History UsefulNotes / MaoZedong

Mao later married Yang Kaihui, who was the daughter of his favorite professor, after having an unhappy arranged marriage with Luo Yixiu that ended with Luo dying. It didn't end well for Yang, who was killed by Chiang's regime (the Kuomintang) in 1930.

Mao later married Yang Kaihui, who was the daughter of his favorite professor, despite the fact that Mao was already married. It didn't end well for Yang, who was killed by Chiang's regime (the Kuomintang) in 1930.

->''"Politics is war without bloodshed. War is politics with bloodshed."''

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[[quoteright:225:http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/MaoZedong_1610.jpg]]

Mao was increasingly senile - if not outright mentally ill - by the 1970s, and his wife Jiang Qing and three of her associates later took on a relatively prominent role within the party by 'speaking' for Mao until he died in 1976. Mao's immediate successor, Hua 'Two Whatevers' Guofang[[note]] We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave"[[/note]] turned on Jiang and her associates, who were accused of causing the entire cultural revolution by themselves - comfortably ignoring the massive popularity of the Red Guard movement - and 'purged' (executed) as 'The Gang of Four'. Deng Xiaoping, who was later re-habilitated, came to the fore for the third time and this time took leadership of the party from Hua on the basis of experimental economic reforms that could well mean the end of communism. This was totally unacceptable to Maoists within the party, but such was the legacy of the Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution that Hua was toppled and Deng was in 1978 able to proclaim the SEZ - Special Economic Zone - experiment. Mao's cult of personality was still so strong that, despite the supremely dubious legacy, Deng felt unable to publicly criticise Mao for his failures until 1981. To this day, there are some who ''still'' regard Mao - and not Sun Yat-sen/Zhongshan - as the Founding Father of modern China. This may be because the former's pretty-darn-obvious-to-us bungling is not quite so obvious in China, wherein all textbooks are still written by the Department of Education - and wherein the kiddies are told that Mao was fundamentally a good guy who made some mistakes. According to Deng, Mao was "seven parts right and three parts wrong". Like numerous party figures before and since, Deng found it very convenient in political terms to blame the Gang of Four for Mao's actions.

* ''Film/ForrestGump'' (the book) saved him from drowning.
* ''Film/{{Kundun}}'' by Creator/MartinScorsese features him in a cameo (played by Robert Lin). It portrays him as a bit of an AffablyEvil smarmy politician.
* ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'': The episode "Goo Goo Gai Pan" had the Simpson family go to China, and on the way they visit Mao's mausoleum. When Homer came up to Mao's body, he said to it quietly: "Aww, look at him. He's like a little angel that killed 50 million people. Yes you are! ''Yes you are!''" This episode was BannedInChina.
** Note that in RealLife you cannot approach Mao's corpse, you have to march past reverently. There are so many people who come to see him that you really ''can't'' stop. Rumor is because the embalmer did a very poor job, and they don't want anyone to find out.
* In a ''Series/MontyPythonsFlyingCircus'' sketch, Mao appears on a quiz show along with Karl Marx, Lenin and Che Guevara.
* In one of the early ''ComicBook/SpiderMan'' comics by Creator/StanLee and Creator/SteveDitko, Harry Osborn tells Peter Parker that he's about as popular at Empire State University as Mao. This meant that he was ''unpopular,'' as it was before the college fad for Marxism in the late 1960s.

* Z.G. Li and Joy meet him in ''Literature/DreamsOfJoy'', which takes place in China during the 1950s.
* Playable in VideoGame/{{Civilization}} I to IV. One of the more peaceful leaders, but he's quick to take offense if you ally with anyone he doesn't like. Tends to sink to the bottom of the list near the endgame.
** Ironically in the Chinese version of Civilization IV, he was replaced by Emperor Tang Taizong.
* The modern {{opera}} ''Theatre/NixonInChina'' naturally features Mao (along with Jiang Qing, Zhou Enlai, and of course [[UsefulNotes/RichardNixon Richard]] and Pat Nixon).

