my father grew up in the immediate aftermath of the Great Leap Forward and during the Cultural Revolution and he's told me those were particularly hard and bitter times
There is always somebody with "histories" and tales in this kind of video 🤣.... Of course, all those Chinese and farmers that were happy with Mao are going to be a 100% ignored in order to create the anti China narrative 😊
If only the western powers actually left China alone, none of these socialists states would have ever had to go into the defensive to protect themselves from capitalist influence, the thing that brought ruin to their country, exploited and contributed to the whole communist revolution in China and some other countries.
@@NeostormXLMAX the loss of historical artifacts and records has no positive. It is a horrendous removal from the ability to more effectively study history.
Communism says that art work is an illusion built by the bourgeoisie to distract the working class from destroying capitalism. Yes, it’s that horrendously stupid.
The foot binding practice has been officially banned by the Chinese government since the established of the Republic. It was not very effective, but the ban has been gradually become more acted throughout the country.
And where they were funded? BTW Pol pot and his commies were supplied and supported by NV, Mao China and soviets, they helped to bring Cambodia to comm*nism and kept friends when they were genocided their ppl and invaded only when they were attacked first. It was murica who tried to stop them, and it was NV who helped them to rise power in the first place. If NV didn't help Pol pot and his cummies they wouldn't genocided in the first place commie scum
@@RESTITVTOR_TOTIVS_HISPANIAE fricken pick a name. Compared to any leader that has never starved or extra-judicially murdered millions of their citizens. 23 million of those deaths weren’t even out of malice, just a consequence of bad agricultural and economic policy.
@@aze94 castro was the leader of a small island in the Caribbean. Tito, of a small country in the Balkans. The USSR and China are massive civilizatory empires. There is no comparison in scale.
From discussions with Chinese colleagues about their education and learning about Mao, apparently they learn that it was a massive tragedy but that he had 'good intentions'
@@RESTITVTOR_TOTIVS_HISPANIAE lol interesting you could have that opinion when even people I've met who were raised in China on Chinese propaganda don't see Mao's 'good results'. Deng Xiaoping fixed Mao's massive failure if anything
This is the stupidest comment in this comment section. This sort of idea is what led to people in the middle ages to put dangerous chemicals in their faces to look "paler" because that was their standard of beauty. Hope you're really young, cause if you're over 20 and you actually believe this, there is something seriously wrong with you
lol wtf, 80mil? my dad was born in 1956 and grew up during both the great leap foward and the cultural revolution and although he's told me alot about how even low quality noodles were only reserved for the most special occasions (meat being completely out of the question) the death count is nowhere near as high as people nowadays say it is always interesting to see americans who have never stepped foot on chinese soil in their entire lives act like theyve been through it all in youtube comment sections though
Generally speaking, estimates for total death toll in big tragedies like this become higher the more information is learned. Early estimates usually just include the number of specific individuals which documents describe as having died from the tragedy, and this is crudely extrapolated to the people who weren't well documented as well. But oftentimes, the best-documented people were the least badly hit by tragedy, so that as we learn more about the previously lesser studied populations, our estimate goes up. After that, there's an even bigger thing: Tragedies create ripple effects causing even more deaths, but its difficult to trace any SINGLE person's death to that. For example, my Great Uncle had COPD and died in a hospital, because it was during the height of the recent pandemic so all respirators were taken by COVID patients. If you just count people killed by COVID, my uncle wouldn't be listed. But it is nearly certain that the COVID pandemic indirectly caused or at least contributed to his death. In the past two decades or so, scholars have started to estimate these sorts of indirect deaths and include them in their approximate totals. Looking specifically at The Campaign to Suppress Counter-Revolutionaries, the earliest estimates coming out shortly after Mao's death placed the death toll at about 0.7 million. But as additional previously covered-up deaths were identified, new documents became available to researchers, and deaths from abysmal treatment in slave labor camps were included, that estimate today sits at somewhere between 2 and 5 million--at least 3 times and potentially as much as 7 times higher than what was initially thought. The % increase in death tolls for the Great Famine and Cultural Revolution aren't quite as drastic as those of The Campaign to Suppress Counter-Revolutionaries, but they have increased for for very similar reasons. This isn't unique to discussion of Chinese History. Estimated death tolls for events as variable in nature as The Holocaust, The Black Death, Hurricane Katrina, the US Invasion of Iraq, and British Colonization of India, have all increased over the past years and decades. There isn't a global and/or ""western"" conspiracy to inflate the number of people killed through Mao's totalitarianism and dysfunctional governance. Nor is there a conspiracy to inflate the numbers killed by any other mass-death events. It's just that scholars have more information than they did earlier, and include indirect deaths which had previously been swept under the rug.
