Mao Zedong: The Chairman of Communist China

This video is sponsored by Shaker & Spoon.

Credits:
Host - Simon Whistler
Author - Shannon Quinn
Producer - Jack Cole
Executive Producer - Shell Harris

Other Biographics Videos:

Joseph Stalin: The Red Terror

Winston Churchill Biography: In the Darkest Hour

Source/Further reading:

[Czardeaner]

"But actually it was about to get a whole lot worse" really sums up this century in politics.

[matthintz]

Correction: the government under the KMT was The Republic of China. The government under Mao Zedong was The Peoples' Republic of China.

[pheebsofficialaccount]

“People would never go hungry again”


Well about that...

[YellowAlex]

When someone says "Mao Zedong" every thing is fine but when someone says
"Mao Zepenis" everyone loses their minds

[ignitionfrn]

0:55 - Chapter 1 - Early life
4:30 - Chapter 2 - The rise of communism in china
7:35 - Chapter 3 - The long march & the 2nd sino japanese war
10:05 - Chapter 4 - The great leap forward
13:20 - Chapter 5 - The cultural revolution
16:30 - Chapter 6 - Later life & death

[windywendi]

A problem in this video: Mao's age. He was born in 1893.
1:21 said Mao born in 1883.
4:16 said Mao was 18 in 1911, birth year correctly dated to 1893.
7:33 said he was 48 in 1931, got him 10 yrs older again.

[zmanafacation]

how dare you question the magical powers of the holy Mango

[pyromania]

"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

[narikimbally]

I asked my cat who was her favorite dictator. She said "Maooo."

[jamesmoffat]

U disrespect chairman mao? 10 yrs steel production!

[christopherheselton]

As a historian of China, there are so many inaccuracies in this video it's quite misleading. I know simplifications are necessary to boil things down for a video, but this smacks of lazy research. I'm quite disappointed.

A couple of examples:
"He convinced a group of students to seek out anyone who was speaking out against the communist party." The way it is described, it sounds like Mao met with students to establish the Red Guards, but in actuality, the red guards began among high school students at the Tsing Hua University Affiliated Middle School quite spontaneously and without central direction. Mao certainly encouraged it, but he wasn't involved in its beginnings. Furthermore, the Red Guards actually targeted the communist party or as they saw it "traitors" within the Communist Party, referring to them as "capitalist roaders" (走资路) and "Soviet Revisionist" (苏修). By 1968, the Red Guards had devolved into basically street gangs fighting amongst themselves in factional violence, and eventually, they started attacking military installations, looking for "Soviet Revisionist" within the military. That led to their quick suppression by the military. Mao supported the Red Guard's attack on the party, because he was sidelined by the party after the failure of the Great Leap Forward but still maintained an important spiritual role in the nation, and he used the Red Guard to attack his enemies in the party. (Source: Roderick MacFarquhar, "Mao's Last Revolution")

"The leader of the KMT, Chiang Kai-shek, had to swallow his pride and ask the Communist Party for their help. Their Red Army was growing in numbers. They defended China in what is known as the Hundred Regiments Offensive." That's a heck of a mischaracterization. Chiang Kai-shek was forced at gunpoint by mutinying officers to establish a truce with the Communist in 1936. The Communist was actually at their weakest point after being chased across China by KMT forces. However, Chiang's insistence of wiping out the Communist while ignoring the Japanese invasion of Manchuria made Chiang highly unpopular. Eventually, his officers, particularly the former Manchurian warlord Zhang Xueliang, knew that destroying the communist would exacerbate national division at a time when unity was needed to face the Japanese, so they took Chiang hostage in December 1936 to negotiate a back-channel truce. On top of that, the Red Army was at its lowest point in 1936. It didn't start growing until the war started to break out, and the Red Army did very little to the Japanese compared to the nationalist. They primarily focused on guerilla campaigns in the northern countryside of questionable effectiveness. The Hundred Regiments campaign in 1940 was the CCP's only real conventional offensive in the war, but it was pretty minor. Involving only about 80, 000 men. It largely just caused a minor inconvenience for the Japanese Imperial Army, killing only 12, 000 Japanese troops and causing infrastructure damage that the Japanese were able to recover from in a few months. While it would be the CCP's greatest victory in the war, it was hardly impressive in the broader scheme of things. The nationalist did far more on a yearly basis. The CCP was able, however, to use the Hundred Regiments Campaign as a great propaganda tool and often portray themselves to this day as the (most) active resistors to the Japanese invasion. The reality was more complicated. The CCP was poorly equipped, smaller, and in a rural hinterland that the Japanese did not care for as much. This video makes it sound like the CCP came in to save the day, but honestly, no one really saved the day, and the KMT contributed far more to the war effort, in part because it had the resources to and was the main target of the Japanese. (Source: Rana Mitter, "Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945")

[berniecruz]

I wish they had this type of documentaries in high school. It would have made learning history a lot easier! Sometimes it's only necessary to learn about the highlights of what happened in history than knowing the full monty of everything.
With these kinds of documentaries, he gets right to the point and doesn't bore the audience of useless information.
In my opinion, I think schools need to adopt this kind of teaching for this kind of history lessons.

[daeseongkim]

You should do one for Zhou Enlai, in all the chaos and tubulence of Mao and Jiang Qing’s rule, Zhou was a rationale man, an unspoken hero and renown diplomat that saved what he could of the old China and shielded people who were being hunted down by the rogue Red Guards - people like Madame Sun, Deng Xiaoping, and Pu Yi. He saved what he could of the Forbidden Palace and the Potala Palace in Tibet, royal tombs and Buddhist temples throughout the country.

[dae]

I mean mangos are pretty damn good to be fair 😂

[molihua]

I wouldn't call this video biased, but there are so many inaccuracies. The CHinese Civil War ended in 1949, it restarted in 1946 after WWII.

[fin]

The people’s republic wasn’t created in 1911, that was the republic, the people’s republic was formed after/during Mao’s revolution. This has been mentioned a million times already but you really need to fix this video

[anactualalpaca]

"See these herpes? Chairman Mao gave me these herpes."

[ShadowSumac]

An example of ruthless tyrant and of "if hero lives long enough, he eventually becomes a villain"..

[xtwzyz]

as a chinese myself,






I just not gonna say anything, since people will get triggered by politics no matter what

[helixvoidecho]

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions"