1Mao's View on Kim
In 1956, Mao Zedong was so angry with Kim Il Sung that he told Moscow he might use the 400,000 Chinese troops still in North Korea to “help Kim Il-sung correct his mistakes,” a thinly veiled proposal to depose him. However, Mao later came to regard Kim as a loyal son, to the point of promising him that if the United States attacked the North, Kim could use China’s northeastern provinces as a rear area under his own command.
2. North Korea exists because Taiwan exists: China was prevented by the US 7th Fleet from invading Taiwan in June 1950, so Mao Zedong announced China would enter the Korean war with the invasion force originally intended for Taiwan, and by October this force saved North Korea from imminent defeat.
3. Mao Zedong declared South Asian tigers as “enemies of the people” and as a result of several “anti-pest” campaigns that were launched by him, these animals were brought to the brink of extinction.
4. The Four Pests Campaign of 1958 was the first action taken in Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward. With this, he intended to eliminate rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows from China. He suspected that a single sparrow consumed four pounds of grain per year. The program was successful in eliminating sparrows, but it had the unintended effect of bug populations exploding that ate all the crops due to the fact that their natural predator was no more. 20 million Chinese died as a result of the ensuing famine. Despite the widespread famine, China continued to be a net exporter, as Mao sought to maintain face and convince the world of the success of his plans. Foreign aid was refused.
5. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward campaign intended to turn China from an agrarian nation into an industrialized one. To win favor with their superiors and avoid being purged, each layer in Mao’s party exaggerated the amount of grain produced under them. Therefore the state requested a disproportionately high amount of that fictitious harvest for state use. Farmers were left with little food for themselves. Millions starved and many resorted to cannibalism. There were reports of people eating the dead and parents eating their own children.
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6Mao's Death
No one in China expected that Chairman Mao would die, so there were no preparations at all for his death. Mao’s body was drained of fluids, injected with formaldehyde, and it was said his head swelled up “like a football.”
7. Mao Zedong infected several women with an STD. However, the young women were proud to be infected. The illness transmitted by Mao was a badge of honor and testimony to their close relations with the Chairman, according to his doctor.
8. In 1959, Nikita Khrushchev described Mao Zedong to a Chinese diplomat as an “old boot that needs to be thrown out.” ‘Old boot’ in Chinese meant prostitute, which led Chinese officials to believe Mao had been insulted as an ‘old whore’ due to misinterpretation.
9. After Mao Zedong promised that China’s steel production would one day surpass England’s and America’s, many children born in China in 1958 and 1959 were named ‘Chaoying’ (Surpass England) or ‘Chaomei’ (Overtake America).
10. Mao Zedong was personally struck by the loss of his son, Mao Anqing, during the Korean War, a war he had effectively started. North Korea and China commemorated each other’s support in their struggle against the United States and there is a Chinese soldiers’ cemetery north of Pyongyang.
11Mao's Successor
When Hua Guofeng arrived in Beijing in February 1971, he was virtually unknown. Yet just five-and-a-half years later he succeeded Mao as China’s paramount leader, catapulted over the heads of veteran revolutionaries, seasoned senior administrators, and accomplished Marxist theoreticians.
12. Mao Anying was the son of Mao Zedong. He fought for China in various wars, before ultimately being killed in the Korean War. Mao Zedong did not know about his death for about two months, despite being the head of government of China. Mao had originally groomed Anying to succeed him as the head of China but after Anying died none of Mao’s other children or wives were fit to succeed him so he appointed non-relative successor Hua Guofeng.
13. In 1972, Richard Nixon was insulted by Mao Zedong’s gift of 50 grams of Da Hong Pao tea, until he was told that it was half of China’s entire crop and was worth around $250,000 in today’s money.
14. In the 1950s, Mao’s government purged capitalists and political opponents by abusing them verbally and physically until they confessed, often committing suicide. Jumping from tall buildings became so common that people avoided walking near skyscrapers, afraid that bodies might land on them.
15. Mao Zedong promoted higher birth rates in China and its population grew from 550 million to over 900 million during his reign as he believed that population growth empowered the country. He then reversed his policy in 1970, where citizens were encouraged to marry at later ages and many were limited to having only two children.
16Romanization of Chinese
Stalin saved the Chinese written script by talking Mao Zedong out of completely replacing it with full-scale Romanization (Latin alphabets to transliterate Chinese). After the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, Mao wanted a radical break with old ways and thought that China’s beautiful yet complicated and inefficient script was a hindrance to the country’s development. After Stalin talked him out of it, the regime instead simplified many Chinese characters, supposedly making them easier to learn.
17. During the period of Mao, China made several concessions to North Korea, such as handing over part of the territory of Changbai/Paekdu Mountain to North Korea and granting it other privileges in Northeast China during the early 1960s.
18. During the Chinese Civil War that lasted between 1928 and 1949, Stalin advised a coalition government between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Nationalist Party in postwar China, but the proposal was rejected by Mao Zedong.
19. When the Japanese invaded China during World War 2, Mao Zedong allied his party with his opponent in the Chinese Civil War, Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party). At this time, the KMT was a proper military and the Communists were literally a peasant guerrilla army. While KMT bore the brunt of fighting the Japanese, Mao and his army hung around the countryside, recruiting and growing in strength. When the Chinese Civil War resumed, Mao’s army starved Kuomintang forces in some cities and massacred them in many other places.
20. North Korea has its ethnic Chinese community dating to the 1800s, whose members hold passports of the People’s Republic of China. China in the 1960s, 1970s had lower living standards than North Korea and Kim Il-sung’s dictatorship was seen as more predictable and less moody than Chairman Mao.
21Mao & Nixon Meet
The initial 1972 meeting between President Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong was planned for 15 minutes, but it lasted for about an hour. Mao seemed to only want to talk about philosophic questions, although Nixon brought up questions like the India-Pakistan crisis, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Korea.
22. Mao Zedong’s ‘New Marriage Law’ of 1950 outlawed arranged marriages, enabled women to divorce their husbands, and made it illegal for men to have multiple wives. However, women continued to face pressure to marry workers and farmers to prove their socialist values during his era.
23. After Mao Zedong gifted mangoes to workers during China's Cultural Revolution, a mango cult developed, with workers preserving mangoes in formaldehyde and making wax mango replicas. Workers worshipped mangoes, holding processions that celebrated them and equating them with Mao’s image. One dentist who compared the mangoes to sweet potatoes in appearance was executed.
24. Mao Zedong was actually a Hunanese speaker and his Mandarin was so bad that he had to have people translate his words into comprehensible Mandarin Chinese.
25. Mao Zedong never brushed his teeth and by the time of his death, his teeth were covered in a green film. Mao had a habit, which was shared by many peasants in China, of washing his mouth in the morning with tea and then eating the tea leaves. Once, when his private physician suggested to him that he should use a toothbrush, he replied, “A tiger never brushes his teeth.”
