Mao: Tyrant or Great Leader?

“Mao Tse‐tung, who began as an obscure peasant, died one of history's great revolutionary figures. In Chinese terms, he ranked with the first Emperor who unified China in 200 B.C.

A Chinese patriot, a combative revolutionary, a fervent evangelist, a Marxist theorist, a soldier, a statesman and poet, above all Mao was a moralist who deeply believed, as have Chinese since Confucius, that man's goodness must come ahead of his mere economic progress.

China achieved enormous economic progress under Mao. He transformed China into a modern, industrialized socialist state."

Unlike many great leaders, Mao never exercised, or sought, absolute control over day‐to‐day affairs.”

Who would write such blatant communist propaganda?

It was the New York Times in 1976!

 

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This year is the 75th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. After winning the long Chinese civil war, Mao Zedong spoke before a large crowd in Beijing in 1949 and proclaimed, “The Chinese people have stood up.” Thus, was born the PRC.

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Beijing, 1949: “The Chinese people have stood up.” Thus, was born the PRC.

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Chairman Mao laid the foundation from which contemporary China took off like a rocket over the last 40 years, especially in the last 20 years.

And the Chinese are still standing up against imperialism, which is desperately trying to contain the Middle Kingdom through trade wars, tech wars, geopolitical wars and propaganda wars.

The quote you heard in the beginning of this podcast about Mao sounds shocking, only because the US and the UK have engaged in profound revisionism of history since the 1990s. It all started when the CIA’s color revolution in China failed in 1989 – yeah, we are talking about the Tiananmen Square protests. The globalists really wanted to end communism all over the world when the USSR collapsed.

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Chinese students and workers protesting in 1989, the Tienanmen Square crisis, a color revolution instigated by the US.

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However, when China continued to cling on to its core ideology, Americans decided to rewrite history and demonize Mao as an incompetent or evil tyrant who killed tens of millions of people. But you can go back and look at US media and even the CIA reports for four decades, from 1950 until 1989, and you will mostly find neutral or positive reports. You will not find a single report on the Great Famine or millions of people dying. I will share a lot of stunning statistics and some CIA reports later in this article.

This is not to say that Mao was flawless. Obviously, nobody is perfect. Even the Chinese Communist Party acknowledges that Mao made mistakes, especially during the cultural revolution. But I will show you what Mao accomplished and what the Western lies are about his record.

Let’s start with the big picture. Mao was greatly admired by the regular Chinese people when he was alive. In fact, a CIA report in 1971 described as a semi-god!

Mao liberated China from the imperialists and their puppet, Chiang Kai-shek. And it was an improbable military achievement – Mao and his poorly armed peasants defeated the opponents who were heavily funded and armed by the US. Mao’s legendary Long March involved trekking for 6000 miles. This inspires the Chinese people even today while dealing with any extraordinary challenges as a nation.

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The Long March was a heroic turning point in the Chinese—and human—revolution to rid themselves of imperialism.

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China's high-tech infrastructure sets standards for the rest of the world, including the "developed West". 

Mao also liberated all the farmers from feudalism, for which the farmers were eternally grateful. Mao was also a feminist – he proclaimed that women hold up half the sky and established equal rights for women. This is why the poor people of China never once rose up against Mao even when the times were difficult. Even today, many villagers in China have Mao’s picture in their homes and public places. And, of course, Mao’s image is on all the denominations of Yuan, the currency. His photo will also stay in the Tiananmen Square forever. Yes, that’s me in the picture:

Mao is everywhere in China, and deservedly so. In the hearts of countless grateful compatriots.

More importantly, Mao turned China into an industrial powerhouse. This was beyond anyone’s expectations after the Soviet Union withdrew all its technical advisors and aid in 1960. But merely four years later, China exploded its first nuclear weapon.

China had such holistic success in so many areas that the US decided to befriend Mao. This is why Nixon flew to Beijing and spent a week with Mao, forging a new alliance.

Nixon in China—1972. China's "opening" to America served to create a fracture in the world socialist bloc, and deepen the ideological rift between China and the USSR.

