Combine a champion of the poor, a visionary leader, blind ideologue, and a brutal tyrant. What do you get? Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong, the communist revolutionary and founder of the People’s Republic of China, is both loved and loathed in the country he helped build. Some speak his name with respect, even reverence, others with bitterness and hatred.
The CCP or Chinese Communist Party was the only party in power from 1933 till now. Its views and policies have, in many aspects led china to become an economical super power in only a matter of years whereas it took many other western countries centuries to become as industrial as china has become in less than 100 years. Many youths living in a Chinese city may say that Mao and the CCP are heroes and extremely beneficial for the county as they have brought prosperity and peace to the county, through things like political stability, Industrial change, Land Reform and Unification. But many older people in the countryside may remember the horrors of Mao’s policy and how much destruction it brought upon the people. For example if we look at negative events during the rule of the CCP than we may start to question whether the social and economical success of china today was worth the deaths of nearly 40,000,000 Women Children and Men which we saw during Mao’s Great Leap forward.
Possibly the most outstanding positive change which Mao brought to china was the economical change. China as a whole before the rule of communism was feudal and run by a very small percentage of the Chinese population, and this meant that change would not happen. A huge proportion of people were landless peasants and worked on the land but with the help of Mao and the CCP helped to dissolve the feudal system and from this stemmed industrial change from an agrarian society to and industrial society.
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