This is an very sensitive topic. We all know comrade Mao, he is one of the 5 heads of communism, founder of the PRC, and one of the biggest writers of communist theory to ever exist.
But he commited errors, a lot of them, and more expecifically during his last years of governance. We all know the awfull chinese foreign policy towards the majority of other socialist countries, how they supported capitalists and genociders just for the sake of fucking with the USSR. While China was justified at the beggining of the sino-soviet split, it was not justified to create discord with the international socialist movement all around the world.
There was also some very bad internall decisions, like the great leap forward and the cultural revolution, that haved good intentions but haved awfull execution, good strategy but bad tactics. Even leaders that where aways friendly towards China like Fidel Castro got extremelly pissed of when China foreign policy during Mao last years started to call almost everyone an revisionary, even Che guevara almost got snapped when he visited China during the cultural revolution.
There was also Mao’s wife terrible decisions that influenced him a lot, and created tons of problems and instability on China.
We need to remember that it was not mao idealistic reforms that made china the superpower it is today, it was deng xiao ping and xi jinping reforms who did.
Now i ask to you comrades that know better: what the fuck happened? Why mao did so much bad decisions? Was his age that started messing with his mind? His wife manipulating his decisions? Him losing control of rogue members of the party? Too much idealism for its own good? What happened?
Mao Zedong did make a lot of mistakes in his later years. A mildly acceptable mistake is collectivization, which inhibits agricultural production in China and makes farmers less trusting in the Communist Party (my grandmother told me that in the past, the government would take away food, and in the south, a farmer could only get 200kg of grain each year, the rest must be handed in). As for the fatal mistakes, it was the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Some people reminded Mao Zedong before Mao Zedong launched the big steelmaking, but he was criticized by Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong noticed that the local government was falsely reporting crop yields, but he believed that this reflected the enthusiasm of farmers. In order not to discourage farmers’ enthusiasm, he chose not to correct them, which also increased the amount of grain expropriation. But because farmers did not like collectivized agriculture, it coincided with a natural disaster, which led to a great famine. As for the Cultural Revolution, in fact, the local government expanded it and even entered anarchy in the end. This situation existed before the Land Reform and the Cultural Revolution. For example, Jiang Zemin was once the head of a factory. He was asked to choose a rightist. He could only choose a worker who once said that Soviet machine tools were noisier than American machine tools. The blame for these mistakes cannot be entirely attributed to Mao Zedong, but Mao Zedong undoubtedly has a huge responsibility. I think these mistakes are mainly due to idealism, China’s steel production in 1957 was five million tons, Mao Zedong believed that the superiority of the communist system could allow it to reach ten million tons in five years, surpassing Britain, and later The time limit was changed to one year. I think it can only be explained by idealism But Mao Zedong also laid the foundation for today’s China. Without Mao Zedong leading the Communist Party to take power in China, and without the industrialization of Mao Zedong’s era, China’s subsequent leaders could not have allowed China to achieve such great achievements today. Of course, China might be richer today without the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution
