WI:A smarter Mao

What if Mao was more intelligent than in OTL? To the point of him being able to avoid the mistakes he made?
 
That's like saying what if Wallstreet was smarter, would we not have this credit crisis?

Mao was highly intelligent. He was also egotistical and arrogant. Smart people make all sorts of mistakes. Some mistakes only PhDs can make.
 
How much smarter can he be before he realises the enormity of the challenge before him and just gives up? As seems to happen a lot in Communist parties, Mao owed his position as much to tenacity, faith and aggressiveness as to brainpower. A smarter man might just have thrown in the towel. Or, for that matter, support a democratic system. A smarter Mao might end up in the Guomindang, or a labour camp.
 
Seems like he must be a pretty smart guy to get as far as he did. What we need is some sort of robot Mao that has some sort of ideological alliance with a more benign Skynet. Then I think we would see some positive results
 
Lack of intellegence was not Mao's problem. A stupid person would not have been as successful. What Mao lacked was knowledge in certain areas, especially economics, and practical common sense.
 
Mao was a friggin genius, though unfortunately entirely un-interested in science, preferring the humanities.
 
Honestly, Mao's problems probably stem more from a combination of mental inflexibility and a belief that poetry would serve as a decent means of policy making.

In his own way, Mao was fairly smart. He just was an utter failure when it came to actually running a country.
 
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Hendryk

Banned
Honestly, Mao's problems probably stem more from a combination of mental inflexibility and a belief that poetry would serve as a decent means of policy making.
Mao's chief problem was his single-minded craving for power, and then for more power. Well, it may not have been a problem for him personally, but it sure was one for everyone else.

Also, don't think Mao was an academic or anything. He did get some university education, but he remained a country bumpkin at heart, with little intellectual curiosity. Unlike, say, Zhou Enlai, he never went abroad before 1949, nor did he learn any foreign language. And he never shed that thick Hunan accent that is the Chinese equivalent of a Deep South drawl.
 
He might not have been an academic, but according to all accounts his bed was constantly weighted down by all the books he was reading. He was probable the most well-read of all the great dictators. And his written works are often brilliant, including, I hear, the poetry.
 
Also, don't think Mao was an academic or anything. He did get some university education, but he remained a country bumpkin at heart, with little intellectual curiosity. Unlike, say, Zhou Enlai, he never went abroad before 1949, nor did he learn any foreign language. And he never shed that thick Hunan accent that is the Chinese equivalent of a Deep South drawl.
Mao was the ultimate out of the box thinker. He was self taught, and I disagree that he wasn't intellectually curious. Actually he was always asking big questions. Robert Kennedy's saying, "some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not?", perfectly captures Mao. He was not in the habit of questioning himself however, nor did he allow others to question him.

Zhou Enlai was a much more conventional thinker. He was formally educated and quite worldly. But he wasn't very original nor was he particularly assertive. People liked him more for his equanimous personality. He was legendary in his ability to seduce foreign journalists on a one on one basis. Mao was good at inspiring devotion from the masses. Zhou was Spock to Mao's Captain Kirk.
 
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Mao, like Stalin and Hitler before he became a stoner, knew exactly what he was doing. His goal was lots and lots of power, and he knew exactly how to get it and he did.

Now if you want to change Mao's objectives, that's different.
 

wormyguy

Banned
Mao, like Stalin and Hitler before he became a stoner, knew exactly what he was doing. His goal was lots and lots of power, and he knew exactly how to get it and he did.

Now if you want to change Mao's objectives, that's different.
Exactly. I'd guess that Mao had an IQ approaching 160 or so, and applied it in the manner most beneficial to himself. Now, I would take issue with part of your statement - Hitler and to a lesser extent Mao were "true believers" in their respective ideologies, while Stalin merely saw in Communism an ideology with the potential for vast populist appeal that he could exploit to grant himself the unlimited power he craved.
 
As far as I am concerned, Hitler, Stalin and Mao were all insane. Maybe not raving lunatics [although Hitler was close to this at the end] but if there was an insanity test based on average people, all 3 would fail miserably. I could come up with examples for all, but since this is a thread about Mao, let's just say that the cultural revolution was not the work of a sane man. How did it help China in any way? How did it make Mao more powerful?
 
What if Mao was more intelligent than in OTL? To the point of him being able to avoid the mistakes he made?

Yeesh- he was very intelligent and a brilliant guerilla general as well as being highly effective at achieving his primary goal- the primacy of Mao in China. Looking at his actions in that light he didn't really make any mistakes at all. He may have been an "utter failure at running a country" but even then I don't think that was his goal- he did in fact make China more powerful, at the expense of untold suffering on the part of the people but this just helped his goal of keeping himself in power.

If by this question you mean you want a more civilised post-1949 PRC then you need someone like Zhou Enlai in charge.
 
As far as I am concerned, Hitler, Stalin and Mao were all insane. Maybe not raving lunatics [although Hitler was close to this at the end] but if there was an insanity test based on average people, all 3 would fail miserably. I could come up with examples for all, but since this is a thread about Mao, let's just say that the cultural revolution was not the work of a sane man. How did it help China in any way? How did it make Mao more powerful?

'Attack the headquarters', remember? Mao had cleverly elevated himself above the headquarters- he was the Great Helmsman to the Red Guards. This meant that he could accuse the entrenched Party hierarchy of getting into a bourgeois rut and have his idealistic teenage attack dogs take them on for him. He got to sit above the turmoil and compose poetry while the chaos below ensured that neither the young people nor the old cadres could wedge him out of power. Of course Mao was probably a sincere True Believer and so he rationalized it in ideological terms by arguing that without constant internal revolution a successful communist party was bound to sink into the morass of Soviet-style bureaucracy. This was the rationalization and as far as it goes Mao probably did think it would help China or at least Communism in China, but the goal was to secure Mao as supreme leader and it did so quite well.

Mao was probably not insane- from the late 1950s onward with the Great Leap Forward he was probably somewhat distanced from reality but if you look at his actions they were generally internally consistent. Just because he didn't value human life doesn't mean he was insane. IMO what's really scary is the ability of completely sane people to commit horrific atrocities in the sincere belief that it's worth it.
 

Hendryk

Banned
Just because he didn't value human life doesn't mean he was insane. IMO what's really scary is the ability of completely sane people to commit horrific atrocities in the sincere belief that it's worth it.
Revolutions tend to facilitate the rise to power of that kind of person--one reason I'm wary of them. Revolutions put the less principled, more power-hungry contenders at an advantage against their competitors, and generally speaking, the less restrained one has been in one's conquest of power, the less restrained one will be in the exercize thereof.
 
As far as I am concerned, Hitler, Stalin and Mao were all insane. Maybe not raving lunatics [although Hitler was close to this at the end] but if there was an insanity test based on average people, all 3 would fail miserably. I could come up with examples for all, but since this is a thread about Mao, let's just say that the cultural revolution was not the work of a sane man. How did it help China in any way? How did it make Mao more powerful?

It destroyed the party apparatus that he was starting to lose control of.
 
let's just say that the cultural revolution was not the work of a sane man. How did it help China in any way? How did it make Mao more powerful?

The idea behind the cultural revolution was to shake up the structure of Chinese society, and to restore Mao to full control. It was a disaster by almost any standard for china, but it put Mao back on top and halted Liu's reform efforts.
 
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