* The fourth run of ''LetsPlay/TwitchPlaysPokemon'', ''[[LetsPlay/TwitchPlaysPokemonFireRed Fire Red]]'', features a Skitty nicknamed "Meow Zedong", who hopes to usher in a communist revolution to the Pokemon world.

Mao Zedong was the first head of state of the People's Republic of China, having become head of the Chinese Communist Party in 1935 and lead it through [[NoMoreEmperors the Chinese Civil War of 1946-50]]. He ruled the PRC until his death in 1976.

In practice this treaty was more or less ignored by both sides, with GMD and Communist guerillas rarely co-operating and both parties' forces involved in an active stand-off along their shared border. The 'Hundred Regiments Offensive' of 1940 was launched as per [[JosephStalin Stalin's request]] to take pressure off the Guomindang (shortly after Soviet aid to the Guomindang had been retracted due to the requirements of the USSR's military modernisation program), and marked the only time the CCP can be confirmed ([[UnreliableNarrator by non-CCP sources]]) to have fought ImperialJapan. It yielded some early successes because [[KatanasOfTheRisingSun the IJA]] had expected the CCP to keep its truce with them, but they soon rushed in reinforcements and beat them back without too much trouble. After the offensive was over, the two made peace again and avoided fighting each other for the rest of the war - the IJA even allowing the CCP to set up numerous Soviets in the nominally-occupied (and in practice rather chaotic/anarchic) North China Plain on the grounds that [[EnemyMine it was better that the territories be controlled by the CCP than by the Guomindang or other partisan groups who might fight the Japanese occupation forces]].

By mid-1947 the country suffered hyperinflation as the short-sightedness of the GMD's economic policies - they tried to balance their huge budget deficits by printing money instead of, say, making a serious attempt at re-centralising their administration and thereby correcting gross corruption at the local level[[note]] Because Jiang/Chiang wanted to concentrate on the military campaigns. This would've worked if the campaigns were as decivise as he was hoping - which they weren't. In hindsight he should've hedged his bets more and tried his darnedest to get the reform programme pushed through and implemented rather than just giving it a half-hearted go[[/note]] - began to tell, which made the Communists' reasonable credentials as a governing body look that much more attractive. With Manchuria secured for and its economy stabilised by the Communists, the Peoples' Liberation Army began to fight open battles with the GMD. They made great use of their superior manoeuvrability and intelligence - the product of a huge network of peasant-sympathisers who had been antagonised by the GMD - to crush or - more often - force the surrender of entire GMD formations one unit at a time. After a further two years of fighting, The Peoples' Republic of China was declared on October 1, 1949, whereas the Chiang and his remnant forces retreated to the island of Taiwan.

Mao was increasingly senile - if not outright mentally ill - by the 1970s, and his wife Jiang Qing and three of her associates later took on a relatively prominent role within the party by 'speaking' for Mao until he died in 1976. Mao's immediate successor, Ma 'Two Whatevers' Guofang[[note]] We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave"[[/note]] turned on Jiang and her associates, who were accused of causing the entire cultural revolution by themselves - comfortably ignoring the massive popularity of the Red Guard movement - and 'purged' (executed) as 'The Gang of Four'. Deng Xiaoping, who was later re-habilitated, came to the fore for the third time and this time took leadership of the party from Ma on the basis of experimental economic reforms that could well mean the end of communism. This was totally unacceptable to Maoists within the party, but such was the legacy of the Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution that Ma was toppled and Deng was in 1978 able to proclaim the SEZ - Special Economic Zone - experiment. Mao's cult of personality was still so strong that, despite the supremely dubious legacy, Deng felt unable to publicly criticise Mao for his failures until 1981. To this day, there are some who ''still'' regard Mao - and not Sun Yat-sen/Zhongshan - as the Founding Father of modern China. This may be because the former's pretty-darn-obvious-to-us bungling is not quite so obvious in China, wherein all textbooks are still written by the Department of Education - and wherein the kiddies are told that Mao was fundamentally a good guy who made some mistakes. According to Deng, Mao was "seven parts right and three parts wrong". Like numerous party figures before and since, Deng found it very convenient in political terms to blame the Gang of Four for Mao's actions.