I gonna say though. I'm glad I'm American and didn't experience the 3rd world shithole that was China. I would be homeless in the streets and still better off than the average Chinese peasant
@p00bix 'scholars' use "people that were never born" to inflate the death toll, so yes, it is a deliberate way to inflate the numbers. It's, quite frankly, the most glaring thing people always omit when talking about the Great Leap Forward. If we use the same methodology for European Colonisation of the Americas, the death toll for Native Americans would be in the billions, much like how the Indian death toll under British rule was over 1.8 billion. It's absolutely absurd. Just count the deaths as is, which I suspect is in the low millions because if it was any higher, China's population could not have possibly reached 1 billion by the 1970s. If we look at the previous wars in Chinese history that killed over 20 million people, the population always stagnated for over a century. And here, we are expected to believe 80 million people died when China's population was around 550 million. So, essentially, by 1965, China population should have dipped below 470 million. But, instead, it swelled to nearly a billion.
It's all just propaganda, for example he blames the locusts on the pest campaign against the sparrows without mentioning that the sparrows themselves were an invasive species that was also a plague on the fields while they still used traditional seed casting methods. And while the pest campaign contributed to the locusts, plagues of locusts have arisen throughout history without any pests campaigns. He also makes no mention of China's long history with famine, and just darts over the year long drought and the flooding of the yellow river which drowned over a million people, washed away stockpiles of food, and drowned the fields. Both of these events were devastating. He also mentions Lysenkoism (close cropping) without mentioning that the KMT had been experimenting with a variety of agricultural methods in different regions as part of an effort to modernize China's agriculture. All the blame is placed on Mao for continuing experiments that were already under way when the revolution happened. Some of those experiments proved disastrous and others beneficial He also says Mao didn't want to know about the famine but when he realized he was being fed faulty reports he started traveling to the affected areas and sending people to study everything they could possibly learn to solve the famine and prevent the next one. And the video says 80 million died but that's a completely made up number from the black book of communism, the actual number of deaths from the famine were around 15 million, and can fluctuate up and down a few depending on what criteria is deemed appropriate. Similar famines had occurred throughout China's history but what made the great famine different was that it affected the whole mainland all at the same time. This guy's basically just an anti-communist liberal who read the Black Book of Communism and took everything in it at face value without doing any additional research or scrutinizing it, so you may as well just listen to that on audiobook. Two of the authors cited on the cover denounced it btw, and said the author who put it together was obsessed with exaggerating death tolls to get the highest numbers possible.
Although Mao’s purpose in criticizing The dismissal of Hai Rui was to purge Peng Zhen, the mayor of Beijing, the play was actually written by Wu Han, then deputy mayor of Beijing and a renowned historian specializing in Ming history. He was a sycophant of Mao and at first praised by Mao for this work but ironically became the first victim of the cultural revolution.
@@Russo-Delenda-Est Americans also heard about imaginary WMDs and killed 500 000 civilians for it. Wouldn't trust what one says or hears for the life of me.
You should do an entire video dedicated to documenting various influential academic, political, and cultural figures who ignorantly (at best) kept singing of Mao, his regime, and his movements’ praises.
I find it funny that while many autocrats blame the U.S. for buying civil activists and academics to stand against their government, they usually do exactly that to the U.S.
Ignorantly? There's a reason Mao is praised to this day, China was in a terrible position before the revolution and it massively improved after it. You can't expect the revolution to magically fix every problem that dates back countless dynasties in a day
@AceFromGorillaz Mao was dead before the limited yet effective market reforms of the 80s and then in the 90s especially. So, no, they're just bubble world living scumbags.
