The public are usually fed simplistic, emotional propaganda by their governments, all of them: good vs evil, right thing to do, freedom, whatever. But in fact policies are based on interests and cold calculations.
Luckily Xiaoping entered the chat and the rest is Chinese history.
(I have always liked the Chinese for their pragmatism. Americans are too far up their own ass).
I think Deng Xiaoping is a direct result of these developments during the Mao years.
Things would have been very different for China, without the rapprochement with the west. Without friendly terms with the west they would have to maintain an enormously big army.
Think of a China today that is more like North Korea.
They don't?
Yes, just like during the "Great Leap Forward" and the cultural revolution. Sure...
Washington shaped the nation, but also massacred Native Americans and didn't free his slaves until after his death.
The Chinese see Mao as someone who gave them their pride back, but most of his socioeconomic policies were failures.
I'm not trying to do a "whataboutism" here, just trying to bring some perspective of how the average Chinese person thinks of Mao.
But yeah I get your point, it's unfortunate that China never had its Khrushchev moment.
I'm not somebody who can say to what extent that comparison does or doesn't make sense, but your response is irrelevant because they weren't saying that Mao and Washington were comparable in terms of their aspirations or specific actions.
It is unfortunate that you feel that way because it's not all ambiguous.
I mean for instance a German person could say "that Bismarck and Hitler were comparable in terms of their aspirations or specific actions" and they would technically be correct in a certain way (much more so than someone comparing Mao and Washington anyway). However that would be in no way a morally sensible comparison.
Apply the logic for why Mao was as bad as Hitler, read up on the Bengal famine, and you'll come to the conclusion that Churchill was also Hitler. But of course he wasn't Hitler, and famines aren't on the same scale as the Holocaust.
While you're educating yourself, perhaps read up on Mao's nationalist counterpart in the Civil War, a fascist dictator and war criminal named Chiang Kai-Shek. I would find the comparison to George Washington and Chiang Kai-Shek to be quite distasteful. George Washington was not a bad man by the standards of his time, he was not a dictator, and he was not a war criminal.
Conversely, Chiang Kai-Shek was a murderous tyrant even by contemporary standards. During the White Terror of 1927, he infamously stated he'd prefer to kill 1000 innocent people "by mistake" than let one communist live. Over 300,000 people were murdered during this purge alone, and that's a floor. Some estimates put the death toll in the millions. We'll never know the true body count. Unfortunately, it was not difficult to kill people without a trace in rural China at this time. At any rate, it was a crime against humanity within an order of magnitude of Stalin's Great Purge. And this was just one of the many, many atrocities committed by Chiang Kai-Shek. I don't think anyone could fight this monster and win, without becoming a monster themselves.
And yet, I have no trouble understanding why Taiwanese people might have mixed feelings about this heinous man. Without Chiang Kai-Shek, there would be no Taiwan. As it stands, only 12 UN nations recognize Taiwan as an independent country. Nationalism is a helluva drug...
Why is it that we all know Mao Zedong's name in infamy, and not Chiang Kai-Shek? Because we are always eating from the trashcan of ideology.
I don't think Mao was a crook in the sense of "stealing money and the country be damned". I think he was motivated by a vision for his country, why else fight so fiercely against the nationalists and the Japanese? He believed in something.
Whether the Great Leap Forward or any one of his policies was a disaster is orthogonal to whether he believed in doing a great good for China.
Claiming Mao "believed in violence" adds nothing new, really. Most revolutionaries believed in violence as a means to reach an end. Nationalists did, too.
I think it's not controversial that Mao had a vision for his country which he tought would make China great, he was a visionary and an ideologue. You don't have to agree with his vision to acknowledge he had one.
Also, if the great leap forward and the cultural revolution were as bad as the propaganda says it was, china wouldn't have been able to industrialize. China would have crumbled and become a vassal of the US or the Soviet Union.