Hello everybody and welcome to the start of our new saga: Communism!
I'd like to take this opportunity to say hello to all our newcomers. You guys have been subscribing to the newsletter like mad and I just wanted to say thank you! I hope you enjoy these newsletters as much as I love writing them. I learn something new every week doing these and I hope you do too.
This week we are starting off with one of the most famous communists of all time, and someone who believed in Communism with his whole heart – so much that he convinced a country of more than half a billion people in the 1960s and 1970s to as well.
Mao Zedong was born in 1893 in the Hunan province in China to a prosperous peasant family. He became one of the founding members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chairman of the party in 1943 during the Long March.
During the years of Mao's reign, he quickly ascended to a god-like position in the eyes of the people, celebrated for his strong Communist ideals, heavily inspired by Marxism-Leninism (which we will discuss further next week), to re-establish the Chinese National Essence and rebuild the nation after centuries of struggle.
Tragically, hundreds of millions of Chinese lives were lost in the process of putting Mao's vision into action and this has undeniably had a huge impact on the Chinese Nation, both domestically and internationally. For these reasons, Mao is regarded as one of the most controversial figures of all time who employed one of the most repressive totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.
One of the movements of the regime that Mao is most remembered for is the Cultural Revolution. The Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution took place over 10 years from 1966 until Mao's death in 1976. During this time, potentially millions of people died, but the exact number is unknown. It is critical that we avoid taking a Eurocentric view on the Cultural Revolution (that Mao was a madman and caused only grave suffering to the Chinese people), but attempt to gain a more nuanced understanding of Mao's intentions, as anecdotal evidence suggests that many people living in China today have mixed feelings about the Cultural Revolution.
This is not an apology for Mao, but Mao's vision for the Cultural Revolution was not for millions of his own people to die. The intention of the Cultural Revolution was to send the youth of the city to the countryside to learn from the peasants, who Mao believed held the knowledge of the essence of China and would inspire a new revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy that the CCP had readopted after Mao's ascent to power. Mao never liked bureaucracy. He wanted a true communist state; one that was run by the people, for the people. After his ascent to power, he realised the CCP had quickly adopted a powerful position, unequal to the power held by the people; a hierarchical configuration that was not akin to his Marxist ideals.
Sadly, this turned sour very quickly. As part of the process to reclaim the nation and rid the people of 'revisionist' or 'capitalist' influences, Chinese cultural artefacts were destroyed, thousands of intellectuals were threatened or tortured, citizens' lives were upended, the natural environment was damaged, and millions of lives were lost. But the people did this willingly, and that is perhaps what the Eurocentric view misses, because Mao promised their country a better, more prosperous way of life.
Such a large country, with billions of citizens still below the poverty line, it seems, is still hoping for a vision out of this. Perhaps this explains some of what his happening in China now. (A controversial topic, that I do not know enough about to go into more.)
As always, there is much I haven't discussed here that would influence your interpretation of this little snippet. This opinion is heavily influenced on a class I took this semester about Maoism at uni. I do not know everything about the topic, nor do I intend this to be a summative conclusion of it. Do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Then, use that in your essays!
