Oct. 1 marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. A mammoth birthday fete will include China’s largest ever military parade showcasing new weapons, and an Olympic-size gala. Efforts are even being made to improve the weather.

U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates just warned China’s growing military power “threatens our freedom of movement and narrows our strategic options.”

Translation: the U.S. Seventh Fleet can no longer operate with impunity off China’s coast. True enough. China is reasserting its historic sovereignty and will push U.S. power back into the Pacific.

I first went to China in 1975 during the madness of the Cultural Revolution. Over the ensuing three decades, I saw China transformed from a giant, dimly-lit prison camp into today’s booming nation, which just surpassed Japan to become the world’s second largest economy.

This is the most remarkable event I have seen in my life.

Much of the credit goes to China’s late leader, Deng Xiaoping, one of the 20th century’s greatest men.

He ended Marxist dogma, releasing the energy of his long-suffering people whose nation had been raped by western imperialism, then ravaged by brutal civil wars. Until 1800, China was a leading world power.

But a ghost will haunt this celebration: the Great Helmsman, Mao Zedong. What to make of him?

I have long struggled to understand Mao and felt conflicting emotions. Was he modern history’s greatest revolutionary and earth-shaker, or a demented mass murderer who nearly destroyed China?

Chaos

Great times produce great men. Mao rose from the chaos of 1920s China to lead the new-found Communist Party. He fought Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, an assortment of powerful regional warlords, and, later, the Japanese invaders.

China suffered some 15-20 million dead from 1928-1949.

Mao was an accomplished poet, writer and historian, a profound thinker, and a superb military strategist. His works on guerrilla war are on my desk. Mao crushed the U.S.-backed Nationalist’s 4.3-million strong armies in numerous titanic battles.

Mao gave the Communists political and strategic direction. Below him were a group of outstanding generals — the “Ten Marshals” — among them Zhu De, Lin Piao, Peng Dehui, Chen Yi and Nie Rongzhen — who crushed Chiang Kai-shek’s armies.

The Great Helmsman united fractured, war-torn China for the first time in centuries, restoring its pride and self-confidence after a century of humiliation. Mao thwarted Soviets and U.S. efforts to turn China into a client state, and built up China’s military power.

But Mao’s crackpot economic notions, notably the infamous 1958 Great Leap Forward, created famines that killed 20-36 million Chinese peasants. “Red Emperor” Mao was prodigal with his people’s lives, cared little for them, and was indifferent to their suffering.

Mao horrified even brutal Soviet leaders by saying he was prepared to lose half his people in a nuclear war.

When the party resisted Mao, he tried to destroy it by unleashing the Great Cultural Revolution that plunged China into chaos and civil war. China’s brilliant, much under-rated premier, Zhou Enlai, curbed some of Mao’s worst excess and rescued China by engineering Deng Xiaoping into power.

Gang of Four

Deng crushed far-left Maoists known as the Gang of Four, and restored order. His sweeping economic reforms revitalized China, unleashing its latent economic power. But Deng’s great achievements — and this week’s huge birthday party in Beijing — would not have been possible without Mao’s unification of China and imposition of an all-powerful one-party state.

So, as with many Chinese, I’m uncertain how to qualify Mao. Like Stalin — once called “half man, half beast” — Mao appealed as much as he repelled.

Most Chinese now regard Mao as their nation’s beloved, respected father — but who went dangerously senile before his death in 1976. Old men’s egos can be very dangerous.

I suspect as time goes by, Mao’s misdeeds will fade away and the glowing image of the Great Helmsman will continue to hang over the gate of the Beijing’s Forbidden City.

By Eric MargolisA