Mao Zedong is one of the most controversial leaders of the twentieth century. The Chinese people know him both as a survivor and a tyrant. From his tactical success of the Long March to his embarrassing failure of the Great Leap Forward, Mao has greatly influenced the result of what China is today. Most of Mao's major successes have been in the Cap's rise to power, while Mao's failure have come at the time when the CCP was in power. To focus on Mao's legacy one has to illuminate the questions why Mao despite all his big failures and his tyranny hold such a hero status? And how did his successors elude with his controversial legacy?

China was a "predominantly rural society, with more than 80% of its people peasants" before Mao came into power. The economic problems were so big that the totalitarianism with which Mao reigned was necessary. "The collectivisation and industrialisation programmes that Mao enforces may not have accorded with civil rights as understood and operated in other nations but China's needs made them unavoidable." Mao's way of reign was ruthless and despotic but it saved China from "disintegration and laid the basis for the 'revolution' of the 80's when Deng

Following the disaster of the Great Leap Forward Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. Red guards were formed in 1966 and sent into the countryside to force bureaucrats, professors, technicians, intellectuals, and other no peasants into rural work. Thousands were murdered or forced to give up their job. The resulting anarchy, terror and paralysis completely disrupted the urban economy, industrial production dipped. The Cultural Revolution served Mao's intention on purging Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, but the outcomes of this revolution, as Harry Harding argued, was "unrelenting intrigue, betrayal, and violence at the highest level of leadership." Ironically the ideology and the cult of Mao surged to the highest point in the Cultural Revolution. It caused a barrier of other ideological and philosophical development in the culture. A long-lasting effect from the time of Cultural Revolution was the rapid growth in population. There were about two hundred million children born during the ten years of the "great rebellion." The birth control planning lost the designator because of many experienced cadres in this field were criticised and purged, and also the romanticism from the revolution increased the sexual activities in the masses. The cult of Mao made people fell into Mao's theory of a newborn child was "a set of productive hands waiting to work, rather than as a hungry mouth waiting to be fed." As the young people being born during the Maoist "baby boom" began to reach working age in the late-1970s, unemployment and underemployment of the urban labour force became the major problem in the early Deng's era. Another Mao's legacy suffered by the Chinese people was his persecution toward the intellectual and educational culture during the Cultural Revolution. Mao's beliefs of intellectuals were all evil which could be trace from his background in the studies of traditional Chinese philosophy, especially Legalism. In addiction, Mao's hatred toward intellectual could be seek back to the criticism Mao suffered in the Hundred Flower campaign, "his strategy of using intellectuals to criticise his foes within the party had backfired." Mao had also uttered his view toward intelligentsia to Doctor Li, which explained why Mao used the Cultural Revolution for not only removal Liu and Deng, but also the irritating intellectuals, just liked the bourgeois. Mao was deeply suspicious of China's intellectuals... intellectuals had to be reformed. Mao put the intellectuals in the bourgeois camp. "Intellectuals are unstable... swinging with the wind... they are ignorant of real life." " The party has not yet properly educated the intellectuals. The bourgeois spirit hangs like a ghost over their heads. They are vacillating." "...His (Mao's) lifelong disdain for the arrogance of parasitic intellectuals." Mao's lack policy on the economic development and his ignorance of the need of practical preparation from economist led to unproductive and limited economic development that was not up to China's potential.

Nevertheless one has to point out very clearly that Mao had to take the largest responsibility of the lasting effects from the Great leap Forward (1958) and the Cultural Revolution (1966), these terrible campaigns which influenced the social, economical and cultural developments in China until the present. His utopianism, radicalism and authoritarianism had not only led him and CCP to victory over Guomindang, but also changed the entire nation into the sufferings from revolutions and confrontations. As Edgar Snow remarked, "Mao's achievement was perhaps unique... a dreamer, warrior, politician, ideologist, poet, egoist, revolutionary destroyer-creator," Mao was the sole leader of the Chinese people, but his failure in the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Rev

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Approximate Word count = 2546
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)