Mao: His Impact and Leadership

Some of the main issues that caused a downfall for China were mostly tied to Mao who was for Communism. He thought that everyone should work together and that way they could over power the United States. He tried to get involved in the Korean war but many thousands of soldiers died. He also tried what he called the Great Leap which ironically caused them to fall or go backwards. He wanted everyone to work together so that they could "surpass America" by killing the sparrows because they ate some of their grain. Mao didn't really think of the "then what" or what came after he killed the sparrows. What ended up happening was that then there were too many insects and they ended up eating a lot of the grain which cause a famine. Mao failed to think ahead and that is why many of his ideas were failures. The plan sounded great the problem resulted after the plan had been achieved. Like when he tried to increase harvests. He thought that having people work harder would make them produce more and indeed it did, but it was more of a unrealistic competition. They would say they would produce a ton and so the government would take that as a promise that they could collect a certain amount of what they were going to produce. But when it came time for the government to collect, they hadn't produced what they thought they would and so the government would take what they were promised and left the country workers with nothing.

Mao had great ideas like getting them motivated with competition and to work together to be more efficient, but as I have said before it only lead to disaster. Mao wasn't a good leader in the sense that he didn't think ahead. He thought of what they could do at that moment and then he would try it out. He experimented but it was like testing ideas with people's lives. If his plan failed, which most of them sort of did, then lots of people would die. He was not aware that some many people of the country side were dying when they were supposed to be prospering because of the hypothetical amounts of grain. But the people were actually dying of starvation. A leader needs to be in contact with all the different parts of land and all the different kinds of people, that way he can prevent a chain of deaths from starvation. A leader also needs to be able to think ahead of what could happen if I did this, or what might go wrong and if it does go wrong what can I do to help the people. I think he was so consumed in his own ideas that he got overwhelmed with how well he thought things would turn out.