I think this era was definitely one of the darkest periods of Chinese modern history but my dad says the stability and peace they got was much preferable than the chaotic warlord era and the Japanese occupation area that his dad had to endure; and that while there were so many needless deaths, the populace grew so substantially that they had to implement the one child policy a few decades later. it’ll be very interesting to see the next period of Chinese history in this series!
Getting a high body count in China is a bit easy tho with the massive population. Their regional rebellions have a higher kill count than some international wars.
What is your point? Sorry but your comment seems to imply that Mao's genocide is not a big deal or that Mao was not that bad of a dictator since China has a large population, which makes no sense.
Actually, the death of ordinary Chinese people is not a big issue. The key point is that almost all foreign-educated technical experts who returned to China and university professors who did not follow the Kuomintang to Taiwan died during the Cultural Revolution. Some committed suicide, while others were tortured to death. In many famous Chinese universities, there are memorial halls displaying the photos of those who founded the schools or made outstanding contributions to them. Although their birth dates are different, their death dates are exactly the same. Therefore, after China's reform and opening up, they could only seek technology imports from the West and Japan, as there were virtually no people with basic academic backgrounds in the entire country at that time, having been wiped out during the Cultural Revolution. As a result, the Chinese began to continuously acquire technology through various means, as there was no foundation for research and development. In fact, most Chinese people cannot reflect on the Cultural Revolution and even believe that it was necessary for making China strong. What you see and hear now are mainly the descendants of the perpetrators from that time. Those who had even the slightest dissenting opinions or knowledge and culture from the old era were all killed by these people. Opposing the Cultural Revolution is essentially equivalent to criticizing all Chinese people. Only the descendants of those who do not understand history may have some resentment towards the Cultural Revolution.
This isn’t communism, communism is the end goal, in order to achieve communism you must build towards socialism and then towards communism. This is just a clown trying to modernize his nation without being educated on anything he wanted to change, while surrounding himself with yes men.
the fact that Mao is revered as some sort of twisted messiah in China to this day is very disturbing, although Stalin is still a god in the eyes of some and his reign of terror was almost as bad. Can't imagine the angry moustache man still being treated as a hero by the modern German government.....
That's due to China's 2000 years of imperial rule beat into people's subconscious to obey one demigod (Emperor, mandated by heaven). Mao just filled that hole left by the collapse of Qing dynasty.
Meanwhile you see the real China in the bottom right hand corner and it's just horrible to think the Chinese would be doing infinitely better with them even if the Republic of China was also authoritarian I'm their own manner, however, whatever the Republic of China would've done is still nothing to the brutal absolutely, insane and qusi-demonic materialistic horrors that Mao and his ilk of the ' 'Peoples ' ' republic of 'china' brought into being that were absolutely preventable in every way imaginable. Nothing is more clear than the Republic of China is the real China and anyone or any government who doesn't recognise that needs to.
The number of death during the Great Leap Forward varies dramatically, and it still remains a debatable matter due to the lack of reliable sources. However, it's undoubtable that the Great Leap Forward was a real tragedy. That being said, Mao shouldn't be the only one to blame. People often forget that China was a very poor and backward country with little industrial productivity, and since both US and USSR turned hostile against China, China suffered from trade blockade and the lack of foreign aid and investment(meanwhile Japan, South Korea and Taiwan received much support from US, North Korea received support from USSR).
And let's not forget that Mao was also really successful in the first 5-year plan (the one before the Great Leap Forward) and he increased the output of the agricultural sector. Sure, the Great Leap Forward was catastrophic, but it didn't come with the intention to hurt people, but to improve their lives as fast as possible.
Like Staline for the URSS, the population don't forget the horror he made but won't forget that Staline make a feudal society to the second superpower. Reason why in these day Putin is popular among his population since he manage to raise Russia from the chaos post URSS to a stable society
@@Dageka People often neglect the dilemma that PRC had to deal with: little industrial capability and too many people to feed. To overcome this, the only way would be rapid industrialization. Without sufficient foreign aid or colonies to exploit, it was inevitable that China went through a very tough phase of history, which added with some human error, turned out to be too much a price to pay.
