Difference between revisions of "Mao Zedong"

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==Impact and legacy==
 
==Impact and legacy==
Mao's impact on China is hard to overestimate.  Many consider him to be the founder of the modern Chinese state.  He is also the hero who destroyed the colonialists and imperialists, as well as the fascist and corrupt Chiang Kai-shek. Strangely enough, the state that this corrupt fascist founded is now liberal and democratic (not thanks to the man himself, though), unlike the state that the destroying hero founded.
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Mao's impact on China is hard to overestimate.  Many consider him to be the founder of the modern Chinese state.  He is also the hero who destroyed the colonialists and imperialists, as well as the fascist and corrupt Chiang Kai-shek. Strangely enough, the state that this corrupt fascist founded is now liberal and democratic (Not thanks to the man himself, though, who was actually a corrupt fascist and subjected Taiwan to several decades of military rule and horrible oppression supported by the United States government), unlike the state that the destroying hero founded.
  
 
On the other hand, he nearly destroyed the country twice.  He was also capable of extreme cruelty in service to ideology, and was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions.
 
On the other hand, he nearly destroyed the country twice.  He was also capable of extreme cruelty in service to ideology, and was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions.

Revision as of 09:37, 27 June 2010

Mao Zedong (Wade-Giles: Mao Tse-Tung) (Simplified Chinese 毛泽东) (Traditional Chinese 毛澤東) was a well-known Chinese Communist and political leader.

Mao was born on December 26, 1893, into a prosperous peasant family. He started his career as a physical education instructor. This qualified him as a member of the intelligentsia, at least within his community. As a young man, he read many different Chinese translations of Western works, particularly those of Karl Marx. It was after this that he began his life as a radical.

He was a brilliant and charismatic leader, and relentlessly terrible at actually running a large country.

Early political work

After the 1912 revolution, China (to a large degree) disintegrated. Mao joined the newly established Chinese Communist Party, although he was not (as was later claimed) one of its founding members. After the breakdown of the alliance between the Communists and Nationalists and the beginning of the Chinese Civil War, Mao took the opportunity to create a small Communist mini-state (the Jiangxi Soviet), which was eventually crushed by the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek.

To avoid total destruction, Mao and his forces began the "Long March." Moving through the mountains of western China, they evaded the Nationalist forces and founded a new stronghold in the Yan'an area.

The war was put on a theoretical hold during World War II, when the Japanese invaded China, and the various Chinese factions nominally formed a united front. However, Chiang Kai-shek was still determined to destroy the Communists, and spent as much time attacking Mao as he did the Japanese.

By the time the war with the Japanese ended, Mao had become an accomplished guerilla leader. After efforts to form a post-war unity government quickly ended, mostly due to Chiang's intransigence, the Civil War resumed. Mao's army, being much smaller and very lightly armed, was expected to be demolished. Instead, utilizing Mao's new theory of guerilla warfare and receiving significant support from the Soviet Union, the Communists managed to destroy or capture large parts of Chiang's forces. Indeed, by the end of the war most of the Chinese forces were using arms taken from Chiang. In, 1949, Chiang's forces were forced to retreat to the island of Taiwan. In Tiananmen Square, on October 1, Mao proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China

Leader of the People's Republic

After consolidating the Communist hold on China, Mao next got involved in North Korea's attempt to unify the peninsula. As UN forces under US command approached the Yalu river in December 1950, Mao decided to intervene. He snuck many of his men behind American lines (which was rather easy, as the Americans were racing so fast to the Yalu that they did not bother with basic security), and ambushed them.

After some initial success, the Chinese forces were eventually forced into a conventional war along (more or less) the 38th parallel. The Chinese forces were not equipped to fight a conventional war with a better armed foe, and many more Chinese forces died than UN (among the casualties was Mao's own son). The issue of repatriation of POWs delayed the settlement of the Korean War until 1953. (The armistice was signed just after Stalin's death, leading many to speculate that he was forcing the continuation of the war.)

Many within China considered the war a victory, in that they had prevented the US from taking any North Korean (or Chinese) territory. It was an especially sweet victory, since the US was the pre-eminent military power in the world. However, the leadership understood how dearly the war cost China, and asked Mao to step away from day to day domestic government work, while maintaining him as the figurehead and foreign relations head.

Under Zhou En-lai and the moderates, China prospered for a few years. Many farmers, with government support, undertook experiments into collectivization, with promising results. To Mao, this suggested that the whole country could collectivize in all respects and achieve even more. He stepped forward, and called for a "Great Leap Forward" in January 1958.

