(02-15-2016 12:23 AM)Native Georgian Wrote:  It is difficult, even to this day, to get reliable statistics about the # of people who were killed either by Mao's direct orders, or by the orders of his underlings, or by the mob-violence that he unleashed and encouraged. Add to that, the fact that Mao's enforcers apparently did not keep the kind of meticulous records that the Germans kept in the 1933-45 era. So it really is anyone's guess, as to the total number of Mao's victims. Even so, I am skeptical that previous Chinese rulers killed more people than he did. For one, it was rare for any one person to rule over all of China. The ability to project force from a central location was much more difficult.

A Chinese emperor (Guangxu) died in 1908. I read once that the news of the Emperor's death did not reach Mao's village until 1913, by which point the "next" (and so far, last) Emperor had already abdicated. I mention this to give a sense of how spread out and unwieldy China was in those days, and how challenging it would have been for earlier rulers to initiate the kind of mass-horrors like "Great Leap Forward" and "Cultural Revolution" that Mao spawned.

An Lushan Rebellion

Censuses taken in the half-century before the rebellion show a gradual increase in population, with the last census undertaken before the rebellion, in 755, recording a population of 52,919,309 in 8,914,709 taxpaying households. However, a census taken in 764, the year following the end of the rebellion, recorded only 16,900,000 in 2,900,000 households. Later censuses count only households, but by 855 this figure had risen to only 4,955,151 households, little over half the number recorded in 755.[17] Some scholars have interpreted the difference in the census figures as implying the deaths of 36 million people, about two-thirds of the population of the empire.

That's 1/6th of the world population.

Tiaping Rebellion

With no reliable census at the time, estimates are necessarily based on projections, but the most widely cited sources put the total number of deaths during the 15 years of the rebellion at about 20–30 million civilians and soldiers.

Other sources put it at 100 million.