NEW DELHI -- History is replete with myths woven by victors. The myths about Mao Zedong, including his military exploits and triumphs over imperialism and capitalism, have helped keep the Chinese communists in power, even as a transformed China now practices capitalism and presents itself as a large empire with even larger imperial ambitions.
China's repressive state machine still keeps heresy at bay and communist legends pristine. Mao's giant portrait even now peers down Beijing's Tiananmen Square, where his successors gunned down hundreds of people to save communism in 1989 at a time when other besieged Leninist regimes began to fall.
Success is a great leveler, justifying the unjustifiable and masking follies and atrocities. Mao's feats, real or fictional, and the remarkable rise of China as a world power have kept him as a real-life demigod in Chinese eyes and deflected careful scrutiny of the human costs exacted by the Mao-made disasters, including the "Great Leap Forward," "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom" and the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution."