n of China on the Chinese people by whatever means possible, including the exercise of terror which he directed against the peasants, the intellectuals, and the members of his own inner circle. As Chang and Halliday (424) note, Mao himself told his top echelon "there has to be a personality cultà . It is absolutely necessary."
The portrait of Mao painted by Chang and Halliday (186-188) is the portrait of a megalomaniac who was comfortable with torture, who frequently flew into rages, and who treated his wives and children with casual indifference. He set out to create a personality cult that would ensure that all of his subordinates would follow his every wish and to further establish his own intellectual and political superiority. At the same time, Chang and Halliday (332-333) report that Mao was a man who enjoyed luxury and comfort, maintained a double standard regarding sexual chastity and austerity for his followers while indulging in all sorts of caprices himself, and who bathed infrequently (at one point going for 25 years without a bath instead being wiped down and rubbed with a hot towel).
With respect to the Great Leap Forward movement of 1958-1961, Chang and Halliday (427) state that Mao set out to shorten the original 1953 schedule of completing industrialization in no more than 15 years to 8, 7, 5, or even 3 years. To achieve this, he relied upon acquisitions from Russia and also set out to "overtake all capitalist countries in a fairly short time, and become one of the richest, most advanced and powerful countries in the world (Chang and Halliday, 426)."
For the Chinese, the Great Leap Forward became an enormous burden in that they were required to produce fantastic crop yields that never quite lived up to expectations. So-called sputnik fields were developed, created by transplanting ripe crops into a single artificial plot (Chang and Halliday, 427). These false fields were simply propaganda designed...