* In the {{OVA}} of ''TheLegendOfKoizumi'', Koizumi's aura is so powerful, it actually causes Mao to ''rise from the grave'' so he and Koizumi can engage in a {{Mahjong}} battle. Mao teams up with PolPot for the match. [[spoiler: Mao loses the match, but earns Koizumi's respect as a WorthyOpponent.]]

Mao was born in Hunan Province in December 26, 1893. He was quite a rebellious lad, and had AbusiveParents. He managed to scrape enough money together from working on the family farm to get himself into high school. [[UsefulNotes/NoMoreEmperors When the 1911 revolution got going he joined the local (Hunan-ese) revolutionary forces for a time]], returning to high school once it was over so he could graduate. He later got job as a librarian at the Beijing University library, studying there on the side. It was in Beijing that he came in contact with Chinese Marxists.

* The fourth run of ''LetsPlay/TwitchPlaysPokemon'', ''[[LetsPlay/TwitchPlaysPokemonFireRed Fire Red]]'', features a Skitty nicknamed "Meow Zedong", who hopes to usher in a communist revolution to the Pokemon world.

* In one of the early ''ComicBook/SpiderMan'' comics by Creator/StanLee and SteveDitko, Harry Osborn tells Peter Parker that he's about as popular at Empire State University as Mao. This meant that he was ''unpopular,'' as it was before the college fad for Marxism in the late 1960s.

* ''Film/{{Kundun}} by Creator/MartinScorsese features him in a cameo (played by Robert Lin). It portrays him as a bit of an AffablyEvil smarmy politician.

* The modern {{opera}} ''Theatre/NixonInChina'' naturally features Mao (along with Jiang Qing, Zhou Enlai, and of course [[RichardNixon Richard]] and Pat Nixon).

->''"Politics is war without bloodshed. [[DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment War is politics with bloodshed.]]"''

* Z.G. Li and Joy meet him in ''DreamsOfJoy'', which takes place in China during the 1950s.

Deng Xiaoping managed to undo much of Mao's excesses, and later launched his campaign of ToGetRichIsGlorious, changing China's economy from a socialist based one into a market economy, which allowed for greater private enterprise and ownership. As such, [[{{Irony}} today's China lies closer to Chiang Kai-shek's vision than Mao's own]]. In spite of this, Maoist memorabilia and "Red Tourism" to Mao's hometown still remain popular today in China due to nostalgia.

When the results of the Great Leap Forward became known to the party at large in 1961 the five-year plan was aborted in favour of a disaster-control (i.e. famine-relief) effort spearheaded by Deng Xiaoping, Mao's credibility as a governor was severely undermined and he [[TenMinuteRetirement resigned his position as Chairman]]. Consequently, official control of the party went to slightly less radical figures like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Mao described himself as "dead ancestor" - praised but never consulted. In 1966, [[HesBack Mao made a comeback]] from the shadows of the party - The CulturalRevolution. History was revised and Liu and Deng were blamed for the 'Three Years of Natural Disasters' and subjected to re-education. Mao's newest Grand Crusade to completely destroy China's 'Feudal' and 'Reactionary' heritage of Daoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and the Abrahamic religions. Mao's chosen pilgrims were the Red Guards, young ideological-extremists (largely students) who destroyed - or tried to destroy - pretty much every legacy of China's history pre-1949. They did a pretty good job, actually, but the Party leadership soon realised that the movement was getting way out of hand - the Red Guard were so convinced of their own (ideological) righteousness that they were actually beginning to criticise the Army and the higher echelons of the Party for being insufficiently communist. In the end, the People's Liberation Army was used to break up the movement - and some Red Guard even fought back. However, the movement was soon crushed and thousands of Party members, including Liu Shaoqi, were MisBlamed for the failures of the CulturalRevolution and sentenced to re-eudcation or death. [[TheManBehindTheMan Mao slipped back out of the spotlight and into the shadows once more]], from which he continued to influence the Party Leadership and its decision and ensure its Mao-ist orthodoxy.

