Few major figures of the twentieth century have been subject to such widely varying assessments as Mao Zedong. In the 1940s, he was seen in many quarters (including the Kremlin) as a talented guerrilla leader whose Marxist credentials were of dubious authenticity. In the early 1950s, he was perceived rather as the ruler of a totalitarian party state, subservient to Moscow. Then, during the Cultural Revolution, he was metamorphosed once more in people's minds (especially those of student rebels in the West) into an inspired visionary who had devised a new pattern of socialism, purer, more radical, and more humane than that of the Soviet Union. Finally, in his last years the view began to gain ground that he was, on the contrary, a harsh and arbitrary despot cast in a traditional Chinese mould. Mao was all these things simultaneously, and a number of others beside. It has often been said that Mao Zedong was both China's Lenin and her Stalin. If, however, we wish to explain developments in China in terms of analogies drawn from Russian experience, it would be more appropriate to say that Mao Zedong was China's Lenin, Stalin, and Peter the Great. Though he did not himself create the Chinese Communist Party, Mao qualifies as China's Lenin in the sense that he ultimately devised the tactics employed in the conquest of power, and led the Party to victory. He also fulilled the rather more ambiguous role of Stalin, who not only presided over agricultural collectivisation and laid the foundations of a socialist economy, but brought the whole enterprise perilously near to ruin by the methods he used in destroying his rivals in the Party. In addition, he was in a very real sense China's Peter the Great: the first ruler who sought to modernise the country by drawing upon ideas and techniques of Western origin as none of his predecessors had done either before or after the fall of the empire.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Few major figures of the twentieth century have been subject to such widely varying assessments as Mao Zedong. In the 1940s, he was seen in many quarters (including the Kremlin) as a talented guerrilla leader whose Marxist credentials were of dubious authenticity. In the early 1950s, he was perceived rather as the ruler of a totalitarian party state, subservient to Moscow. Then, during the Cultural Revolution, he was metamorphosed once more in people's minds (especially those of student rebels in the West) into an inspired visionary who had devised a new pattern of socialism, purer, more radical, and more humane than that of the Soviet Union. Finally, in his last years the view began to gain ground that he was, on the contrary, a harsh and arbitrary despot cast in a traditional Chinese mould. Mao was all these things simultaneously, and a number of others beside. It has often been said that Mao Zedong was both China's Lenin and her Stalin. If, however, we wish to explain developments in China in terms of analogies drawn from Russian experience, it would be more appropriate to say that Mao Zedong was China's Lenin, Stalin, and Peter the Great. Though he did not himself create the Chinese Communist Party, Mao qualifies as China's Lenin in the sense that he ultimately devised the tactics employed in the conquest of power, and led the Party to victory. He also fulilled the rather more ambiguous role of Stalin, who not only presided over agricultural collectivisation and laid the foundations of a socialist economy, but brought the whole enterprise perilously near to ruin by the methods he used in destroying his rivals in the Party. In addition, he was in a very real sense China's Peter the Great: the first ruler who sought to modernise the country by drawing upon ideas and techniques of Western origin as none of his predecessors had done either before or after the fall of the empire." in the context of "Stuart R. Schram, "Makers of the Twentieth Century: Mao Zedong", History Today (April 1981)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.