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(More customer reviews)Just as Red China's history and culture remains a mystery to most in the West, so does Mao Tse-Tung stand as little more than a footnote to world history - a great big footnote, of course, but one little studied and even less understood than most by Westerners. Some may only know him as the grandfatherly fellow who met with President Nixon in 1972. Mao was and is one of the most significant leaders in modern world history, a monster and a genius who made China a world power while bringing about the deaths of more people (his own people) than Hitler and Stalin combined.
Mao was born a peasant, and in many ways he ruled as a peasant; he was a man of "charming vulgarities" who almost single-handedly saved the Communist movement in China. As a youth, he was part of the first wave of Communists working to bring about revolution in a country overseen by corrupt and generally ineffectual leaders. As Chiang Kai-Shek sought to rid the country of this growing Communist menace in the early 1930s, Mao became an outlaw who led the remnants of the revolutionaries on "the long march" - which only 20,000 out of 100,000 survived; he then established a new base in the north and began mobilizing an army. Vastly outnumbered by Chiang Kai-Shek's superior forces, Mao was able to avoid total defeat thanks to the Japanese invasion of mainland China - Mao joined the fight against the foreign aggressor. The U.S. inadvertently helped arm the man who would, in 1949, claim control of the entire country and establish the People's Republic of China.
This video draws a great contrast between Mao the revolutionary and Chairman Mao. His strengths did not lie in managing a country, as was soon made clear by his radical changes to Chinese society. Rebuffed by Stalin, Mao set about forging his own Communist reshaping of the country, asking more of his people than was possible. His massive farm collectivization efforts and zest for overnight industrialization quickly led to a horrendous famine; some 40 million Chinese died of hunger between 1959 and 1961. Mao did not see the reality of the disaster at first because people were afraid to tell him the truth. His invitation to the intellectuals to speak their mind in 1956 resulted in an "anti-rightist" purge that tore apart over one million families, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without a job and tens of thousands consigned to labor camps. The true state of affairs soon became apparent, however, and Mao was forced to the sidelines.
After five years of careful planning and a calculated mobilization of China's young people, Mao reclaimed ultimate power and disposed of the moderates he viewed as having rolled back many of his reforms. This new Proletarian Cultural Revolution marked a return to Mao's paranoid dictatorship. The moderates and intellectuals had again been purged, and over one million Chinese had been killed or imprisoned. Mao did manage to do some good, despite himself, in his old age. The visit by President Nixon and the opening of Chinese-US dialogue after three decades of silence marked Mao's turn to diplomacy and his hope of gaining China an important seat on the world stage. He would die four years after Nixon's historic visit. The Chinese mourned the loss of their great savior, and Mao's influence has never abated in the country, even as the new generation of leaders seeks to come to terms with Mao's true legacy.
I think this video does a good job of summarizing Mao's and China's history in the short time allotted. It also does a fine job revealing Mao the man to viewers. He was a great mobilizer of men who never lost his peasant ways. He was also a notorious womanizer. Was he, like Stalin, evil, though? This video would seem to indicate that he was not. He seemingly did try to do what he thought best for China; the problem was that he became, after 1958, a paranoid tyrant divorced from the reality of his land and his people. He certainly had little problem justifying the destruction of his enemies, but he did not bring misery to his people intentionally. Mao was a simple yet highly complex man, and this video makes for an instructive introduction to the subject at hand.
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Biography - Mao Tse Tung: China's Peasant Emperor (2005)
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