Mao Situng has been called by one historian, quote, one of the most tyrannical despots of the 20th century, end quote.

I think most of us, because of history class or pop culture, know something about Mao Sidong,

about Mao Sidong, often called Chairman Mao, or just Mao, because of his pivotal place

in Chinese history, at a pivotal moment in world history. In 1961, Mao's government, that of the Communist

People's Republic of China, split from the Soviet Union, which was undergoing its own set of

changes after the death of Joseph Stalin, and the rise of new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev,

who introduced a set of policies revolving around, first, de-Stalinization,

and second, so-called peaceful coexistence, the former referring to a desire to step away from the

cult of personality that Stalin had built for himself in the prior decades, and the latter

referring to a new popular theory that communist states like the Soviet Union could

peacefully coexist with capitalist countries like the United States.

Mao vehemently disagreed with these concepts, in part because he himself was building his own

personality cult at the time, and because he believed that the Sino, the Chinese

interpretation of communist theory was the correct one. And that version of the theory indicated

that capitalists must be stopped, and that all good communists need to be an ever-present

ideological opposition to them.

This disagreement over ideological creed led Mao to denounce the Soviet Union as a product of, quote,

revisionist traitors, end quote, and broke the alliance that the two countries had shared up until that point. During that same time period, from about

1958 until about 1962, a period of only around four years, Mao was undertaking what he

called the Great Leap Forward, an economic and social plan that was meant to quickly

convert the largely agrarian, technologically unsophisticated, and

relatively poor nation into a collective-based tech-heavy industrial giant.

...