Price of War - Mao Sets Acceptable Losses

  In the West, we sometimes assume that the atrocities of the Cultur@l R3volut!on in China didn't provoke an uprising in the local population because they were never told of the magnitude of the problems.  I recently read a book of short stories that provided a different explanation.  Here's the story.
   "The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of," M@o told Nehru, "China has many people. . . . The deaths of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of." A witness said Nehru showed shock. Later, speaking in Moscow, M@o displayed yet more generosity: he boasted that he was willing to lose 300 million people, half of China's population.
  From the story, the people of China were proud of this and wanted the chance to show their devotion to M@o when the bombs hit.  Of course, this never happened.  However, during the ensuing Cultur@l R3volut!on, more than 50 million may have been killed due to a wide variety of causes.  When the chinese characters in the story learned of this (and the outrage of some of their compatriots and foreigners), their attitude was:
  "What's the big deal?  That's only a fraction of the people he was willing to sacrifice to the western bombs."
  This kind of thought process had never occurred to me.  Stalin was right; the death of a million people really is just a statistic.  That I never realized the deaths of the r3volut!on could be easily excused (by anyone) based on the willingness to have even more deaths is probably an indication of my continuing naivete.  Perhaps I can cure this with more exposure but I'm starting to think I like living in my naive world.  This real world calculus is difficult for me stomach.