The land that was thus freed up was redistributed, largely to the poor, this measure securing the CCP a solid base of support which made up for their tentative control over the (somewhat, if not ''openly'', hostile) towns and cities. Generous funds were allocated to a programme of national schooling for all the country's children, and Chinese characters were simplified/standardised to make reading and writing them easier. In 1951, fearing that the North Koreans would lose in the UsefulNotes/KoreanWar when the US-led United Nations taskforce (the USSR had momentarily dropped out of the UN and its Security Council in protest) [[CurbStompBattle curb stomped]] their way up the Korean peninsula, Mao and his generals unleashed a ZergRush of 'Chinese People's Volunteers' against the UN troops, saving Kim Il Sung's regime from defeat at the hands of the UN.

We can't say the 'real' figure with certainty, as the CCP's official policy is that the famines and resultant epidemics [[FanonDiscontinuity were not at all or even in part the result of their organisation's callousness and incompetence]]. Also, sorting out 'normal' deaths from the 'extra-ordinary' ones caused by the famines is a teensy bit difficult - with a population of more than five hundred million at the time, a natural death-rate of 1% of the total per-annum would give a figure of more than 15 million people 'naturally' dying over that period. Access to CCP Archives is thus denied to researchers who ask for it on the grounds that what they're searching for doesn't exist - and most researchers know better than to ask. Officially the famines and epidemics were and are still blamed on poor Fedual/Guomindang-era environmental management and poor weather, the period being dubbed the "Three Years of Natural Disasters". It didn't help that Mao's China had a schism with Nikita Khrushchev's Soviet Union - the "Sino-Soviet Split". This resulted in a complete withdrawal of Soviet technical assistance as the two fought small-scale, but increasingly intense, skirmishes along and across their mutually-disagreed-upon borders.

----

Mao Zedong was the first head of state of the People's Republic of China, leading the Chinese Communist Party from 1935 and overseeing the establishment of the Peoples' Republic of China in 1949, ruling it until his death in 1976.

Mao was increasingly senile - if not outright mentally ill - by the 1970s, and his wife Jiang Qing and three of her associates later took on a relatively prominent role within the party by 'speaking' for Mao until he died in 1976. Mao's immediate successor, Ma 'Two Whatevers' Guofang[[note]] We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave"[[/note]] turned on Jiang and her associates, who were accused of causing the entire cultural revolution by themselves - comfortably ignoring the massive popularity of the Red Guard movement - and 'purged' (executed) as 'The Gang of Four'. Deng Xiaoping, who was later re-habilitated, came to the fore for the third time and this time took leadership of the party from Ma on the basis of experimental economic reforms that could well mean the end of communism. This was totally unacceptable to Maoists within the party, but such was the legacy of the Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution that Ma was toppled and Deng was in 1978 able to proclaim the SEZ - Special Economic Zone - experiment. Mao's cult of personality was still so strong that, despite the supremely dubious legacy, Deng felt unable to publicly criticise Mao for his failures until 1981. To this day, there are some who ''stil'' regard Mao - and not Sun Yat-sen/Zhongshan - as the Founding Father of modern China. This may be because the former's pretty-darn-obvious-to-us bungling is not quite so obvious in China, wherein all textbooks are still written by the Department of Education - and wherein the kiddies are told that Mao was fundamentally a good guy who made some mistakes. According to Deng, Mao was "seven parts right and three parts wrong". Like numerous party figures before and since, Deng found it very convenient in political terms to blame the Gang of Four for Mao's actions.

