ABSTRACT
Asia’s Communist countries have experienced some of the most violent collective traumas in world history. If Mao Zedong and Pol Pot symbolize the extremes of Communist utopia – each of them attributing the failure of revolutionary expectations to excess in moderation – they have also triggered murderous processes of horrendous proportions.1 And although a reliable death count is still out of reach, it can safely be stated that at least two-thirds of the victims of Communist regimes have been Asians. The phenomenon is partly connected to China’s huge population (around 700 million at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966). Taking 58 million unnatural deaths as an average estimate would put the death toll over three decades, from 1946 to 1978, at 8 per cent of the total Chinese population. This figure is not much different from the one recently established for the three decades of the Lenin-Stalin period.2 Figures are less accessible for Vietnam, Laos and North Korea, but as these countries followed closely Mao’s and Stalin’s paths, the end result should not have been very different. While the hard-line period in Vietnam lasted slightly more than 30 years, from 1953 to 1986, the Pyongyang regime remains even today as fierce as ever, after more than five decades. In Cambodia’s case, the bloodbath reached the dimensions of a full-fledged genocide in just under four years, from April 1975 to January 1979. During these four years between 17 and 30 per cent of the population perished from mass killings, exhaustion, mistreatments or starvation – and that in one of the few Asian countries that is not known for large-scale famines.
