History UsefulNotes / MaoZedong

* 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.

Although China's economy had finally recovered 1937-levels of production and was growing admirably in the first several years after the war (industrial production was growing 19% per year and national income 9% per year, though only 10% of GDP was accounted for by 'modern' industry and services at the time), this wasn't enough for Mao, who decided that China must surpass the Soviet Union in industrial production in 15 years or less. He dubbed the Second Five-Year Plan of 1958-1963 'The Great Leap Forward', declaring that it would be a grand crusade to grow the Chinese economy. The ill-advised setting and heavy-handed insistence on meeting unrealistic growth and 'growth'-targets from above, lack of impartial reports and the suppression of protests from below, the extinction of a number of animal subspecies[[note]] Mao wanted people to rely on more traditional Asian medicines, which used animal parts such as rhino horn and big cat bones, causing species such as the Javan and Bali Tigers, the mainland subspecies of Sumatran and Javan rhinos, and recently the Western Black rhinos, to go completely extinct. It's still a major problem to this day.[[/note]] environmental degradation[[note]] Soil erosion and decreasing soil-quality had been issues for ''three centuries'' by this point due to heavy land-use in numerous areas, as the 18th-century saw China surpass the previous population-high of the 11th-century Empire of the Song due to the introduction of Corn and Potatoes, staple-foods from The New World [[/note]] and denial by the all levels of party-leadership that anything was wrong resulted in about 35 million citizens dying when they otherwise would not have done of other causes (e.g. influenza, cancer, accidents) - chiefly from starvation-related diseases like Beriberi. ArtisticLicenseBiology was implemented on a massive scale, such as plowing fields to a great depth, under the idea that it would make it easier for roots to penetrate, which not only wasted huge amounts of effort, but made it much easier for the soil to wash away; and efforts to exterminate sparrows, under the belief that they ate grain, which resulted in a literal plague of locusts and other insects, with no sparrows to control their numbers, which then devastated the already-decreased crop yields. ArtisticLicenseEngineering was also widespread, with the desire to drastically increase steel production leading to people building crude wood-fired furnaces in their backyards, melting down whatever steel items they could find, and presenting the result (worthless sponge-iron riddled with impurities) to the government. Similarly, poorly-planned irrigation projects led to dams bursting and flooding cities, free-flowing rivers turned into stagnant, silt-filled reservoirs, and considerable erosion.

Mao has also been grouped together with Stalin and UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler as the "three great despots of the 20th century".

* 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".

Although China's economy had finally recovered 1937-levels of production and was growing admirably in the first several years after the war (industrial production was growing 19% per year and national income 9% per year, though only 10% of GDP was accounted for by 'modern' industry and services at the time), this wasn't enough for Mao, who decided that China must surpass the Soviet Union in industrial production in 15 years or less. He dubbed the Second Five-Year Plan of 1958-1963 'The Great Leap Forward', declaring that it would be a grand crusade to grow the Chinese economy. The ill-advised setting and hilariously heavy-handed insistence on meeting unrealistic growth and 'growth'-targets from above, lack of impartial reports and the suppression of protests from below, the extinction of a number of animal subspecies[[note]] Mao wanted people to rely on more traditional Asian medicines, which used animal parts such as rhino horn and big cat bones, causing species such as the Javan and Bali Tigers, the mainland subspecies of Sumatran and Javan rhinos, and recently the Western Black rhinos, to go completely extinct. It's still a major problem to this day.[[/note]] environmental degradation[[note]] Soil erosion and decreasing soil-quality had been issues for ''three centuries'' by this point due to heavy land-use in numerous areas, as the 18th-century saw China surpass the previous population-high of the 11th-century Empire of the Song due to the introduction of Corn and Potatoes, staple-foods from The New World [[/note]] and nigh-hilariously idiotic denial by the all levels of party-leadership that anything was wrong resulted in about 35 million citizens dying when they otherwise would not have done of other causes (e.g. influenza, cancer, accidents) - chiefly from starvation-related diseases like Beriberi. ArtisticLicenseBiology was implemented on a massive scale, such as plowing fields to a great depth, under the idea that it would make it easier for roots to penetrate, which not only wasted huge amounts of effort, but made it much easier for the soil to wash away; and efforts to exterminate sparrows, under the belief that they ate grain, which resulted in a literal plague of locusts and other insects, with no sparrows to control their numbers, which then devastated the already-decreased crop yields. ArtisticLicenseEngineering was also widespread, with the desire to drastically increase steel production leading to people building crude wood-fired furnaces in their backyards, melting down whatever steel items they could find, and presenting the result (worthless sponge-iron riddled with impurities) to the government. Similarly, poorly-planned irrigation projects led to dams bursting and flooding cities, free-flowing rivers turned into stagnant, silt-filled reservoirs, and considerable erosion.