@@Dageka Also, the importance of foreign aid was often underrated. Industrialization requires tons of investment, which means financial and technological support are crucial.
Unfortunately, unfortunately, there is very little in this video about how Ma killed 80 million people in a lot about communist party politics and about Gio political relationships and the Indian Chinese war and the Pakistani camps and so forth. I would recommend trying to stick a little bit closer to the topic or else just label it as general Chinese history 1955 and 1970.
Mao did do something good only on the industrilation(many of those were also just useless because of the old technology),but the cost was unacceptable, my grandpa nearly starved to death when he was a kid
@@Cam-nq8br Actually his neighbours little little girl was send to other family to change for just about a bowl of rice...and it was actually just in hebei province near bejing....
@@Cam-nq8br and that was not even the worst cause sometimes people just eat dead bodies or change other's babies to eat because the can't kill their babies themselves.....in Chinese this is called易子而食
@@autumnalcell6689 Industrialisation is over rated, it shouldn't be forced on a country for short term gain, the rabbi's transformation destroys demographics, culture and isn't even that effective. Planned economies always failed on consumer goods for instance
40% time in ideological education doesnt lead to good soldiering. What is more I have a feeling that today, tho the army swears loyalty to the party the soldiers actually feel loyal to China their country not the government.
So China had struggles to the 70ies, like Europe had in the middle ages. Fast Forward to this day i don't think these times are just over becuse Moa died. I think it is still a major danger to the chinese state, that chinese culture today is only 50 years from these events. And the CCCP still fosters this kind of worshipping of the "state religion" communism down to private issues. Doesn't look god in the long run if this kind of worshipping and blind following is not widely overcome. Even if the majority of chinese may not be easily manipulated. I guess that's why the city i live in has a sizeable chinese community for 15 years. Doesn't seem like they are eager to go back.
Mao is the second-class great Chinese in my mind. Sun is the first-class. Mao proved that even the greatest people cannot maintain their intelligence in old age, which is why Deng Xiaoping later abolished the lifelong tenure of leaders.
The weirdest thing is: after China's 30 years of chaos, India and China are still at the same level. So maybe the common narrative in the west about Mao need to be reviewed.
@Yibay that is absolutely untrue, china was a backwards country up until they opened themselves up to a the wider world with their socialist capitalism, everyone before jiang zemin was actively hearting their countrymen
Yep I mean look at the death rates, only 1 person per 1000 died during the GLF more than India's annual death rate at the time. India 24:1000 to GLF 25:1000 yet people don't pretend tens of millions were dying every year in India.
Your history and particularly your drawings are excellent and I hadn’t seen you in my feed and I just assumed that you put something negative about China or did something else that the sensor that RU-vid frowned upon. I’m sorry you have to go through that.
The population of China in the 20th century was about 400 million because of the Japanese invasion which resulted in about 35 million deaths and disappearances. However, do you think Mao Zedong's dead population in China was about 80 million when he founded the People's Republic of China, and it seems that China's dead population in the 20th century after the founding of the People's Republic of China should have been more than 100 million, and that's the population of a small country, so do you think it's possible for him to have done that?
But one has to tale info the perspective of Chinese history before ww2. At least a CENTURY where the British and other colonial powers did as they pleased and killed any Chinese people who resisted. This towards a people and nation who were the peak civilisation of the world long before we had clothes in Europe. Yet between the 18th and 19th century went from a society not seen anything even close to as sophisticated elsewhere. From this they became the world victim any nation could rob, rape and steal from. So the impetus for Chinese leaders to break with cooperation with the west and basically the worst Tabu in China seems to be to be dependent upon other countries. They’d rather start e than bend their knee again in defeat. Btw the Nationalist lead by Chang Kai Shek fought against the Japanese while Mao and his organisation hid in the mountains. And when the nationalists had defended china against the Japanese, Mao suddenly attacked them with full strength because they hid from the Japanese.