China in 1949

What a lot of people don’t understand when criticizing Mao is the formidable challenge he faced when he came to power. In 1949, China was extremely poor and faced a myriad of serious problems after suffering through colonialism and the Century of Humiliation.

1.       There were only 10 countries in the world with GDP-per-capita smaller than that of China!

2.       More than 4 out 5 Chinese people could not read or write.

3.       More than 20 million Chinese were addicted to opium

4.       China was a primitive agricultural country with no industrial capacity. People outside the big cities did not even have electricity.

5.       Life expectancy was only 35 and healthcare was nonexistent in much of the country.

6.       Worse, the US was meddling in China’s internal affairs by establishing Taiwan and preposterously claiming it to be the real China. Consider that 0.2% of Chinese were in Taiwan and 99.8% lived in mainland China. That’s democracy with American characteristics.

Given all these, what Mao accomplished was quite astounding. Let’s take a quick look at the stats between 1949 and 1976, when Mao passed away:

 

First, life expectancy under Mao grew from merely 35 years to 64 years. In 1949, Chinese people lived 9 years less than the world average. By 1976, they lived three years longer than the world average.

Under Mao, infant mortality fell by a whopping 75%.

And China’s population grew by 400 million during the Mao era – from 540 million to 940 million. That’s a stunning number!

The Communist party of China also reduced youth illiteracy from close to 90% to 20% under Mao. The UN called it the “single greatest educational accomplishment in human history.” To be deemed literate, a person in rural China had to master 1500 Chinese characters!

Next: Under Mao, 1.4 million barefoot doctors became famous worldwide by delivering free basic medical services, prevention, and education on hygiene and nutrition to hundreds of millions of people.

The "barefot doctor" model could be adopted by many countries, including "developed nations" like the US or the UK ravaged by deep class divisions and oligarchic regimes.

The barefoot doctors integrated Chinese and Western medicine. Thanks to the Patriotic Health Campaigns and barefoot doctors, China eradicated or significantly controlled many diseases such as smallpox, plague, malaria, cholera, tuberculosis, parasitic infections etc. This revolutionary program was so successful that the UN’s World Health Organization and UNICEF considered recommending it for all developing nations.

Mao was also a feminist who emancipated Chinese women from many societal injustices. He famously said that “women hold up half the sky.” Mao got rid of child marriage, arranged marriage, prostitution, and concubines, while ensuring that girls had equal access to education and women had not only the right to work but with equal pay. By the time Mao died, the female labor force participation rate in China was 80%.

 

So, 75% growth in population, 85% growth in life expectancy, 75% reduction in infant mortality, massive improvement in healthcare, and emancipation of women, but Western media have the chutzpah to lie about Mao being a mass murderer. That’s deranged propaganda. [Unfortunately, a huge number of people in the West, especially the USA, the most brainwashed nation in history, believe such malicious idiocies and stubbornly repeat them. Rightwingers in the US swallow these myths about China and much more, calling even dedicated servants of the oligarchy such as Kamala Harris or Barack Obama a "Marxist" or "communists". This is part because the mass media has never made any effort to correct such disinformation, and in fact, as China grew in world power, it has spread more lies about China in the last 25 years. —Ed]

Okay, now let’s take a look at the industrial and technological capabilities that improved under Mao. From the beginning, he understood the importance of transforming the nation into an industrial giant. For example, steel production from 1949 to 1976 grew a staggering 120-fold.

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Of course, you cannot grow a country without plentiful of electricity and energy. Thus, in coal production, China became #3 in the world by 1976, only next to the US and the USSR. In terms of electricity, China’s production increased 50-fold, from 4GWh to 200 GWh.

Although China does not have a lot of oil, the production grew 400-fold under Mao from 0.2 million tonnes to 80 million tonnes.

In the late 1950s, China even started manufacturing its own cars and tractors. The first Chinese car Hongqi was Mao’s favorite and it’s still a luxury car, especially for diplomats.

China today is a scientific powerhouse, leading the world in numerous categories.