CH: Mao Zedong a good guy

Seeing that we have Good Guy Hitler and Good Guy Stalin thread, I suppose Mao needs a mention, too, just to have all three greatest OTL tyrants of the 20th century in.

Same criteria as all the other threads: he can't just fade away into history. He must be remembered.

Thoughts? ;)

Marc A
 
Mao dies suddenly right after the beginning of the 100 Flowers Movement with no instructions on how to proceed afterwards.

The Chinese people hail him as a hero and have no real ammunition to criticize him with.
 
Mao dies suddenly right after the beginning of the 100 Flowers Movement with no instructions on how to proceed afterwards.

The Chinese people hail him as a hero and have no real ammunition to criticize him with.

Interesting, that...

What about him getting killed some time during the Long March? AFAIK there were tons of chances where the KMT could've finished him off for good. :)

Marc A
 
Interesting, that...

What about him getting killed some time during the Long March? AFAIK there were tons of chances where the KMT could've finished him off for good. :)

Marc A
Unless he dies in a heroic sacrifice then he wont really be a good guy would he? He would just be a nobody. Not even the leader of the Red Army at that point. So he that would definitely be fading into history.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Yeah, basically, if he dies at the hands of a pro-KMT assassin or something 1949-1951ish then he's going to be a martyr.
 
If he dies shortly after unification (during the hundred flowers campaign is best) he's remembered as a great revolutionary hero, and one of the greatest leaders in Chinese history. Assassination by Nationalist or American-linked agents would be even better.
 
Maybe make him more competent? Seriously, if he had more competence in economics, like Stalin(Yes, he's so horrible, he makes the Soviet Union look amazing by comparison) could make him appear much better historically.

How? I don't know, Stalin somehow managed it despite not exactly using great economics(totalitarian namely.)
 
Maybe make him more competent? Seriously, if he had more competence in economics, like Stalin(Yes, he's so horrible, he makes the Soviet Union look amazing by comparison) could make him appear much better historically.

How? I don't know, Stalin somehow managed it despite not exactly using great economics(totalitarian namely.)

Stalin was, at the end of the day, a politician. His atrocities were based around paranoia combined with destroying any possible threat to his rule (the peasantry, the revolutionary generals, the Old Bolsheviks, the Polish officers and intellectuals, etc). Mao meanwhile, was a true believer, and seems to have honestly thought the Great Leap Forward would help the country. That's why you need him to die after his greatest achievements (land reform, communist revolution, kicking out European influence) but before it goes to shit (trying to implement communism in a society even less suited for the theory then Russia).
 
Stalin was, at the end of the day, a politician. His atrocities were based around paranoia combined with destroying any possible threat to his rule (the peasantry, the revolutionary generals, the Old Bolsheviks, the Polish officers and intellectuals, etc). Mao meanwhile, was a true believer, and seems to have honestly thought the Great Leap Forward would help the country. That's why you need him to die after his greatest achievements (land reform, communist revolution, kicking out European influence) but before it goes to shit (trying to implement communism in a society even less suited for the theory then Russia).

The last part I think reveals the issue. China makes no sense ideologically to have Communism, as it hasn't gone through a capitalism phase. It has been EXPLOITED by capitalism, but it itself hasn't really been capitalist.

With that in mind, what could work is if he's convinced something like Yugoslavia's approach would work for him, however this would probably require the Soviet Union to be substantially changed.
 
The last part I think reveals the issue. China makes no sense ideologically to have Communism, as it hasn't gone through a capitalism phase. It has been EXPLOITED by capitalism, but it itself hasn't really been capitalist.

Neither was Russia, unless one counts the NEP as a sort of state-capitalism.

Going by Good as 'generally considered to have been a better leader than his contemporaries and an overall positive influence on his country and the world at large,' have Mao focus on a Stalinist-style industrialization policy rather than what he did IOTL, i.e. something rather more sane than having peasants smelt pig-iron in their backyards. This means Public Works, a lot of them. Dams, canals, railroads, factories, etc, financed by the export of...well, what can Red China export in the 1950s? The USSR financed its industrialization by wheat exports, but what can China offer? Rice? The US will directly subsidize its own wheat sales or that of rice made in pro-American countries to compete with anything China does.
 
Neither was Russia, unless one counts the NEP as a sort of state-capitalism.

