#personally i feel like the guangxi massacre and teh early purges are very reminiscent of

[gudaho]

I hate how tumblr praises Mao Zedong without ever critically thinking about his impact- or even flat out denying the awful things that happened under him

People like to bring up that his policies helped alleviate nationwide famine- which was caused by Mao in the first place. During the Great Leap Forward when peasants were forced to work and then had all the grain they produced taken because it was now government property(similar to a US supreme court decision btw). Local officials who ran the communes (police) would beat peasants and force them to work injured. The food produced by chinese villagers wasn't equally distributed, it sold as surplus (that didn't exist). This doesn't even go into how Mao decided to divest labor into steel production instead of agriculture

Then we come to what people now know Mao for, the Cultural Revolution. Under the idea of destroying anything 'old', people and their belongings and culture were tortured and killed. Again, I don't mean just the wealthy. A common target was ethnic minorities, as the Cultural Revolution was about assimilation

There is a reason that what is probably the most famous incident of violence took place in Guangxi, which is near Vietnam. Mao's officers seized control and in response to the local's 'resistance' committed a several years long massacre. The CCP endorsed ritualistic cannibalism in the area. In an region that was populated by an ethnic minority (Zhuang ppl, instead of Han) the officers did what they believed was necessary for a communist future- which in my opinion was thinly veiled genocide.

Like Stalin, Mao got rid of anyone who was against him by calling them bourgeoisie- which included peasants.

Don't get me wrong, Mao had more sympathy and compassion than any US president I have seen. He was a friend to Vietnam and Palestine as western countries invaded them. Getting rid of landlords was a massive win. He stood by MLK jr. and black americans during the civil rights era. He worked to give women the opportunities they had been denied. He banned child-marriage.

But he was a cult of personality and his leadership got hundreds of thousands of people killed.