Mao Zedong - Simple English Wikipedia

# Mao Zedong

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Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong was a Chinese Communist leader. Many have called him a dictator, because millions of Chinese deaths were his fault and because he was bad at running the government and was impatient with waiting for the results he wanted. Others, mainly Chinese Communists, have defended him, saying he is a revolutionary hero.

Mao was born on December 26, 1893 to a farming family in Hunan providence, China. He became a Communist while working as a librarian (someone who works in a library). Throughout the 1920's, his power increased in the Communist Party of China, and by 1933, he was its leader. During the 1920's, the party began to fight with Chiang Kai-shek and his party, the Kuomintang. This fight was called the Chinese Civil War Some people say the Nationalists wanted China to be a democracy (where people choose their leader), but other say they only wanted to keep power. The Communists wanted to make the country a socialist one-party state (a country where only one political party is allowed).

The Nationalists had a stronger military, and in something called the Long March Mao escaped from them with his fellow Communists to a part of China called Yenan. By this time, in 1935, he was the reason for more than 500,000 deaths.

When Japan invaded China in 1937, Mao and Chiang briefly stopped fighting. However, soon after the United States entered the war, they attacked each other again. Some say the Communists started it, other say the Nationalists.

By the time the United States defeated Japan in 1945, the Chinese Civil War was very violent. Chiang had support in the cities and among the middle class, but Mao, with many peasants behind him, became stronger. By 1949, Mao had chased the Nationalists to an island called Taiwan. Then, he told the people that China would be Communist, with him as leader.

Mao had many plans for how China could move forward very fast and catch up with countries like the United Kingdom. However, except for the First Five Year Plan, they were all failures that resulted in violence or starvation (death from hunger). Some believe that the amount of people who starved during the Second Five Year Plan was more than 30 million people.

He disagreed with Nikita Khrushchev, new leader of the Soviet Union, and the close relations that the countries had once had disappeared. China was left with only a few allies (friendly countries), such as Albania, North Korea, Democratic Kampuchea, and Pakistan. This argument was called the Sino-Soviet Split.

Then, in the "Cultural Revolution" he drove all of China's best and brightest people out of their jobs, and into the farms. China become poorer, and weaker as a result. He died in 1976.

Some Chinese mainlanders still believe Mao Zedong as a great leader, although they also know that he made serious mistakes in his later life. According to Deng Xiaoping, Mao was "seven parts right and three parts wrong", and his "contributions are primary and his mistakes secondary." Some, including members of the Communist Party of China, say Mao pulled China away from its biggest ally, the USSR, in the Sino-Soviet Split, however, Mao at the time regarded Khrushchev's denounciation of Stalin in 1956 as implicate criticism of himself and his own cult of personality. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution are also thought of as major disasters in his policy. If the figure of seventy million dead as a result of his policies is true, it would be an big number of victims of state violence in peace time. Other critics of Mao fault him for not encouraging birth control and for creating a demographic bump which later Chinese leaders responded to with the one child policy.

He also made a few changes to the Chinese language. He changed the Wade Giles system of Romanization to Pinyin, which is different. For this reason, Nanking is now called Nanjing on modern maps. Taiwan still uses Wade Giles, so its capital is called Taipei instead of the pinyin Taibei. He also simplified the Chinese characters, making them easier to read and write so that more people would be able to read.

## [edit] Sources

1. [1] Washington State University.

- BBC 中国丛谈特辑（上）
- BBC 中国丛谈特辑（上）采访录音
- BBC 中国丛谈特辑（下）
- BBC 中国丛谈特辑（下）采访录音
- "Mao: The Unknown Story" on Amazon.com
- 開放出版社 《毛澤東：鮮為人知的故事》中文版
- 《毛澤東：鮮為人知的故事》 英文注釋
- 德国之声，含采访录音 张戎：鲜为人知的毛泽东是怎样写成的
- Spence. J. MAO 1999 Weidenfeld & Nicolson LONDON

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Category: Politicians

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