However, to do so Mao started using collectivization which alongside three years of floods and poor food production, 30-40 million people died, no matter if they were wealthy or poor (Edwards). Alongside this massive famine, Mao also made thousands of labor camps that were spread across China. These Laogais would force long hours with little food and everyone in China was in danger of being sent to one, no matter what class they were in or who they were. In all, this together killed and changed the lives of millions of Chinese. However, in 1962 Mao lost power and therefore he started to plan a massive revolution to overthrow the Capitalists who took him away from ruling China. Therefore, he put together a peasant army called the Red Guardians that would purge the “undesirables” (“Mao Tse-Tung Biography”). This resulted in another mass killing of many people in China and truly showed how strong Mao really was. As Mao said, “What’s so unusual about Emperor Shih Huang of the China …show more content…
After Mao died on September 9, 1976, at age 82 due to Parkinson’s Disease, Mao left a legacy of cold-blooded genocide and the destruction of all Chinese culture. However, despite all of the murderous crimes he had committed, Mao is still to this day treated like a hero to the country of China. Nevertheless, in Mao’s later years he became slightly less harsh and did improve the lives of many of the Chinese. For example, Mao helped raise the status of women, improved literacy, increased the amount of people going to school, and even enhanced health care in China (“Mao Tse-Tung Biography”). Though, later in his life, he decided to try to close all of the schools and redesign the curriculum so that the youth would not learn, but instead only do manual labor, which this caused pure chaos and devastation of the Chinese culture. Therefore, about two years after Mao’s death, the ones who followed Mao in the government collapsed and were replaced while Mao’s successor, Hua Guofeng, decided to try to reform the Chinese government (Scharm). Even though the government had tried as hard as they could, Mao still left his footprint on all of the Chinese people and completely changed the way they are today. Mao brainwashed all of the youth of China during the Cultural Revolution and entirely changed the culture of China as he intended to when he was writing it. He merely made the revolution to