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 [[UsefulNotes/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 UsefulNotes/ImperialJapan. It yielded some early successes because [[UsefulNotes/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]].

The figure of about 35 comes from analysis of the capacity of the land to support life and national census data, since researchers aren't allowed to comb through Party archives. Of course the CCP dubs the period "The Three Years of Natural Disasters" and claims that the famines and resultant epidemics resulted largely or solely from [[NeverMyFault sabotage by and/or the withdrawal of the Soviet advisors in 1959, extraordinary weather events, and long-term environmental damage caused under the feudal and Guomindang governments]]. Sorting out 'normal' deaths from the 'extra-ordinary' ones caused by the famines was quite a task - 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 'ordinary'/natural deaths over that period. Indeed, this is precisely how the high-end '45 million' figure for the famines comes about.

The concurrent "Sino-Soviet Split" arose as a result of ideological disputes, foreign policy disagreements, and nuclear proliferation. Mao viewed the Soviet Union as being in imminent danger of losing its whole-of-society revolutionary fervor to bureaucratic ossification, and decried its consideration of socialist market-systems in some sectors of its economy (such as by de-collectivising agriculture) [[JumpingOffTheSlipperySlope as 'capitalism by the backdoor']]. Moreover Mao totally disagreed with Khrushchev's foreign policy of 'Peaceful Coexistence' with the Capitalist Empires while waiting for the inevitable World Revolution - that would be caused by Capitalism's inherent contradictions - to collapse it from within. Instead Mao asserted that the world's Communist Powers should do their utmost to bring about the World Revolution as soon as possible, if necessary by [[BloodKnight attacking the Capitalist Empires directly from without]]. And finally, Mao felt that China deserved nuclear weapons when Khrushchev increasingly came to feel - in light of Mao's domestic and foreign policies - that this was unwise and would also complicate arms-control negotiations with the United States. Khrushchev also advised against Mao's collectivisation of agriculture, not least because he himself had overseen a disastrous campaign to do so in the Ukraine.

Mao is also well known as a [[WickedCultured calligrapher, poet, and military leader]], and author of several books dealing with guerrilla warfare and political theories. The most well known is ''Quotations from Chairman Mao'', better known as the ''Little Red Book'', one of the most printed books of all time.

In the Western world, the characteristic [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_suit Chinese tunic suit]] is named after him. However, in China it's called the Zhongshan Suit, named after Dr. Sun Yat-sen.

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 it appeared that [[UsefulNotes/KoreanWar North Korea was about to be annexed by South Korea]], and then the USA might use the north as a springboard for invading Manchuria. To preserve North Korea as a buffer zone Mao had the PLA dispatch '[[InsistentTerminology Chinese People's Volunteers]]' to serve in all-Chinese units of the North Korean Army, which was swiftly brought under Chinese control (under Defense Minister Peng Dehuai). When their surprise counter-offensive successfully pushed the UN forces back, Mao then seems to have suffered an attack of optimism and assumed that the Chinese-backed north could annex the south completely. Although he was disabused of this notion when the offensive failed and fighting bogged down into a stalemate over the winter of '51-2, he seems to have chosen to prolong the conflict out of a hope that the US might lose its nerve and sign a more favourable peace if both sides continued to haemorrhage men and material. After a further year of fruitless back-and-forth attritional trench warfare, in Spring 1953 Mao was finally convinced that A) the war was a stalemate and B) the Americans really were losing patience, but that their response would not simply be to give up and let the North annex the South but rather to use as many tactical nuclear weapons as necessary (i.e. hundreds) to break the deadlock and win.

