After seeing a megathread praising Mao Zedong, an actual mass killer, and a post about a guy saying “99% of westerners are 100000000000% sure they know what happened in ‘Tiny Man Square’ […] the reasons for this are complex and involve propaganda […],” I am genuinely curious what leads people to this belief system. Even if propaganda is involved when it comes to Tiananmen Square, it doesn’t change the atrocities that were/are committed everywhere else in China.
I am all for letting people believe what they want but I am lost on why one would deliberately praise any authoritarian system this hard.
Can someone please help me understand why this is such a large and prominent community? How have these ideals garnered such a following outside of China?
EDIT: Thank you to everyone who has responded! This thread has been very insightful :)
I was indeed, thanks.
Even if his revolutionary politics were laudable, it’s hard to ignore his either intentional or incredibly stupid choice to sacrifice millions of lives to modernize the economy.
I mean. It worked, but ouch.
He didn’t, though. The most controversial decision was carrying out the cultural revolution, which modern China sees as a misstep, but life expectancy doubled under Mao precisely because of industrialization and the expansion of safety nets under him.
It didn’t work out. Only after Mao’s death and a near total turn around in policies did the Chinese economy modernize. And the claim that in the parallel comment about life expectency doubling because of Maoist policies is a blatant lie based on malicious misinterpretation of statistics.
Incorrect. In the People’s Republic of China, under Mao and later the Gang of Four, growth was overall positive but was unstable. The centrally planned economy had brought great benefits in many areas, but because the productive forces themselves were underdeveloped, economic growth wasn’t steady. There began to be discussion and division in the party, until Deng Xiapoing’s faction pushing for Reform and Opening Up won out, and growth was stabilized:
Deng’s plan was to introduce market reforms, localized around Special Economic Zones, while maintaining full control over the principle aspects of the economy. Limited private capital would be introduced, especially by luring in foreign investors, such as the US, pivoting from more isolationist positions into one fully immersed in the global marketplace. As the small and medium firms grow into large firms, the state exerts more control and subsumes them more into the public sector. This was a gamble, but unlike what happened to the USSR, this was done in a controlled manner that ended up not undermining the socialist system overall.
“Malicious misinterpretation of statistics” my ass.
Though life expectancy increased during Mao Zedong (from 41 to 61.2 years), it didn’t double.
GDP per capita was mostly flat (modest growth from €733 to €1017 in purchasing power parity) during Mao Zedong & took off only later.
GDP grow figures say little about how modern an economy is and in general Mao’s policies did more harm than good.
Thanks for proving my point with sharing this graphic. See that “Mao slump” there in the 1950-1960? No other similar country had that, including other nominally socialist countries. The increase of life expectancy was a recovery after WW2 and a global phenomenon brought through by the broad availability of antibiotics and other modern medicine. Again, Mao did more harm than good and his policies certainly didn’t cause a doubling of life-expectancy.
You keep stating that “in general Mao’s policies did more harm than good” without backing any of those claims. China was a semi-feudal colonized country prior to the founding of the PRC, and under Mao and the introduction of Five Year Plans, China began rapidly industrializing. The only major decision China evaluates as having been actively harmful (outside of individual missteps like the Four Pests campaign) is the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
GDP growth is absolutely a valuable metric when considering that China was transitioning from an agrarian economy to an industrialized one, it’s not like it was transitioning to a finance-based service economy. This is raw industrial output improving in the context of a majority planned economy.
You’re calling rapidly rising life expectancy a “slump?” This is ridiculous. The rise in life expectancy came from dramatic improvements in agriculture ending famine, rapid industrialization, a massive expansion in the social safety net, and land reform from landlords to the peasantry. Recovery from World War II helped as well, but the biggest impacts were in creating a socialist economy. Deng’s reforms did not start modernization, they improved an ongoing process.
You don’t back up any of your reasoning on why you claim “Mao did more harm than good.” Both Mao and Deng are seen as critical for China’s success today, trying to attribute it all to Deng and throwing Mao under the bus when Deng made serious but overstated tweaks to the system created while Mao was in power is historical nihilism.