The original goals of the Great Leap Forward were grand, with the intention of using the vast manpower of the country to create new infrastructure, enabling the creation of steel plants and increasing agricultural production. Highways and dams were built by brute labor, household goods were melted down to make steel, and farms were thrown together into collectives.

At first, the results were positive, and Mao rewarded those that succeeded best. He also pushed for more to be done, and at a faster rate. As a result, local party officials began fudging reports on progress and production, and eventually entirely fabricating them. As the farms were unable to keep up with the false reports, famine spread. Steel production, the most touted goal of the Great Leap, also suffered.

As the catastrophe became evident, Mao took full responsibility and turned the government back over to the moderates. Again, he was the face for foreign policy. He publicly denounced Khrushchev and Soviet "revisionism," and was partially responsible for the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s.

Mao stayed in the background until 1966, when he came forward to denounce new "bourgeois" elements in China, called for a "Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution." He called for a purging of the Four Olds, "old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas." He also called on the youth and the factory workers to step forward and enforce the Cultural Revolution.

From the perspective of most observers, what resulted was as near a mobocracy as has been seen in recent times. The government figures warred in the courts of public opinion, and used revolutionary cadres and other groups to punish opponents. Mao and his followers developed a "cult of Mao" throughout the country. It was at this time that Mao's Little Red Book became ubiquitous, along with pictures of Chairman Mao. Hymns were composed to Mao, and people throughout the country had to sing and participate, or else be denounced.

In 1969, Mao recognized what he had unleashed, and called for an end to it, but he did very little to end it. His wife enthusiastically continued the Cultural Revolution, and it did not end until his death on September 9, 1976. Despite his wish to be cremated, his body was preserved and can be seen in the "Maoseleum" in Tiananmen Square.

Impact and legacy

Mao's impact on China is hard to overestimate. Many consider him to be the founder of the modern Chinese state. He is also the hero who destroyed the colonialists and imperialists, as well as the fascist and corrupt Chiang Kai-shek. Strangely enough, the state that this corrupt fascist founded is now liberal and democratic (Not thanks to the man himself, though, who was actually a corrupt fascist and subjected Taiwan to several decades of military rule and horrible oppression supported by the United States government), unlike the state that the destroying hero founded.

On the other hand, he nearly destroyed the country twice. He was also capable of extreme cruelty in service to ideology, and was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions.

Outside of China, he is regarded as either an anti-colonialist liberator or a horrible despot. In the litany of Communist dictators, he is normally listed right after Stalin. Yet in the annals of anti-capitalist heroes of disaffected youth, he's also right after Che Guevara. Much of this has more to do with the West than Mao himself.

Ideology

Mao started as a standard Marxist, placing a great deal of emphasis on liberating the working class. However, in the course of his career, he laid out a considerably different vision, known as Mao Zedong Thought or Maoism. He tended to claim it was just an extension into an agrarian society, but others see it as a radically different version of Communism.

Today, there are still Maoist movements, most notably in Nepal.

Mao Zedong and the dark era of sparrows

Besides condemning to death millions of people, Mao Zedong is also responsible for one of the greatest bird massacres in history. In 1958 Mao Zedong declared sparrows an enemy of the state[1] and started The Great Sparrow campaign (also known as the Kill a Sparrow campaign). Officially it was called The Four Pests campaign, that was meant to eliminate rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. Sparrows were included on the list because they ate grain seeds, causing disruption to agriculture. Peasants were told to go out to the fields, screaming at the tops of their voices and making noise in every possible way. The birds were frightened and took off, and since the hubbub went on steadily, the sparrows did not dare to land. People also carried tall sticks and chased away birds from the trees. Constant flying and escaping exhausted the sparrows soon and they simply fell down and died. The method was highly effective, and millions of sparrows were slaughtered.

However, by April 1960 the National Academy of Science found that sparrows ate insects more than seeds. Mao declared "forget it", and ordered the end of the campaign against sparrows. By this time, however, it was too late. With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward and adverse weather conditions, leading to the Great Chinese Famine in which around 30 million people died of starvation.

Footnotes

  1. Chairman Mao and the sparrows

    In China, the Great Leader Mao Tse-Tung decided in 1958 to get rid of sparrows, calculating that each bird (the tree sparrow) consumed 4.5kg of grain each year and that for every million sparrows killed, there would be food for 60,000 people.

    He mobilised the population to kill the birds, to great effect: at least 2.8 million sparrows were killed in Shantung province alone. But what Mao had not taken into account was the number of noxious insects the sparrows consumed when rearing their young. The net result was that the following year the rice crop, far from being increased, was significantly down, The idea was quickly forgotten and the birds soon recovered to their normal level.
    Independent (UK)