Mao Zedong (December 26, 1893 – September 9, 1976) 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 the UsefulNotes/ChineseCivilWar of 1946-50. He ruled the PRC until his death in 1976.

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 UsefulNotes/CulturalRevolution and sentenced to re-education 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.

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 as 'The Gang of Four' [[note]]The Gang was sentenced to death, but none of the sentences were carried out. Jiang Qing allegedly committed suicide in May 1991; Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan died in 2005 of illness (Zhang in April, Yao in December); Wang Hongwen also died of illness in August 1992.[[/note]]. Deng Xiaoping, who was later rehabilitated, 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 CultOfPersonality 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.

Although China's economy had finally recovered 1937-levels of production and was growing admirably in the first several years after the war (industrial production was growing 19% per year and national income 9% per year, though only 10% of GDP was accounted for by 'modern' industry and services at the time), this wasn't enough for Mao, who decided that China must surpass the Soviet Union in industrial production in 15 years or less. He dubbed the Second Five-Year Plan of 1958-1963 'The Great Leap Forward', declaring that it would be a grand crusade to grow the Chinese economy. The ill-advised setting and hilariously heavy-handed insistence on meeting unrealistic growth and 'growth'-targets from above, lack of impartial reports and the suppression of protests from below, the extinction of a number of animal subspecies[[note]] Mao wanted people to rely on more traditional Asian medicines, which used animal parts such as rhino horn and big cat bones, causing species such as the Javan and Bali Tigers, the mainland subspecies of Sumatran and Javan rhinos, and recently the Western Black rhinos, to go completely extinct. It's still a major problem to this day.[[/note]] environmental degradation[[note]] Soil erosion and decreasing soil-quality had been issues for ''three centuries'' by this point due to heavy land-use in numerous areas, as the 18th-century saw China surpass the previous population-high of the 11th-century Empire of the Song due to the introduction of Corn and Potatoes, staple-foods from The New World [[/note]] and nigh-hilariously idiotic denial by the all levels of party-leadership that anything was wrong resulted in about 35 million citizens dying when they otherwise would not have done of other causes (e.g. influenza, cancer, accidents) - chiefly from starvation-related diseases like Beriberi.

The figure of about 35 comes from analysis of the capacity of the land to support life and national census data, since researchers aren't allowed to comb through Party archives. Of course the CCP dubs the period "The Three Years of Natural Disasters" and claims that the famines and resultant epidemics resulted largely or soley from [[FanonDiscontinuity sabotage by and/or the withdrawal of the Soviet advisors in 1959, extraordinary weather events, and long-term environmental damage caused under the feudal and Guomindang governments]]. Sorting out 'normal' deaths from the 'extra-ordinary' ones caused by the famines was quite a task - 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 'ordinary'/natural deaths over that period. Indeed, this is precisely how the high-end '45 million' figure for the famines comes about.

The concurrent "Sino-Soviet Split" arose as a result of ideological disputes, foreign policy disagreements, and nuclear proliferation. Mao viewed the Soviet Union as being in imminent danger of losing its whole-of-society revolutionary fervor to bureaucratic ossification, and decried its consideration of socialist market-systems in some sectors of its economy (such as by de-collectivising agriculture) [[JumpingOffTheSlipperySlope as 'capitalism by the backdoor']]. Moreover Mao totally disagreed with Khrushchev's foreign policy of 'Peaceful Coexistence' with the Capitalist Empires while waiting for the inevitable World Revolution - that would be caused by Capitalism's inherent contradictions - to collapse it from within. Instead Mao asserted that the world's Communist Powers should do their utmost to bring about the World Revolution as soon as possible, if necessary by attacking the Capitalist Empires directly from without. And finally, Mao felt that China deserved nuclear weapons when Khrushchev increasingly came to feel - in light of Mao's domestic and foreign policies - that this was unwise and would also complicate arms-control negotiations with the United States. Khrushchev also advised against Mao's collectivisation of agriculture, not least because he himself had overseen a disastrous campaign to do so in the Ukraine.