!!Tropes Embodied by Mao

* AMillionIsAStatistic: "Let us imagine how many people would die if war breaks out. There are 2.7 billion people in the world, and a third could be lost. If it is a little higher it could be half ... I say that if the worst came to the worst and one-half dies, there will still be one-half left, but imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist. After a few years there would be 2.7 billion people again".
** Note that historians still debate whether he was serious when he said this, or if it was just sabre-rattling (see Deadpan Snarker below).
* {{ArchEnemy}}: to ChiangKaiShek.
* YouFailEconomicsForever: the Great Leap Forward was intended to surpass Britain's industrial capacity at that time for a period of 15 years. It actually started well and had the right idea - initially. (JosefStalin had, after all, managed a similarly rapid industrialization at a huge human cost). But numerous factors soon ruined the whole thing. Local officials inflating numbers and not reporting failures caused negative results to not be seen until too late. Mao getting overconfident and pushing production quotas upwards meant that farmers ended up abandoning their crops or melting their farming tools to meet the quotas. And the unchecked (but low quality) industrialization destroyed rivers or woods that fed the local ecosystem, destroying China's agricultural productivity and ultimately causing the starvation deaths of ''tens of millions'' of people.
** The exact numbers are sketchy, but estimates range from 16.5 to 46 million - as with Stalin, there are almost as many estimates as there are authors. When we add victims of purges, labor camps and the invasion of Tibet, the death toll of Mao's regime could be anywhere up to 78 million, which is more people than died in all of UsefulNotes/WorldWar2 (though when we average all estimates we get "only" 45.7 million deaths). Incidentally, this makes Mao's regime the deadliest in the history of humanity in terms of sheer numbers. However, since China had a much larger population than the USSR or Nazi Germany, and Mao ruled a long time, you could make an argument that regimes like Hitler's, Stalin's, the Khmer Rogue and the Congo under Leopold were even worse than Mao's China since they killed off a larger ''percentage'' of their population.
** Note that China is well known for its deadly famines and rebellions long before Mao. The Anshi Rebellion during the 700s was estimated to have killed 34 million people, half of China's population at the time, while the Taiping Rebellion during the 19th century killed at least 20 million people. Mao's predecessor ChiangKaiShek presided over the deadly 1942 Henan famine, which killed over three million - not that, of course, the Guomindang had ''any'' money to spare for famine relief given the debilitating expense of [[UsefulNotes/SecondSinoJapaneseWar the]] [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo war]]. Even Chiang's ''loyal'' troops in the Henan salient (the province was surrounded by the Japanese on three sides, and had to be supplied by ox-cart) were consistently underfed.
** [[FromBadToWorse Made even worse]] after you realize that, after Mao was made aware of the problem, he ''still'' decided to keep it going for several years.
* BadassBookworm: Had no personal combat skills, but he was both an exceedingly callous and shrewd politician and a man fairly well-read in The Classics (courtesy of his position as Beijing University Librarian) and Marxist philosophy (again, largely due to his time in University). He made conscious efforts to emulate Sun Tzu in his writings on military tactics, though he was smart enough to appreciate his shortcomings as a military leader and leave the campaign- and strategic-planning to Lin Biao and his other Marshalls.
** He and most of his cabinet - especially Zhou Enlai - liked to style themselves as bureaucrats of The Confucian Mode, a school which emphasized breadth of knowledge.
* BadBoss: His treatment of Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai, among others, both of whom died of abuses by Red Guards.
* BlueAndOrangeMorality: Let's just say that he had a very, very unusual approach to ethics. Even his personal physician, when interviewed after Mao's death, said that Mao simply didn't think like other people.
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* DeadGuyOnDisplay: His embalmed body is on display in a mausoleum in Beijing, (even though back in 1956, he signed a proposal that all central leaders should be creamated after death). Some claim that the body is actually just a wax sculpture (Mao died at the height of the Sino-Soviet split and the Russian enbalmers were notedly lackadaisical with their work). For what it's worth, tourists are whisked past the coffin at high speeds, to the point the body's authenticity can't be verified.
* DeadpanSnarker: He had a sarcastic sense of humor, to the point that it can sometimes be very difficult to tell whether he was advocating extreme measures or merely being snarky.
-->'''Nikita Khruschev''': ''"The difference between you and I, is that I came from peasant stock, but you are the son of a wealthy landlord"''
-->'''Mao''': ''"Well, there is one similarity; each of us is traitor to his class."''
* DracoInLeatherPants: Many people, especially in mainland China, prefer to focus on his achievements in unifying the country and defeat of the GMD, rather than his political purges and excesses in the Cultural Revolution. (The official position of the Chinese Communist Party is that about two-thirds of what he did was good. His picture is still on the gate into the Forbidden City, and on all the banknotes.)
* EgoPolis:
** His hometown in Hunan as well as Beijing and Shanghai became essentially monuments to Mao till his death despite not one city in China was renamed as Mao Zedong City like in the case of his Vietnamese counterpart Ho Chi Minh (this renaming occured after Ho's death). [[note]] The whole "discouraged the personality cult" claim was fabricated after the fact in an attempt to save his reputation. While he had fairly slight reservations about the extent of the personality cult, he was quite happy with it right until the "Cultural Revolution" meant it devastated China even further, and even then he resumed it to a fairly hearty degree after the chaos of the 60's had died down. [[/note]]
** At one time, it was ''illegal'' in China to not have a picture of Chairman Mao or a copy of his book in your house.
** Even today, it's not uncommon to get into a Chinese taxi and see a lucky charm with Mao's face dangling from the windscreen. There's a lot of Mao memorabilia around, especially in his home province of Hunan, and it comes in all sorts of forms - from badges and statues to calendars with teddy bears posed next to the Great Helmsman.
* EpicFail:
