this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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Where and when?
Remember that I am talking about Mao-era China, not post-Reform China. Under Mao, with the notable exception of the period of the Great Famine, the quality of life by every conceivable metric was improving every day on a scale not seen before in the history of the world (yes, including the USSR and company, though the USSR helped China accomplish this).
You are such a moron. You are clearly saying that they would have gotten there just fine with liberalism, because that was typically the system of the countries you are nebulously comparing it against.
It's a difficult question, because you one can trace very specific accomplishments Mao made in developing Party ideology prior to 1949, and those developments were critical to the success of the PRC. There is also the fact that we have observed that right opportunists were just waiting in the wings for him to croak and then swooped in under Deng and caused a catastrophic degree of mass-impoverishment through their forced privatization campaigns.
I think there had to be a Mao or a collective that did the work that he historically actually did prior to 49, but that even if Mao had a heart attack in like 1952, there were other competent Party members who might have filled in his role as head of state and done just fine.
It is conspicuous that you talk in an extremely nebulous way because you know nothing of the history.
That's the thing, you know nothing about Maoism because you are just equating it to "a cult of personality around Mao" instead of a historical permutation of communist ideology that was primarily authored by Mao, just as Leninism is not the worship of Lenin and Marxism is not the worship of Marx.
Without Mao-ism, though it would obviously be called something else had Mao not been the helm of it, there absolutely would be no new China. Without a clear Marxist analysis that guided the Party away from both liberalism and being a satellite of the Soviets, the PRC would not have succeeded as it did. It did not need to be written by nor named after Mao, but Mao did write it and it accordingly was named for him, so that is in large part why he gets credit for it.