On May 8, 1958, Mao Zedong addressed senior Communist Party officials at a meeting of the Party’s Eighth National Congress. In the course of his remarks, he compared himself to Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China — long condemned in Chinese history for persecuting scholars and ruling through terror. Mao Zedong did not reject the comparison. Instead, he embraced it.
“What does Qin Shi Huang amount to? He only buried 460 scholars alive; we have buried 46,000 scholars alive. We suppressed counter-revolutionaries — didn’t we kill some counter-revolutionary intellectuals? I debated with pro-democracy figures; they accused us of being Qin Shi Huang. I said: ‘You are wrong: We have surpassed Qin Shi Huang a hundredfold.’
“When you berate us for being Qin Shi Huang, for being dictators, we admit it all. It is a pity that you did not say enough, and usually, we have to help you make it more complete.”
Qin Shi Huang unified China in the third century B.C. and is remembered for consolidating power through harsh laws, book burnings, and the execution of dissenting scholars. For centuries, he served as a symbol of absolute tyranny in Chinese political thought. Mao Zedong’s remarks were striking not only for their brutality, but for their candor: He openly acknowledged dictatorship, mass killing, and repression as tools of rule — and spoke of them without remorse.
After the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established its regime in 1949, Mao Zedong launched a series of political campaigns that mobilized the population through fear, ideology, and violence. These movements left tens of millions dead or persecuted. Yet even at the height of this terror, resistance did not vanish entirely.
Among those who refused to remain silent was a nineteen-year-old university student in Beijing named Wang Rongfen.
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