** The Great Leap Forward started off well, being based on successful 1930s industrialization of the Soviet Union, but a number of factors caused it to crash and burn. Thus, it would have been more aptly described as the Great Leap Backward. Mao's entire campaign could be seen as this - he was a revolutionary hero and a master at gaining and maintaining political power over the world's biggest population, in other words, a good war leader. Unfortunately, he was quite incompetent at actually ruling the population. This was helped by him becoming increasingly paranoid and possibly certifiably insane during the later years of his life.
** Many of the agricultural "innovations" used for the Great Leap were based on the ideas of [[MadScientist the now discredited Soviet biologist]] Trofim Lysenko.
** The Hundred Flowers Movement: Sometime after the establishment of the People's Republic, Mao felt that free expression of complaints and criticisms was part of a Socialist utopia and declared complete freedom on the matter. It...didn't go well. The movement was aborted and many people found themselves subjected to exile or re-education. There is still debate on whether Mao [[XanatosGambit genuinely wanted to "let the thousand flowers bloom" or trick to expose people who were critical of the regime.]] For all we know, it went JustAsPlanned.
* FarmBoy: Averted. Mao's father ''was'' born a very poor peasant, but managed to become a very well educated, wealthy SelfMadeMan farmer.
* FreudianExcuse:
** ALL of his brothers and sisters either died young or were executed by the Kuomintang or local warlords.
** He didn't get along with his father but his dad wasn't abusive either, [[ValuesDissonance by the standards of his time and culture]].
* FromNobodyToNightmare: Who would've guessed that a librarian would become one of the most notorious dictators in world history?
* FullCircleRevolution: In many ways, Mao ended up being another link in a long chain of emperors and dictators who ruled China with an iron fist and under whose rule millions died, including his predecessor ChiangKaiShek. Mao's regime was different, however, in that it was far stronger than anything that had come before it - the central governments of the Chinese Empires had been notoriously weak, and Chiang's Guomindang had never managed to establish control over more than six of China's provinces (the others being controlled by 'friendly' warlords). Mao's was the first Chinese regime to make all the country's regional and local governments (except of course Taiwan) obey it in all things.
* HistoryRepeats: In many ways, he is like a Chinese and 20th century version of GenghisKhan.
* IconicOutfit: [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_suit The Mao Suit]], although in China it's called the Zhongshan Suit, named after Dr. Sun Yat-sen.
* InsaneTrollLogic: Supposedly, he never brushed his teeth because tigers never brushed theirs.
* JustFollowingOrders: Jiang Qing, Mao's wife, claimed this after he died.
--> "I was Chairman Mao's dog. I bit whomever he asked me to bite."
* KavorkaMan: According to his personal doctor, he didn't believe in brushing teeth, and gargled with tea instead. Reportedly, this caused his teeth to turn green. Also according to his personal doctor, he never partook in any reproductive hygiene, which led to the spread of STDs among the women he slept with. He claimed he didn't need to bother, that "he bathed himself in the bodies of women."
* LowestCommonDenominator: Some of his writings, particularly the so-called ''Little Red Book'', were written with an audience of peasants and poor workers in mind.
* MajoredInWesternHypocrisy: Averted, he enrolled in and dropped out of half a dozen high schools and professional schools. He did most of his studying by himself, while he was a librarian at Peking University. Unlike most of his cabinet, he never went to university or went overseas.
* NecessaryEvil: Mao still has numerous admirers in mainland China today, especially among the older generation. While Mao had his excesses, the same can also be said of Chiang Kai-shek's government and the warlord cliques he was allied with, as well as Imperial Japan.
* NeverMyFault: Quite similar to Stalin when it came down to this, Mao was one of those leaders who would never admit to their own error for fear of damaging their authority, but because the people needed ''someone'' to blame, it was usually the other government officials who got blamed. This is quite ironic considering that a large number of his famous ''quotations'' (from the ''Little Red Book'') are devoted to promoting the qualities of humility, mercy and ''self-criticism''. However, he stepped down as Premier when he found out the results of the Great Leap Forward, in order to avoid the spotlight.
* RebelLeader: He was one during the Chinese civil war and the war against Japan. Although propaganda has certainly overstated his wartime success, Mao is still considered an authority on guerrilla warfare, his doctrines being followed by Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh.
* TheRevolutionWillNotBeCivilized: As the last Guomindang and anti-Communist holdouts were exterminated (in 1950), there was a round-up of Guomindang and Warlord personnel and troops, and political dissidents. Most were put through re-education (through labour) camps, but those personnel and troops deemed a threat to the regime were liquidated alongside the country's landlord families, who were given public show trials for their Crimes Against the People and executed (though the [young] children of landlord parents were sometimes spared on the grounds that they could be re-educated to love the peasantry). Also, the Cultural Revolution he initiated.
** He provides the page quote for that trope.
* TheStarscream: Following the split with Nikita Khrushchev, he attempted China's displacement of JosephStalin's SovietUnion as the most powerful Communist country.
** Mao also had a tendency to regard his successors as this (and after Krushchev's secret speech denouncing JosephStalin after the latter's death, feared the same would happen to him as well), hence his BadBoss treatment of some party members unfortunate enough to become his NumberTwo.
* UnPerson: To Lin Biao. Even though in early propaganda he is shown as Mao's successor and appeared alongside, if you flip through older books post-1971, you will see Lin's face and name neatly scribbled out by dutiful readers. Although in recent years, Lin has been reappraised for his military skills among China's "Ten Marshals".
** During the Cultural Revolution, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping was officially purged and denounced as capitalist running dogs, which saw the death of the former. Following the end of the revolution, the former has been politically rehabilitated, while Deng is admired today as the architect of China's economic reforms.
** Ironically, the modern CCP is trying to distance itself away from Mao's legacy, and in recent school textbooks Mao only bears one paragraph's mention.
* ValuesDissonance: Reception of Mao's legacy greatly differ between those living in China and those living outside of it. [[RuleofCautiousEditingJudgment Let's leave it at that.]]
* WarriorPoet: Mao wrote quite a few poems during the war against the Nationalists and Japan. The poems are generally considered to be of surprisingly good literary quality, though their veracity is doubtful. It is also claimed that he was a skilled calligrapher; many Chinese institutions still use Mao's calligraphy as logo.
* WhenAllYouHaveIsAHammer: Mao had an obsession with starting Revolutions whenever problems turned up. In essence, his philosophy is closer to those of LeonTrotsky than JosephStalin. It's ironic considering that Mao idealized Stalin and was a staunch anti-Trotskyist (for his part, Stalin had a very low opinion of Mao, considering him a "caveman Marxist" and originally favoured Chiang-Kai Shek - despite the fact that Chiang was openly anti-communist!).

