he did little to prevent the moral chaos and innumerable loss of lives, and his policies are undoubtedly the reasons behind the massacres during that period. This inevitably puts him at number 1 on our list of the 10 most evil and hated dictators of all time.
