My late grandfather was a soldier for the KMT during the Second World War and Chinese Civil War, while my grandmother belonged to a merchant family from Fujian. Both ran the hell away from the mainland as the Nationalist government crumbled and eventually ended up in Indonesia, which is (to put it mildly) not a country known for being particularly tolerant fond of its Chinese community.
And yet, despite the actual systemic racism and violent pogroms against Chinese people in modern Indonesian history, not a day goes by that we aren't thankful they escaped the mainland while they still could. They themselves were of the opinion that Suharto's regime on its worst day remained preferable to Mao's at its best. The many tens of millions who starved under Mao, got worked to death, were humiliated and tortured to death for being a little less miserably poor than their neighbors or engaging in wrongthink, or were straight up eaten by said neighbors certainly go a long way to proving them right. For them, and for the people who stayed behind to fight the Reds to the bitter end of their lives (many of whom, when they are remembered at all, are condemned as anti-communist bandits and evil reactionaries by Mao's spiritual successors and fawning admirers) like my granduncle, I mourn; for their oppressors and butchers, I wish nothing but the most unpleasant afterlife God can conjure up.
Naturally, it should be no surprise that my opinion of the delusional bourgeois Communists and anarchists I have had the misfortune of meeting who think that hateful, murderous, psychopathic megalomaniac & sexual predator did nothing wrong; that what he did should be replicated here in the West; and are probably celebrating in his honor today, is pretty firmly subterranean.