!!In Fiction
* ''Film/ForrestGump'' (the book) saved him from drowning.
* ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'': The episode "Goo Goo Gai Pan" had the Simpson family go to China, and on the way they visit Mao's mausoleum. When Homer came up to Mao's body, he said to it quietly: "Aww, look at him. He's like a little angel that killed 50 million people. Yes you are! ''Yes you are!''" This episode was BannedInChina.
** Note that in RealLife you cannot approach Mao's corpse, you have to march past reverently. There are so many people who come to see him that you really ''can't'' stop. Rumor is because the embalmer did a very poor job, and they don't want anyone to find out.
* In a ''Series/MontyPythonsFlyingCircus'' sketch, Mao appears on a quiz show along with Karl Marx, Lenin and Che Guevara.
* In one of the early ''ComicBook/SpiderMan'' comics by Creator/StanLee and SteveDitko, Harry Osborn tells Peter Parker that he's about as popular at Empire State University as Mao. This meant that he was ''unpopular,'' as it was before the college fad for Marxism in the late 1960s.
* In the {{OVA}} of ''TheLegendOfKoizumi'', Koizumi's aura is so powerful, it actually causes Mao to ''rise from the grave'' so he and Koizumi can engage in a {{Mahjong}} battle. Mao teams up with PolPot for the match. [[spoiler: Mao loses the match, but earns Koizumi's respect as a WorthyOpponent.]]
* Z.G. Li and Joy meet him in ''DreamsOfJoy'', which takes place in China during the 1950s.
* Playable in VideoGame/{{Civilization}} I to IV. One of the more peaceful leaders, but he's quick to take offense if you ally with anyone he doesn't like. Tends to sink to the bottom of the list near the endgame.
** Ironically in the Chinese version of Civilization IV, he was replaced by Emperor Tang Taizong.
* The modern {{opera}} ''Theatre/NixonInChina'' naturally features Mao (along with Jiang Qing, Zhou Enlai, and of course [[RichardNixon Richard]] and Pat Nixon).
* The movie ''Film/{{Nixon}}'' features Mao as someone who, during the meeting with Nixon, shows disinterest in politics and diplomacy and more in how [[KavorkaMan Kissinger gets so many girls]], to which Kissinger responds with the immortal phrase: "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac".
* The fourth run of ''LetsPlay/TwitchPlaysPokemon'', ''[[LetsPlay/TwitchPlaysPokemonFireRed Fire Red]]'', features a Skitty nicknamed "Meow Zedong", who hopes to usher in a communist revolution to the Pokemon world.

