So we all agree that most of the fatalities under Mao were mostly just because he was hillariously incompetent?

So we all agree that most of the fatalities under Mao were mostly just because he was hillariously incompetent?

>Kill all sparrows bc why not
>Locust population books
>Locusts destroy crops
>20 million Chinese starve to death
Yes

> hillariously incompetent
funny way to say clinically demented
I mean the guy liked to defecate outdoors

Don't forget that the actual farmers were the ones starving because redistribution.
This was a more common thing in Chinaland back then

There's absolutely nothing wrong with defecating outdoors user. It's relaxing.

the world would be better off if Mao died in 1950 and Zhou Enlai took over the PRC

a mixture of incompetency and a blatant disregard for human life

Zhou Enlai was a spineless bitch though, the party would've puppetted him at best in no time flat.

I'd say at least 2/3 Mao's fault and 1/3 weather problems.

t. Deng Xiaoping

I'd rather a ruthless leader, than an incompetent one. A ruthless leader can see reason, can see end goal, can be efficient.
An incompetent leader just needs to given water wings and taken away.

Damn, now I kind of want to tey this. Did Indians have the right idea all along?

*try

A lot of problems resulted from Mao meddling in areas that were completely out of his competency, and the entire party just went along with it because that was how the whole apparatus was organized. When he went to see for himself how things turned out in his hometown during the Great Leap Forward, he immediately rescinded his directives there because even he could tell that his plans weren't working out.

So yes, Mao was generally incompetent at economic management and social organization. Economic and social reform should have been delegated to someone who had an idea of what to do. Observers on the ground should have accurately reported what was actually happening. But none of these things happened because of the measures he took to consolidate his power and ensure ideological homogeneity.

I heard Mao got pushed out for a while following the calamities of the great famine, and that China was particularily prosperous at this time until he "came back" via the cultural revolution.
How true is this?

1950s economic reforms were successful until the Great Leap Forward.

Cultural Revolution was successful.

Great Leap Forward was a failure, but not due to incompetency, but rather for a much more complex set of problems that can't be reduced down to "boy he didn't go to school" or "lmao he killed birds"

It is fault of mao but more importantly complete disregard for human life that china has.

>Cultural Revolution was successful.
Very very debatable. It turned around the borderline insane old Chinese culture present but the collateral damage was frightningly immense and what followed it was decades of fearmongering culture.

Compared to the alternative of a bureacrautic gerontocracy ala Soviet Union, that is the better choice.

Again, the damages sustained to Chinese cultural monuments, cities and the very Chinese "soul" itself was pretty immense, maybe if it was orchestrated by someone not a literal sociopath it would've turned out slightly better but as it stands now you can't honestly and wholeheartedly condone what happened during those years.
I might be a bit biased since I read Jung Chang's questionably biased works but still.

>Modernity ain't free

yes

Which would be a good thing. They might have even come up with term limits or something

mao was both

You forgot the most important part where Mao ordered all the fucking farmers to work in factories.

They weren't factories, they were making ""steel"" in their backyards from their cutlery, pots and pans.
If that's what you're referring to.

Doesn't matter. The labor redistribution was a huge factor to the famine.

Yes totally

It was at least 30 million according to Jasper Becker, who is pretty reliable

Try it! we have an entire board about shitting outdoors

He was cruel AND stupid

100% true.
Cultural Revolution was a last ditch effort by Mao to regain relevance.
Sadly it succeeded.

No, he ordered the collectives to start producing iron, and in agrarian communes with no knowledge or experience of mining or metallurgy, they resorted to trying to meet the goals by smelting spare metal tools and so on. A lot of "Mao ordered X" anecdotes in actuality are the central government putting up demands, and the communes failing to meet them due to their poor execution. The problem was unrealistic goals by central government, not "telling peasants to work in factories".

>It was the locusts
>not the massive regional drought

Zhou Enlai isn't some cool alternative to Mao or a Chinese Trotsky. He was literally the second in charge, and held key posts during the periods of which Mao (and he) can be criticized for. Your statement is somewhat in line with something like "the world would be better off if USSR was headed by Lavrenti Beria in 1946". Besides, Mao was not continously in power for his whole reign. The bureacraut-moderate wing of the party led by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping from the end of Great Leap to the beginning of Cultural Revolution.

Every other country managed it. Even the Egyptians aren't killing this much of each other.

Now all Chinese are known for is grinding up tiger penis for their medicines. Glorious.

>Japs set out to exterminate all chinks
>only achieve a score of ~20 mil in 8 years
>Mao decides to modernize economy and agriculture
>doubles their score in a mere 3 years
How can Japs even compete?

It's widely known that the Chinese are the foremost experts at killing the Chinese.

You would too if you spent years fighting a guerrilla war

Mao fought nothing but his superiors, and only to empower himself.

Dude even modern China has accepted that it was mostly the fault of policy.

>Until the early 1980s, the Chinese government's stance, reflected by the name "Three Years of Natural Disasters", was that the famine was largely a result of a series of natural disasters compounded by several planning errors. Researchers outside China argued that massive institutional and policy changes that accompanied the Great Leap Forward were the key factors in the famine, or at least worsened nature-induced disasters.[9][10] Since the 1980s there has been greater official Chinese recognition of the importance of policy mistakes in causing the disaster, claiming that the disaster was 30% due to natural causes and 70% by mismanagement.[11]

>inb4 wikipedia isn't a real source

This tbqh, Even Deng came out and said it was mostly Mao's fault.

never heard of Fidel Castro or Tito shitting in the garden

He fucked 14 year old peasant girls and gave the STDs which they considered a "badge of honor".

>ywn deflower QT peasant girls who revere you so much, they'd take it raw and accept all of your venereal disease infested schnitzel

Yeah, there were literally of peasant girls with STDs because of Mao.

this, and as the party is still around you have massive amounts of repressed trauma throughout society for anyone who was alive at the time.
Not to mention he outright lost control of his zealous youth guards and it just devolved into a shitshow in general
>without the Cultural Revolution China would've had the Soviet style culture
no you probably would've had Deng Xiaoping pushing reforms even earlier with Mao sidelined and tottering off in senility. and plenty of nations have achieved modernity without requiring the massive destruction and psychological trauma inflicted through the Cultural Revolution
until Xi came to power the Chinese leadership basically tried to do its best to mitigate the importance of Mao because they really couldn't justify his fuck ups but couldn't outright disown him, though there's been a semi revival in the last few years