Mao Zedong is undeniably the most influential person in China in the twentieth century. Whether Mao’s effect on China was good or bad does not have a simple answer. On the one hand, Mao helped to bring China into the modern world by breaking its ties with its colonial past and helping to unify China’s large population spread over a large area of Asia. Mao played a leading role in defeating the Japanese when they occupied China in World War II. Mao also took the lead in making China a major diplomatic and military power with relations with major powers such as the United States and the Soviet Union around the world.
On the other hand, to reach important goals, Mao engineered large-scale economic programs such as the Five Year Plan and cultural movements such as the Cultural Revolution which were disastrous for large numbers of the population of China. No one knows how many Chinese died in famines caused by Mao’s ill-conceived economic programs. These programs not only failed to make China a major industrial power, but they destroyed the local economies in many areas. Similarly, Mao’s plans for agricultural cooperatives to replace the small farms of China’s innumerable peasants only drove most of the peasants deeper into poverty; and many died from famine when the forced agricultural cooperatives failed to provide food. In Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and the 1970s, many Chinese, particularly local party officials and intellectuals, lost their positions. Some were killed by zealots leading the Revolution, and many more were imprisoned.
In assessing whether Mao’s overall impact on China was good or bad, light is cast on the question by asking, “What would have been the alternative?” While any answer is speculative, one can deduce that the problems China faced, the goals it sought, and the traumas it suffered would not have been all that much different than those under Mao’s leadership. Mao came to power in a China that was largely impoverished. Besides this, China was engaged in an internal conflict between the Kuomintang led by Chiang Kai-shek on the one side and Communists, socialists, Marxists, and other revolutionary factions on the other. While these two sides formed an alliance during World War II to try to drive the Japanese occupiers out of China, before and after the War they were often in armed conflict with each other.
Custom Mao Zedong Research Papers from Paper Masters
A research paper is an in-depth examination of Mao Zedong. More than just an overview of what was learned on Mao Zedong, like a term paper is, a research paper contains analysis of Mao Zedong along the lines of organizational theory and relevant published material. Research papers are highly analytical and can often be more than 8 to 10 pages. The key to a good research project is the examination of recently published journal articles and peer-reviewed material on the Mao Zedong chosen. Like the name implies, research papers are exactly that, a paper that examines the information that can be found on Mao Zedong.