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 rehabilitated, 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 CultOfPersonality 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.

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 UsefulNotes/CulturalRevolution. History was revised and Liu and Deng were blamed for the 'Three Years of Natural Disasters' and subjected to re-education.

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

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 it appeared that [[UsefulNotes/KoreanWar North Korea was about to be annexed by South Korea]], and then the USA might use the north as a springboard for invading Manchuria. To preserve North Korea as a buffer zone Mao had the PLA dispatch '[[InsistentTerminology Chinese People's Volunteers]]' to serve in all-Chinese units of the North Korean Army, which was swiftly brought under Chinese control (under Defense Minister Peng Dehuai). When their surprise counter-offensive successfully pushed the UN forces back, Mao then seems to have suffered an attack of optimism and assumed that the Chinese-backed north could annex the south completely. Although he was disabused of this notion when the offensive failed and fighting bogged down into a stalemate over the winter of '51-2, he seems to have chosen to prolong the conflict out of a hope that the US might lose its nerve and sign a more favourable peace if both sides continued to haemmorrhage men and material. After a further year of fruitless back-and-forth attritional trench warfare, in Spring 1953 Mao was finally convinced that A) the war was a stalemate and B) the Americans really were losing patience, but that their response would not simply be to give up and let the North annex the South but rather to use as many tactical nuclear weapons as necessary (i.e. hundreds) to break the deadlock and win.

The concurrent "Sino-Soviet Split" arose as a result of ideological disputes, foreign policy disagreements, and nuclear proliferation. Mao viewed the Soviet Union as being in imminent danger of losing its whole-of-society revolutionary fervor to bureaucratic ossification, and decried its consideration of socialist market-systems in some sectors of its economy (such as by de-collectivising agriculture) [[JumpingOffTheSlipperySlope as 'capitalism by the backdoor']]. Moreover Mao totally disagreed with Khrushchev's foreign policy of 'Peaceful Coexistence' with the Capitalist Empires while waiting for the inevitable World Revolution - that would be caused by Capitalism's inherent contradictions - to collapse it from within. Instead Mao asserted that the world's Communist Powers should do their utmost to bring about the World Revolution as soon as possible, if necessary by attacking the Capitalist Empires directly from without. And finally, Mao felt that China deserved nuclear weapons when Khrushchev increasingly came to feel - in light of Mao's domestic and foreing policies - that this was unwise and would also complicate arms-control negotiations with the United States. Khrushchev also advised against Mao's collectivisation of agriculture, not least because he himself had overseen a disastrous campaign to do so in the Ukraine.

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 UsefulNotes/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.

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 CultOfPersonality 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.

Mao is also well known as a calligrapher, poet, and military leader, and author of several books dealing with guerrilla warfare and political theories. The most well known is ''Quotations from Chairman Mao'', better known as the ''Little Red Book'', one of the most printed books of all time.

!!Tropes:
* 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 UsefulNotes/ChiangKaiShek.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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."''
* {{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]]
* 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.
* 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 UsefulNotes/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 UsefulNotes/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.
* 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. He claimed he didn't need to bother, that "he bathed himself in the bodies of women."
* 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.
* 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.
* TheStarscream: Following the split with Nikita Khrushchev, he attempted China's displacement of UsefulNotes/JosephStalin's UsefulNotes/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 UsefulNotes/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.
* 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 UsefulNotes/LeonTrotsky than UsefulNotes/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!).
----

* ArchEnemy: to UsefulNotes/ChiangKaiShek.

* 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.

* TheStarscream: Following the split with Nikita Khrushchev, he attempted China's displacement of UsefulNotes/JosephStalin's UsefulNotes/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 UsefulNotes/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.

* InsaneTrollLogic: Supposedly, he never brushed his teeth because tigers never brushed theirs.

* 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.