When the Guomindang/Kuomintang (GMD/KMT) under ChiangKaiShek purged the socialists from its ranks during the course of its campaign to unify the country, he began to work against it and helped lead attacks on and uprisings against the GMD such as those in Changsha in the late 1920s and the early 1930s, but they proved to be ill-advised and were quickly crushed with much brutality. He fled to Jiangxi province with some survivors and may have been a founding member of the Chinese Soviet Republic there. After exterminating several other such Soviet Communes the GMD was poised to crush the Soviet in 1934, whereupon Mao and his troops staged a breakout and fled the province, cutting a swathe of destruction across the countryside as they took what they needed to survive at gunpoint. A tenth of this force, and leaders like Mao, eventually made it to an isolated Soviet in the mountains of Yan'an after completing what has become known as 'The Long March'. Mao managed to use his loyal troops to install himself as the leader of the Yan'an Soviet, and used this position to claim leadership of the entire CCP at the Zunyi Conference of 1935. Chiang was poised to destroy the Soviet, with a good chance of success, when the Warlord General Zhang Xueliang (son of the late Zhang Zuolin, 'The Tiger of the North') kidnapped him and forced to him to agree to an alliance with the communists against Japan, who invaded Manchuria in 1931. Chiang gave his word and called off the offensive, establishing 'the United Front'.