Had Mao Tse-Tung never become involved in politics, he would today be remembered as one of the greatest Chinese poets of the twentieth century. His deft use of words enabled him to shape the thoughts of a crowd, a party, a nation. Despite his heavy regional (Hunanese) accent, his eloquence in speech and writing overcame all obstacles on the road to power. But it was his own overestimation of this very gift, and the passions it engendered, which contributed to some of the most disastrous errors of his regime. In a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare himself, a man too resolute brought famine and misery upon his kingdom.

Mao's government deliberately killed and otherwise destroyed millions of perceived enemies; the "Cultural Revolution" of 1966-1976 represented the culmination of these excesses. However, as is now coming to light, his regime likely killed a comparable number of its citizens entirely by accident, in the course of a "Great Leap Forward" (a name which Orwell, unfortunately, did not live to see). While the Cultural Revolution was primarily a product of Mao's megalomania and the poisonous, evil character of absolute power, the Great Leap Forward stemmed from a genuine mistake on the part of its protagonist. Having discovered in himself an unmatched ability to shape the human mind and spirit, the chairman mistook this for an ability to control the forces of nature through sheer will and inspiration. To understand how he came to this error, we must recount how Mao had achieved the kind of authority which engendered his legacy of famine, pestilence, brutality, and murder.

Mao's story had been one of nearly uninterrupted rise for two decades until the Communist victory in 1949. A regional Party leader of the Jiangxi Soviet, he played host to the national Communist leadership during the early 1930s; lest this be mistaken for a position of great authority, let the reader recall the relative unimportance of the mayoralty of Washington. As Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalists tightened their stranglehold on Jiangxi, Mao and the Party leadership made a daring escape, bursting through a breach in the Nationalist armies with 100,000 soldiers. These warriors marched thousands of miles in search of safety, evading the forces of Nationalists, warlords, and aboriginal peoples en route; only a few thousand survived these assaults and the brutal terrain over which they sweated, froze, and starved.

This "Long March" greatly reduced the distinctions embodied in the Party hierarchy, enabling Mao Tse-Tung to seize the reigns of power with his elegant speech and his sheer charisma. Having secured control of the Communist movement and its new headquarters at Yenan, deep in the interior of China, the chairman showed remarkable guile in protecting his dominions from Japanese and Nationalist assaults. A committed disciple of Sun Tzu, and avid reader of the annals of past emperors, Mao had an instinctive grasp of psychology and power politics. He used these talents skillfully to keep both rivals and adversaries at bay until his moment would arrive.

With the surrender of Japan, Mao successfully smashed the decaying and demoralized Nationalist regime. With little assistance from the Soviets--whose aid to the Communists paled in comparison with American aid to Chiang Kai-Shek--Mao swept all before him, inspiring the masses with his words and his promise of a better future. There was nothing, it seemed, that could not be achieved through the inspired power of the human will, directed by an omniscient and intrepid central authority.

Utterly self-confident, Mao set out to transform the nature of the Chinese peasantry in 1958, nearly ten years after assuming power. He had already tried, and failed, to remake China's intellectuals in his own image. Having called for "a hundred flowers to bloom and a hundred schools of thought to contend," Mao was genuinely astonished and embittered to discover that some intellectuals had the temerity to criticize the regime. As the metaphorical flowers blossomed, Mao snipped them off at the stem, dismissing, imprisoning, and killing those who had dared to believe his guarantees of freedom of speech. The "Hundred Flowers" campaign, aside from its own destructive output, guaranteed that Mao's information supply would be severely tainted in the event of future disasters. In the court of China's first emperor of the Communist dynasty, messengers bearing bad news counted themselves lucky if the penalty was so mild as death.

The intellectuals might be stubborn, bourgeois, and treasonous; but the peasants, on whose backs Mao had ridden to power, would surely be amenable to a concerted Party effort to improve their lives. Villages were transformed overnight into communes; the landlords of the pre-revolutionary era were replaced by Party cadres who answered to Beijing. Peasants were encouraged to eat heartily from the communal rice bowl, assured that future harvests would be more bountiful than ever before. At the same time, Mao sought to dramatically increase China's production of steel, that phallic symbol of industrialism. Peasants were compelled to set up backyard furnaces, whose output would supersede that of China's existing steel mills within a few years. Agricultural pests--sparrows in particular--were to be wiped out by a concerted campaign. The same fervor that had overturned the ancien regime would enable a backwards China to outstrip its international rivals by the early 1960s.

