Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong was one of the most successful leaders to ever live, but he was also as ruthless if not more ruthless than Joseph Stalin. Mao Zedong was born in 1893 into a well-to-do family in the Hunan province. Zedong was an exceptional student and showed great promise according to his high school teacher, and soon to be father-in-law. Zedong attended classes part time at Beijing University while working as a librarian at National Peking University. While in Beijing he read constantly and was eventually introduced to Communist theories. Zedong attended his first session of the National Congress of the Communist Party in 1921 at the age of 27. Two years later he was elected commissars of the Central Committee. Zedong crushed his opponents in an effort to get to the top. The Communist party was also fighting a guerrilla war with the rest of Nationalist China. This fighting continued on until the beginning of Japanese aggression against China. Until the United States forced Japan to surrender in 1945 Mao Zedong was forced to fight two wars one against the Nationalists and another against the Japanese and in both he was successful. Once Japan was out of his way Zedong forced all of his attention on the Nationalist forces and by 1949 Zedong drove all of the Nationalists off of mainland China onto the island of Taiwan. In order to keep control of Mainland China Zedong instituted the “Great Leap Forward”. This plan was based off of the Five Year Plans instituted by Stalin. The first part of this plan was to take all small agriculture collectives and turn them into much larger people’s communes, and many peasants were ordered to work on massive projects that included infrastructure and the small scale production of iron and steel. Also Zedong got rid of private food production so livestock and farm implements were brought under collective ownership. During this plan Zedong instituted unproven and unscientific new agriculture techniques. These new techniques combined with the diversion of labor to the production of infrastructure caused about a 25% drop in grain production every year over the course of three years. Because of this it is estimated that as many as 30 million of people died in what is thought to be the largest famine in human history. Because of this incident Zedong was forced to abandon the policy in 1962. Also all of the infrastructure projects that many peasants were forced to work on and, in most cases, give their lives for were virtually useless because they had been built without the input of trained engineers, whom Zedong had rejected. After the failure of the Great Leap Forward other members of the Communist party thought it best to remove Zedong from office. When he caught word of this Zedong put the “Cultural Revolution” into effect. The “Cultural Revolution” was a movement that allowed Zedong to circumvent the Communist hierarchy by giving power to the Red Guards. The Revolution led to the destruction of most of Chinese culture and heritage because a large number of Chinese intellectuals were imprisoned. This led to the deaths of millions of people and possibly set China’s culture back beyond repair. Mao Zedong died on September 9, 1976 at the age of 82. Mao Zedong led a very interesting life and only wanted reform for his country, but was it worth the tens of millions of lives? I believe that the sacrifice was to great for the results. Mao Zedong based his revolution and leadership on that of communism in Russia without the same results. With Stalin’s plans Stalin was successful but when it came to Mao the lives were a waste because these reforms set back China much more than it propelled it forward.