Hey comrades! I was reading a lot about chairman Mao and found a lot of good things under his rule. However I also read that Mao Zedong killed 50 million of his own people.

Is this true?
Was Mao a true communist?

also would like to know pros of his regime

You will get much higher numbers from other sources.

Your assessment of Mao and Maoism in general will depend on your sources. If you choose to believe the bourgeois or most other so called leftist sources, you will acquire an extremely negative understanding of it all. However, the parties which are actually making revolutions at the present will provide you with completely different information and analysis.

NEXT EVIL DICTATOR THREAD OMG ZOMG


Mao rocks, he did a great leap forward, some people died starving, but that happens when you industrialize a country in some years

yet he made the population rise by 80(?)%, minimum life time thingy went up to 70 from 25 or something, and he made china an industrial super power...

he got assassinated in the end, sadly

heard there were floodings of farms and thats why the people died... dunno, the truth is burried somewhere...

A good book to read is Mobo Gao's "The Battle for History: Mao and the Cultural Revolution" (PM me for a link)

Here's a good multi-part doccumentary on the 49 revolution, and here's the kasama project's study group on the GPCR.

Mao Tse-Tung was probably the most important Marxist theoretician of his time.

Part 7-15 are rough, pro-Mao and short sketches which cover the period from 1949-1975.
http://www.thisiscommunism.org/speech.htm

This site has two GREAT in-depth analysis of China under Mao's leadership (''Evaluating the Cultural Revolution in China and its Legacy for the Future'' and ''Chinese Foreign Policy during the Maoist Era and its Lessons for Today'').
http://www.mlmrsg.com/

Raising the question ''Did Mao really kill millions in the Great Leap Forward?''
http://monthlyreview.org/0906ball.htm

It is not knowable how many people died because of Mao's decisions. China under Mao wasn't about to discuss it, and since Mao's fall, his successors have attempted to discredit him.

The Great Leap Forward was an unmitigated disaster. Although many Maoists claim that it set the stage for the industrialization of China, it's immediate impact was to cause a massive drop in agricultural productivity that was masked by two years of incredible weather. Two great harvests led the Chinese to think they were doing something right, then came two years of bad weather. Bureaucrats were so afraid of reporting to their superiors that they weren't meeting their quotas that China continued exporting food instead of feeding the starving.

While bureaucratic cravenness itself was a result of the Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, campaign, where afterward, those who criticized the government were sacked, imprisoned, etc. So of course, when things started going wrong with the GLF, they weren't about to say anything.

In many ways, Mao was a great leader and theoretician. But the GLF, though an unintended disaster, has to be laid entirely at his feet.

In some ways, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a response to this, as Mao was being side-lined after the failure of the GLF. Whatever one wants to say about the Cultural Revolution, it allowed Mao to reassert himself and defeat his political rivals.

I think one thing that alot of people tend to forget about is that China is massive. At first glance the numbers for the amount of people killed may look large, but China has about a billion people so they're really not any larger when comparing the numbers to, say the amount of people Stalin killed.

Other than qualifying as a mass murderer, Mao was about as confused a 'marxist' theorist as it is possible to find; proof here:

http://z11.invisionfree.com/Kasama_T...?showtopic=460

Please mind your words. They are useful for nothing except for exposing your counter-revolutionary line.

I've heard the 'Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom' campaign was sacked because of other's in the party when things started getting out of hand with the criticism, and was against Mao's wishes.
Does anyone know the truth?

again, the bourgeois analysts that make these conclusions include natural deaths, and anyone who died in china.

Red Cat:

In fact, they are 'useful' for exposing Mao's anti-Marxist confusions.

Unless, of course, you can show where my argument (at the link I posted above) goes wrong...

I am not a polymath. Nor am I interested in reading your arguments and finding out where you have made mistakes. If you want to have a debate, point out exactly where Mao's theories go wrong so far as they are concerned with the liberation of the proletariat, with reference to the ongoing protracted peoples' wars.

Rosa: please stop posting.

Anyway there seems to be a lot of threads recently about Mao and Maoism, which is cool.

To answer the OP - There is a huge amount of capitalist propaganda against Mao, to try and discredit him and communism in general. If these capitalists applied the same standards to capitalist regimes as they do to communist ones, Queen Victoria and Nehru and many other capitalist leaders would be among the worst mass murderers in history. Any huge death tolls you hear about Communist leaders usually fall down the moment any research is done. If you'll allow me to quote myself (Im tired of writing the same argument again and again lol):
Any more questions just ask

Yeah it was called off due to the more dictatorial elements in the party who didn't like so much free speech. The allegation that "it was just a way of mao to trick people into criticising things so he could kill them later" is stupid and makes no sense. Mao and Zhou Enlai were both very active in this campaign. Mao has consistently advocated free debate, if you look at his speeches and writing, throughout his career.

Red Cat:

The OP wanted opinions about Mao; if you don't like mine, too bad.

Now, unless you can show where I go wrong, then keep your opinions about my work to yourself -- otherwise, you can always expect a reply from me.

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Scarletghoul:

Once more, the OP wanted opinions about Mao; if any Mao-worshippers here take exception to what I have to say, then they shouldn't post at an open forum.

This is not Maoist China, you know -- we are allowed to express our opinions without any threat of imprisonment or execution.

After all, you have your own safe little Maoist heaven in the Groups section, which infidels like me are not allowed even to see.

I wouldn't object to your posting if you actually made logical and clear points that didn't entirely revolve around dialectics and other confusing philosophical debates that mean nothing to most people.

What exactly are your criticisms of Mao? Apart from the fact that he liked dialectics.

Btw, this is Rosa's golden moment on Kasama forum : http://z11.invisionfree.com/Kasama_T...post&p=2610736

It is not Maoists' duty to examine and pin-point the fallacies of every counter-revolutionary theory that avoids the present Maoist revolutionary practice. If you want to prove your theories right, talk with reference to revolutionary practice and not some subject that you won't expect most people here to know.

The West loves to spew the "50 million deaths by Mao" lie because they're afraid of losing their heads. If you think closely, how many people die each year in the USA under the current system? How many young people need to die in the damn Iraq and Afghan wars that fuel a few rich bastards like Haliburton? The west and it's media controls will never mention that though.

Indeed, capitalism is constantly killing people. Every day, over 25,000 people die of hunger. The 50 million deaths (wrongly) attributed to Mao are surpassed by capitalism in just a few years, and without the capitalist leaders making any real effort to stop it.

Mao was a fine military leader and had some interesting ideas but had some major problems as a leader of a country (He's human and had some problems!? OMGWTF!). Much of the deaths during his time didn't stem from systematic violence of the state but from natural catastrophe, poor economic policies and just sheer anger and radical areas of the population. People seem to forget that much of the violence during cultural revolution did not stem from Mao's government but from independent groups with different backgrounds. Mao actually had to end up cracking down on some of the youth groups to try to bring stability to the country.


Overall, Mao was a human being who did some great things (He did greatly improve the lives of the Chinese population in the end) and had some major problems. I always thought the "80/20" policy that the CCP has about Mao's legacy is actually a pretty decent summary of his legacy.