Economists have long held that peasants find ways of maximizing their output given their limited resources. Their productivity can only be improved by introducing new technologies, such as better tools or new strains of crops, by making available additional agricultural inputs, or enhancing farmers' incentives to produce. It is unlikely that Mao was aware of these prescriptions of the "dismal science," and even more unlikely that anyone who dared to inform him would have survived. Mao knew precisely what to do with those who obstructed the path to an Earthly paradise. The chairman's beautiful pronouncements papered over the inconsistencies of both his government's actions and of Marxism itself.

If only the natural world were so malleable as the human spirit, Mao's "Great Leap Forward" would not today be a name tinged with irony. But, alas, the poet did not understand how he had set himself up for a fall; like Don Quixote, his touting at windmills caused real pain and misery in the lives of others. The precious resources of the countryside--the labor of peasants, and the capabilities embodied in their humble tools--were sacrificed for the steel-making campaign. The peasants tried to match the absurd quotas which had been set for steel production, but few even had iron ore to start with, or sufficient fuel to stoke the furnaces. The result was that villagers clattered their precious farm tools into the fires, while deforesting the countryside in order to keep the mills going. Moreover, the steel thus produced was all but useless; the guardians of the revolution would not allow the intricacies of the Bessemer process to obstruct progress.

Ecological disaster swiftly ensued. Hillsides stripped bare of trees for fuel began to erode, their precious topsoil silting up the rivers and confounding navigation. The crop-eating sparrows were all but eliminated, and with them the primary check on the populations of worms and insects.

The result was terrible harvests throughout huge swathes of China. Peasants who should have been planting and plowing had busied away their time turning their tools into scrap metal. Mao had found a sure-fire way to reduce agricultural productivity--he had reduced the peasants' level of technology, diminished the inputs (chiefly labor) available to the farms, and reduced incentives for production. Had these disasters been confined to a single season, they would have been remembered as a singular horror; but they continued for several years, into the early 1960s. The Chinese leadership, having thoroughly eliminated those who would provide it with unwanted news, was not even fully aware of the scope of the tragedy until it was well underway. The few scattered reports of catastrophe which did filter through to Beijing were ignored, and the peasants of China were abandoned to their cruel fate.

Famine stalked the land. In some regions, caloric intake was lower than that of the Russians in besieged Leningrad, 125 grams of grain per day pwer person. People struggled to soften tree bark and wild grasses to make them edible. Starving peasants were tortured by Party officials who wanted to know where they were hiding caches of food. People who had survived warlord misrule and the brutalities of the Japanese occupation finally succumbed to hunger in the millions. The true number will never be known.

The confluence of political absolutism and scientific ignorance had produced a tragedy of Biblical proportions. And, though Mao Tse-Tung has been dead for over twenty years, his ghost still haunts China; the "Great Leap Forward" disaster remains frighteningly relevant. A massive dam, called "Three Gorges," is soon to be completed on the upper waters of the Yangtze River. This behemoth has been touted as a means of reducing downstream flooding, and generating huge quantities of hydroelectric power. Expert opinions which have been critical of the dam have been ignored, and a leading opponent of the project finds herself in and out of prison. Over one million people will be forced to evacuate their homes when the dam is completed, and their ancestral villages will be permanently underwater. Once the dam is finished, the patterns of silt deposition are expected to differ from those at present, but precisely how is not known. The result will likely render some areas infertile for want of topsoil and others burdened with excess silt. The river's course may well shift, flooding some villages and depriving others of their only source of fresh water and easy transport. Should the dam break under the accumulated weight of water and silt, tens of millions of people would be subjected to a flood which only Noah could appreciate.

Mao's mismeasurements--of nature, of humanity, of words, of science and technology, and of ideological passion--devastated his country for an entire generation. This is a lesson to those of us who live in a world tainted by sound bites and the loquacious, empty rhetoric of the law: one must never allow the beauty of language, be it so noble as Shakespeare's, to eclipse the rational evaluation of events and of creatively developed alternatives. Sheer fervor, in the absence of the critical thought processes which engineering and science engender, is liable to wreak destruction on all, bringing down the house in the manner of a Samson--or a Hamlet.