Mao Zedong's Communist Revolution

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Communism, a system deterred by the Kuomintang, looked as if it would soon fall to nationalists if the communist followers did not devise a new strategy. However, a young Marxist named Mao led the Red Army to victory, promising them that he could provide a significantly better future (“History Channel”). Mao Zedong, a communist revolutionary, aspired to make China supersede other countries like the United States, and using his knowledge of communist theory, along with his peasant background, he gained popularity with the lower classes, soon taking power in China. Once in power, he attempted to make China equal to the U.S’ economy by introducing the Great Leap Forward (GLF). The GLF campaign not only set guidelines for China’s eventual industrialization, …show more content…
When this ideology gained popularity, however, it ended up creating a multitude of issues for China’s social economics because of actions by anti-rich extremists (“The Economist”). These extremists, along with multiple-peaceful GLF followers, would shame the wealthy by parading them through the streets with a slab on their backs. When the supposed revolutionary finished their abashment, Maoists would brutally slaughter them like animals (TheBestFilmArchives). This goes to show that Mao’s anti-capitalist model was absolutely detrimental to the pre existing relations between China’s social classes. Also, “CNN” suggests that those affiliated with the bourgeois were “forced [by Mao’s followers] into ‘cowsheds’, makeshift detention centers in which they were forced to perform manual labor and recite Maoist tracts” (“CNN”). These forced recitations of Mao’s systems are inhumane and demonstrate how the GLF campaign created a dispute between the upper and lower class. This social-class rivalry, occuring between the bourgeois and the proletariats, was not avant-gard, in fact, socioeconomic dispute had already existed in China for a number of years. However, the GLF managed to magnify the problem to a point where people were either killed in accordance to their class, or were exalted