Going by Good as 'generally considered to have been a better leader than his contemporaries and an overall positive influence on his country and the world at large,' have Mao focus on a Stalinist-style industrialization policy rather than what he did IOTL, i.e. something rather more sane than having peasants smelt pig-iron in their backyards. This means Public Works, a lot of them. Dams, canals, railroads, factories, etc, financed by the export of...well, what can Red China export in the 1950s? The USSR financed its industrialization by wheat exports, but what can China offer? Rice? The US will directly subsidize its own wheat sales or that of rice made in pro-American countries to compete with anything China does.

THANK YOU! Okay, now I know what Stalin did differently(which ironically was actually doing things more centrally, but that's another matter.)

But okay, now we have our solution that doesn't involve killing him early, or at least one of them. How long it works will be another matter.
 
This means Public Works, a lot of them. Dams, canals, railroads, factories, etc, financed by the export of...well, what can Red China export in the 1950s? The USSR financed its industrialization by wheat exports, but what can China offer? Rice? The US will directly subsidize its own wheat sales or that of rice made in pro-American countries to compete with anything China does.
Indeed, thats a good question. Perhaps ore?
 
Indeed, thats a good question. Perhaps ore?

The infrastructure for that didn't really exist--one can't export ore without already having railways and mines to efficiently move it to harbor.

I suppose Mao's China can try the route of exporting crops, whether rice or wheat, to places like India or south-east Asia, but it's in a rather more difficult position than Stalin's Russia was. Parts of the West, after a while, did open up to the USSR--the hope was that the introduction of capitalism would, by the 1930s, liberalize Russia from within. Stalin took advantage of that to export wheat after he came to power. But American, and by extension a lot of European, foreign policy in the 1950s and 1960s was explicitely aimed at isolating Red China from the most obvious markets, Japan and SE Asia. If Mao wants to keep Soviet support, he won't try to liberalize first in order to allow his PRC access to these markets.

This means that we need to go back to the mid-1940s, at least. We can't have Nationalist China be as completely defeated as it was IOTL--we need a coalition government of Mao's communists and the Nationalists, and for the challenge of this thread, Mao must be dominant at some point for an extended period of time. The coalition-nature of the government will grant Mao's regime some legitimacy in the eyes of the west, and that means open markets for agricultural export to finance these industrialization measures. Stalin would be open to such a thing--he supported the Nationalists until at least 1948 anyway. This scenario, however, requires a less 'ideologically-pure' Mao, one more willing to see reason and not try to get all his revolution at once.
 
That raises a psychology question. Why is Mao the way he is? Why is he an idealist? If we can figure that out, or at partially, we can construct a reasonable POD.
 
Perhaps like Mao i had too much faith in the sole power of Chinese manpower here. :eek:

Well, I suppose you could harness (probably literally harness) the power of Chinese manpower to haul ore from the mountainsides to the ports, but the inefficiency of doing so combined with the need to bring in money will mean that these people will live and work in appalling conditions, and the death toll associated with that would probably mean we don't satisfy the terms of the challenge.
 
Well, I suppose you could harness (probably literally harness) the power of Chinese manpower to haul ore from the mountainsides to the ports, but the inefficiency of doing so combined with the need to bring in money will mean that these people will live and work in appalling conditions, and the death toll associated with that would probably mean we don't satisfy the terms of the challenge.

Additionally, that wouldn't make a significant enough profit to satisfy Stalinist type economics either.
 
The communists and the Nationalists make peace a Guangzhou and form a coalition government. This almost happened but Jiang came in and stopped it.
 
That raises a psychology question. Why is Mao the way he is? Why is he an idealist? If we can figure that out, or at partially, we can construct a reasonable POD.

This interesting thing here is that Mao was fairly pragmatic during the beginning of his reign, rejecting Soviet-inspired top-down collectivisation policies in favour of much more cautious and localised land reform. However, as time goes on Mao keeps losing contact with the day-to-day reality of China, a process made worse by the CCP's leaderships eagerness to lie to him about basic facts.

Mao was really extremely confused by the behaviour of his colleges during the Great Leap Forward, as one minute they'd been telling him the it was a great success and the next trying to explain it had been a great failure. The result was that Mao realised evidently something had gone wrong, but put most of the dissent down to the emergence of some counter-revolutionary element in the Communist Party itself. Thus, Mao actually threatens the entire CCP congress that he'll lead a guerrilla war against them if they try to depose him. That's not the logic of a man who understood the reality of what he was doing to China.

Best way to rectify this? No Communism, I'm afraid.
 
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