Current Events > Chairman Mao - do you think he was generally a force for good, or bad?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Based on what I know, good. I mean, like most socialist leaders (lol), he was fairly ruthless, and not all of his ideas worked, but he transformed China. You can tell he genuinely cared about the people in the country, which makes him closer to Lenin than Stalin, certainly. Early on, he was certainly energetic and approachable.

Thoughts?

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Did your Wikipedia research not mention the millions of deaths he is responsible for
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Those are easy words to understand in English. I don't think we know to put forth a definition or definitions.
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fenderbender321 posted...

Before answering this, we have to all agree to a definition of "good" and "bad".

Lets say murdering a crowd of protestors and then billing their families for the bullets used is bad.
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MC_BatCommander posted...

Did your Wikipedia research not mention the millions of deaths he is responsible for

What about all the people that Lincoln got killed? Or Churchill? Both celebrated figures from history.

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Overwhelmingly a source for bad. Even if you want to debate the merits or lack thereof of Communism, his forced farming policies as part of the great leap forward led to the deaths of tens of millions of people.

EDIT:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/08/03/giving-historys-greatest-mass-murderer-his-due/

Historian Frank Diktter, author of the important book Maos Great Famine recently published an article in History Today, summarizing what happened:

Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors by herding villagers across the country into giant peoples communes. In pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivised. People had their work, homes, land, belongings and livelihoods taken from them. In collective canteens, food, distributed by the spoonful according to merit, became a weapon used to force people to follow the partys every dictate. As incentives to work were removed, coercion and violence were used instead to compel famished farmers to perform labour on poorly planned irrigation projects while fields were neglected.

A catastrophe of gargantuan proportions ensued. Extrapolating from published population statistics, historians have speculated that tens of millions of people died of starvation. But the true dimensions of what happened are only now coming to light thanks to the meticulous reports the party itself compiled during the famine.

What comes out of this massive and detailed dossier is a tale of horror in which Mao emerges as one of the greatest mass murderers in history, responsible for the deaths of at least 45 million people between 1958 and 1962. It is not merely the extent of the catastrophe that dwarfs earlier estimates, but also the manner in which many people died: between two and three million victims were tortured to death or summarily killed, often for the slightest infraction. When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, local boss Xiong Dechang forced his father to bury him alive. The father died of grief a few days later. The case of Wang Ziyou was reported to the central leadership: one of his ears was chopped off, his legs were tied with iron wire, a ten kilogram stone was dropped on his back and then he was branded with a sizzling tool punishment for digging up a potato.

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MeIon Bread posted...

MC_BatCommander posted...

Did your Wikipedia research not mention the millions of deaths he is responsible for

What about all the people that Lincoln got killed? Or Churchill? Both celebrated figures from history.

Did Lincoln let millions of his own people starve to death because he didn't wanna admit his policy was bad
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You know, under Zedong, people's life expectancy almost doubled, i.e. from 35 from 63. That's a HUGE accomplishment. Imagine if a Western leader, in the modern age, doubled our life expectancy. We would live about 170 years. That would be amazing.
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He also is responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people
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Tens of millions of people starved to death under his rule
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MC_BatCommander posted...

Did your Wikipedia research not mention the millions of deaths he is responsible for

How do you know he didnt get this info from Chinese Film?
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Bad. How can anyone think good?
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A lot of Chinese antiques and historical stuff was destroyed during that period.
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the Great Leap Forward was a disaster and killed millions of people

I'll just say that, for nearly everyone involved, it would have been best if he was killed in the closing days of the civil war against the Kuomintang and just made a martyr.

Anything even remotely good that happened under his rule would have happened anyway under Liu Shaoqi. All the bad stuff, well, they were all masterminded by Mao so it's highly likely they wouldn't have happened.
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Cultural differences!
Fake Western propaganda!
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i'm not sure on the timeline, was he in power during the Tiananmen Square massacre?
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ROBANN_88 posted...

i'm not sure on the timeline, was he in power during the Tiananmen Square massacre?

No that was Deng Xiaoping.
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MeIon Bread posted...

You know, under Zedong, people's life expectancy almost doubled, i.e. from 35 from 63. That's a HUGE accomplishment. Imagine if a Western leader, in the modern age, doubled our life expectancy. We would live about 170 years. That would be amazing.

The only good thing about Zedong is the fact that his father grew a beard

He is the most beautiful woman in the whole world.

If you compare that to today, the life expectancy of women in this country would be 120 years. People living now would live 160 years. No one would notice.

You've got to appreciate that. If you're willing to go to work every day and be physically fit, you're going to look pretty good, you're going to look like somebody that's got good sex.

Zedong himself was really very smart and intelligent, but he was basically a bad human being because he didn't like himself for what he was.

(Courtesy of https://talktotransformer.com/)
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China was fucked either way, the only other viable alternative to Mao was Chiang Kai-Shek of the Nationalist party. When Chiang had "control" of the mainland, China was a hilariously corrupt feudal/republic in name only dominated by rival warlords with vast private armies battling each other and occasionally the Japanese. It was Chiang's and the KMTs sheer incompetence that led to the rise of Communism in China.
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MeIon Bread posted...

You know, under Zedong, people's life expectancy almost doubled, i.e. from 35 from 63. That's a HUGE accomplishment. Imagine if a Western leader, in the modern age, doubled our life expectancy. We would live about 170 years. That would be amazing.

Mind = blown
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