How China transformed under Mao Zedong

Question: Who was Mao Zedong?
Answer: Mao Zedong was a Marxist theorist, revolutionary, and, from 1949 to 1959, the first chairman of the People’s Republic of China. Mao was one of the most influential and controversial political figures of the 20th century, in China and abroad.

Question: What is Maoism?
Answer: Mao’s particular strand of revolutionary theory took from the Marxist, Leninist, and Stalinist traditions but was also culturally tailored for the Chinese people.
Maoism departed from other strands of Marxism in its understanding of the peasantry: not as a class incapable of achieving political consciousness but as one with a dormant but tappable source of revolutionary energy.

Question: How has China changed since Mao Zedong’s death?
Answer:Although some practices are still authoritarian, some policies were dismantled, such as China’s agriculture, which was decollectivized, and its economy, which has been refashioned to be more free trade-friendly.

Question: What is Mao Zedong's legacy?
Answer: Mao Zedong has a complex legacy, neither wholly good nor wholly bad. On the one hand, Mao’s revolution achieved China’s sovereignty, and his land reforms bequeathed land to a formerly landless peasantry. On the other hand, Mao ran an authoritarian government that quashed dissidence and caused years of terror, suffering, and famine for its people.

Question: What was Mao Zedong’s family like?
Answer: Mao Zedong was born in 1893 to a peasant family. Mao had three wives: Yang Kaihui, who died in the Chinese civil war; He Zizhen, who accompanied him on the Long March while pregnant; and Jiang Qing, a movie star.