We know that Hitler and Stalin were the worst mass murderers in History. Hitler order the murder of millions of Jews as well as many Travellers, homosexuals, and other people he deemed as lesser across Europe. Stalin's mass murdering was more limited to his own people and the Poles. But both lead to far fewer deaths then the mass manslaughter and cultural genocide of Mao's famines and the Great Leap Forward. And many of the deaths in Mao's China were murders, not famine. Who was the worst ruler in human history? How do you weigh manslaughter against murder in such an assessment?
Well Hitler did it for sure with evil intent in cruel ways for the sake of cruelty. Stalin and Mao might been sadistic, but more clues that it was more like severe mismanagment and that their idea that they could industrialize without see how it would go in practice
We can talk about death count rather concretely, but it's moot to discuss something as subjective as who one considers to be the 'worst' of these atrocious leaders. Just to be clear, my point is that they are all horrible and that one can make pretty convincing arguments for any of them being the worst, either by focusing on their motivations, beliefs, death count, goals, international spread, lasting effects, etc... .
The truth is that: Great leap forward: 55 million kills. Cultural revolution: 20 million kills. Landlord murder under mao: 25 million. Total: 100 million.
The kids and tennager idolizing mao or Stalin wanting to support communism make me think ether they have know idea of what they supporting or the just doesn't care ether way I can take them serious
While the regimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan got most of the condemnation in the 20th century, it were the communist regimes (USSR, Maoist China, Khmer Rouge) who had the highest victims toll.
its weird how people still call Chinese prisons Laogai even though they are very clearly a different institution that people get sent to for different reasons (getting convicted for crimes rather than for just random reasons like under Mao's psychotic dictatorship). Like, it's pretty rich for America to take offense at prisons being inhumane, practicing torture, and outsourcing penal labor to private companies. like yeah, we do the same thing here, except a much higher percentage of our population is imprisoned. and China at least doesn't have any pretensions of being the "land of the free"
It is widely accepted that humanity declined about 50% of its population during the first week of the implementation of the great leap backwards. Commies cannot dispute this figure.
"Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have been immortal. Had he died in 1966, he would still have been a great man but flawed. But he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say?" -Chen Yun
@@wheresmyeyebrow1608 did you think that this video provides accurate info? im sorry but this is just the average western viewpoint on mao zedong, fueled with propaganda.
The problem with anything Chinese history related is that the numbers tend to be alot bigger compared to the rest of the world the 100 years war between France and England had tiny death tolls compared to even 1 of China's civil wars.
These videos are genius. It starts with 1 million dead in China, then 5 million. Finally 20 million people. Now it's 80 million. Genius.Is there 80 million people in France now?😂
The numbers are pulled out of the ass of rabid anti CCP types. If you look at how they arrived at 80m is by counting falling birth rates as deaths then projecting that forward so saying 80m would exist today without mobilization or these policies. The death rate during the GLF was barely even above India's. 24 v 25 per 1000
that's most likely a lie, clearly this video is biased and cites no sources, it's mostly fiction for the anti-china industrial complex that exists in the west
@@wingkeungkong415 No? I think they were talking about such a new ridiculous low for revolutions, killing people based on telling a mango is a mango, far from helping anyone.
@@wingkeungkong415 Tell that to the Quiet Revolution, the Velvet Revolution, the Euromaidan, the Color Revolutions, the Jasmin Revolution, the Revolution that ended the junta in Myanmar and communist rule in Mongolia, the Revolutions that led to the independence of nations like in the Baltics. Reality is unkind to absolutes.
On the note of steel production during the GLF, I remember reading a story about how Mao visited his home village during the campaign and was saddened that a large wooden Buddha statue in the village center he loved growing up was torn down and burned to help meet his steel quota. Just an interesting note on the more human side of an otherwise brutal authoritarian.
as a Vietnamese, i would like to see how some historian depict my country. VCP and VNQDD made numerous mistaken during their rule that was costly to the people. Modern Vietnam share some character of the lesser year but people trying to bring up event that happen decade ago as a reason to tear down the progress made by the people is stupid at time. Learning from previous mistake is a important factor in growing and developing a nation, learning from past mistake is important for the newer generation to strengthen our future.
