Zahra Raja, Student ID: 200788254The official verdict on Chairman Mao delivered by the Communist party in 1981 read as follows:-

"Comrade Mao Zedong was a great Marxist and a great proletarian revolutionary, strategist and theorist. It is true that he made gross mistakes during the Cultural Revolution, but if we judge his activities as a whole, his contributions to the Chinese revolution far outweigh his mistakes. His merits are primary and his errors secondary."

In retrospect, do you consider this is a fair assessment? Justify your answer.

While it would be incorrect to say that Mao wreaked nothing but havoc on China throughout his rule, it would also be incorrect to say that his errors were secondary when we are to consider the magnitude of deaths that he directly caused. This essay will look at key events during Maos rule and attempt to conclude from them whether he caused more harm than good.

One of Maos positive achievements during his rule was improving the status of women. Mao insisted that China's women are a vast reserve of labour power. This reserve should be tapped in the struggle to build a great socialist country (Mao, 1955). Consequently, there were many reforms. In 1950, The New Marriage Law was created in order to give women legal equality with men. It stipulated marriages should be based on ones own choice, a ban on polygamy and taking concubines, as well as a ban on female infanticide. (Trueman, 2000).By the 1970s almost 50% of China's doctors were women and 30% of engineers and scientists. This was quite an achievement to make in a comparatively short space of time when women had been oppressed for many centuries, and had no function other than an heir producer. Unfortunately, it could even be argued that the status of women during Maos rule was perhaps better than it is in China today. While he was Chairman, female infanticide was reduced significantly, but after his death, the figures skyrocketed (Coale and Banister, 1994). This was largely due to the introduction of sex-selective abortion, but it could also attributed to the fact that Maos influence over this matter died once he did.

On a similar vein, Mao managed to abolish the landlord class, and elevate the peasant class for the first time in Chinese history. Jung Chang argues Maos peasant background did not imbue him with idealism about improving the lot of Chinese peasants (Chang, 2005), however given the fact that she grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and suffered much at the hands of Maos policies, it could be argued that she is not being entirely objective. Indeed, in her book Mao: The Unknown Story, she is very quick to focus on Maos faults rather than balancing them out with his positive achievements for China.

Regardless of his motives, it cannot be denied that he improved the lot of many people that had been downtrodden for so long as a result of this class system. Mao stated of the landlord classes these classes represent the most backward and most reactionary relations of production in China and hinder the development of her productive forces (Mao, 1926). As peasants made up the majority of the population in China, it was prudent to have their backing. Shortly after the CCP took power and unified China, the Land Reform Law of 1950 was passed. It stripped landlords of their land, and redistributed it amongst the peasants. Since this law protected the interests of the peasants, agriculture productivity increased (China.org.cn, 2009). Another first for Chinese history, peasants were now landowners in their own right.

While it cannot be denied that Maos policies had positive effects, they also had severely negative ones. The Great Leap forward is an example of where one of one of Maos policies went badly wrong. It began in 1957 in order to increase and improve the economic development of China and to turn it into an industrial power, and consequently the construction of steel plants was pushed for nationally (Harms, 1996). Of course, this could only happen if the nation was well fed; the end of 1958 had placed 700 million people placed into 26,578 communes. This was to encourage a sense of community by having everyone live, work and eat together and ultimately increase productivity by ensuring that people worked for the commune, and not for themselves (Trueman, 2000). However, this failed for a number of reasons. Trueman points out that the backyard production method that was highly encouraged in communes took workers away from their fields food that needed to be harvested was being left to rot. Secondly, the steel that was mass-produced was of a substandard quality that could not be used for construction. (Trueman, 2000). The irony of many people later starving to death to produce useless steel cannot be missed.

The years following 1958 were very poor for growing, due to floods, droughts and other bad weather. In 1960 alone, 9 million people are thought to have starved to death. (Trueman, 2000). As Spence puts it, The Great Leap Forward, launched in the name of strengthening the nation by summoning all the peoples energies, had turned back on itself and ended by devouring its young (Spence, 1999).

If we look again at Mao: The Unknown Story, Chang refers to the economy 21 times, and only one reference is in a positive light. However, it is quite telling that this positive example is when the economy was still in private hands. (Chang, 2005). As previously discussed, Chang has a tendency to focus on the negative aspects of Maos reign as Chairman, however not without reason here. Looking at the example of the Great Leap Forward, it had a disastrous effect on the economy. Maos close cropping policies, while producing a bountiful harvest in the first year of implementation, was one of the main factors for the famine to follow as the nutrients very quickly ran dry in the soil. Famine also occurred because despite nationwide food shortage, Mao insisted on exporting grain anyway in order to continue the illusion that the economy was doing as well. Similarly, iron production figures were high for the first two years, but as previously discussed this iron was useless, so it was a false inflation.

There also can be no denying the disastrous impact of Maos policies on the environment. He stated: for the purpose of attaining freedom in the world of nature, man must use natural science to understand, conquer and change nature and thus attain freedom from nature (Mao, 1940). This meant that essentially, that nature was an obstacle to mans progress, and that it was necessary to conquer said obstacles in order to continue progressing.

One such example was the Four Pests campaign, which began in 1958 in order target four specific pets mosquitoes, flies, rats and sparrows. Sparrows were believed to be eating grain seeds, so Mao ordered that the people eliminate them, and they did so by shooting them and banging pots and pans to scare the birds, until they felt to the ground from exhaustion. (Shapiro, 2001). Unfortunately, it was later discovered that the birds were eating just as many insects that solely ate grain, but by this point, insect populations had multiplied, and it got to the point where sparrows had to be imported from Soviet Russia in order to tackle the problem (Dvorsky, 2012). This campaign is also widely attributed to contributing to the Great Chinese Famine (1958-1961) in which an estimated 30 million people died of starvation. (Dvorsky, 2012).

Additionally, the Great Leap Forward was not particularly successful from an environmental perspective either. Forests were destroyed in order to fuel the steel furnace; this led to geographical erosion, desertification and climate change across China, which transformed once healthy land into barren, unproductive earth (diagonali (pseudonym) 2013). As previously stated, the loss of these forests were completely in vain, the amount of Chinese land covered by forest dropping from 13% to 8% (diagonali (pseudonym) 2013).

Comparatively much fewer people died during the Cultural Revolution than the great leap forward. However it can be argued that Chairman Mao's motives were much less pure. Mao was aware that the others in the party were attempting to marginalise his role as leader of the country. As Trueman puts it, Mao was afraid of a privileged class of scientists, engineers and factory managers forming that would have too much power at his expense. He felt that the best way to remedy this was to create a cult and purge society of those who did not fully support him(Trueman, 2000).However, this had a disastrous effect on Chinas social order. The Red Guards that formed had such a catastrophic effect that an entire generation was left without a formal education for ten years, all to fuel Maos megalomania. Industrial production fell by 12% in just two years. (Trueman, 2000). Eventually, Mao saw the havoc he was wreaking and dispersed the Red Guards by sending them off to the countryside for re-education, but this point the damage had already been done.

Mao caused the deaths of many millions of people, and while it could be argued that his actions laid the framework for China to become the industrial superpower that it is today, as well as improving the nation in some ways, the way in which he went about it is unacceptable. After his death, Deng Xiaoping initialised the open door policy, when combined with new agricultural reforms saw Chinas economy boom (BBC NEWS), which proves that radicalisation was entirely unnecessary and counter productive. His mistakes were primary, and his achievements secondary.

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Trueman, C, (2000) ibid

Trueman, C, (2000) ibid

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diagonali. (2013). Ibid

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Trueman, C . (2000). Ibid

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