Mao Zedong

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Tue Jul 17, 2018 5:44 am

How's he viewed in your country?

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Jul 17, 2018 7:31 am

By the average Australian: who? Is that some chink?
By Australian politicians: actually never mind, they probably fit into the above category too (except they love receiving big donations from Chinese property investors/developers, it's just the average citizen they hate.)

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Tue Jul 17, 2018 7:39 am

Had to google him...

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Tue Jul 17, 2018 7:39 am

Russian stalinists love the guy and see him as the heir to communism after soviet party betrayed its ideals with Stalin's death.

Everyone else doesn't like him either because he turned on the soviet communist party after Stalin's death, or because he was a ruthless tyrant. Or both.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Tue Jul 17, 2018 12:13 pm

I guess in germany most don't know about him at all and the rest don't care too much either.
If you are into a bit of the modern history of the world, his is of course one of the names you should at least recognize.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Tue Jul 17, 2018 12:40 pm

I learned about him in school at a relatively young age, before I knew anything about politics. From what I remember, he was bad because he's communist. The most relevant thing I've heard in the past decade was Chairman Meow jokes:

Iduno · Post by **Iduno** » Tue Jul 17, 2018 12:59 pm

The US teaches that he's a bad communism man.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Tue Jul 17, 2018 1:25 pm

I lived in Australia until I was fifteen, and never heard of him. In my US high school we learned about him, first as Chiang Kai-shek's rival, then as the architect of the Cultural Revolution and associated horrors.

Thaluikhain · Post by **Thaluikhain** » Tue Jul 17, 2018 2:09 pm

Happened to cover him in high school. Unfortunately my Modern History teacher seems to be fighting the Cold War in his classroom. Not fun having an Eastern European last name.

erik · Post by **erik** » Tue Jul 17, 2018 3:58 pm

I got an old translation copy of the little red book in college out of curiosity and wound up hiding it just so my inlaws who live 300 miles away don’t accidentally see it. That’s my Mao story. I honestly don’t know if anyone in her family knows who he was.

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Tue Jul 17, 2018 4:35 pm

China's Stalin, for the few Brazilians that even know him.

What this means exactly ranges from "godless communist monster" to "bold leader who had to take extreme decisions during a extreme time", depending of people getting their history lessons from the far right or the far left.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Tue Jul 17, 2018 5:25 pm

As far as I can tell we Americans treat Zedong the same way we do most foreigners: dismissively. People point out that he was a communist and that the Great Leap Forward didn't work and as far as they're concerned that's all anybody really needs to know.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Tue Jul 17, 2018 6:55 pm

What other Americans have said, except the words "cultural revolution" are attached to his communist autocrat self, but we didn't really go over that.

Shiritai · Post by **Shiritai** » Tue Jul 17, 2018 11:04 pm

Pretty much just this.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Wed Jul 18, 2018 12:45 am

Bad Communism Catman.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Wed Jul 18, 2018 8:16 am

Most things about Mao would be a death count of the famines that continued happening before the internal transport networks were completed. Maybe that he was psycho enough to murder everyone who gave him bad news so all they showed him was good news all the time and he really had no idea how anything he did worked because of how terrified everyone was all the time. Having all the sparrows killed turned out to be a bad thing.

Maybe some of the old leftists could recite the successes he had despite all that, but it's not like they get any airplay ... uh, ever.

Maybe that North Korea shit the bed after he died, cut itself off from the outside world, and lasted about 14 years before complete internal economic collapse that they've never recovered from. While China got on a became, basically, trade-based single-party socialist.