hi! i have a question about maoism/mao in general. is it not true that the "great leap forwards" and his cultural revolution was terrible for the general population? im chinese and my mother, grandparents, and great-grandparents all went through a famine at the time, and my mother is extremely anti-communist for that reason.
was mao a good person? what part of his plan failed, or did it fail at all? and what is there to say about the millions of lives lost—was that a result of his oppressive regime? were the red guards a part of the package of "maoism?"
sorry if this is too much, ty!
The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution
I don't like contradicting/arguing with the recounted lived experiences of people, especially with cases like this, since I know literally nothing about your grandparents and their experiences. Whatever your grandparents experienced was probably real. That being said, China is a huge country and the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution where experimental times. All over the country people had different experiences for a number of different reasons. Both events had significant errors attached to them and major failures, but the idea of massive deaths or Mao committing genocide is enterally fictious. The popular number of 16.5 million dead in the Great Leap Forward didn't come about until after Mao's death, released by Deng during his anti-socialist campaign as an attack against Mao and Chinses Socialism. No solid method has ever been released attached to this method. Meanwhile CIA backed American numbers can go as high as 30 million using methods which are about as reliable as pulling numbers from a hat.
On the whole living standers rose sharply during the Mao period, especially during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, as well as other key metrics like life expectancy, agricultural output and total population. The Great Leap Forward eradicated the feudal relations which had been heaped on the back of the Chinese people for over 1000 years, saw the mass voluntary collectivization of agriculture and the creation of the communes all over China, the rapid growth of industrialized agriculture and light and heavy industry and the narrowing of inequalities between the cities and countryside.
The Cultural Revolution, or by its full name, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, saw continued and intensified positive economic and human outcomes even by liberal standards (minus massive corporate profits) and even liberals are forced to concede that ending practices like foot binding was pretty cool. The GPCR was mainly aimed at wiping away capitalist and feudal customs (such as foot binding, the Confucian (patriarchal) family system, superstition, etc.) as well as combat the growing trend of capitalist roaders in the party. In this regard the GPCR was very successful.
Both of these events, while portrayed in western media as evil and authoritarian, where broadly popular and based on the will of the masses, not some "authoritarian" state out of 1984.
If you are interested in stats and figures in more detail, this work is a good place to start.
That being said, historical debates like this are not very useful if we simply reduce them to "Mao bad/no actually Mao good." This is the dominant trend online, debates on if Stalin or Mao was good or bad backed up by hasty Wikipedia searches and an endless torrent of childish insults from both participants.
The reason revolutionaries and revolutionaries in formation must uphold Chairman Mao is because of his useful contributions to Marxism and because of the lesions we can learn from the struggle he led, such as the importance of two line struggle and the mass line.
