Prompt 1: Analyze the aim and impact of one authoritarian ruler’s socioeconomic policies.
Mao’s economic policies don’t’ achieve his aim and have devastating impact while social policies
worked well. It is because he believed in mass mobilization and people power so much that he
couldn’t realize that it is impossible to challenge natural laws of how things work in economy
through mass mobilization. While social campaigns worked well because society transform based
on people’s mind more instead of objective facts.
Great Leap Forward as known as one of Mao’s greatest failure, which is an ambitious economic
policy. Mao’s initial aim is to mobilize the massive population of China and boost the economy to
overcome the capitalism countries. However, his aim didn’t work well and the impact was
devastating. Peasants did show extremely strong passion in planting more crops and producing
steel. However, they are so passionate that they couldn’t see what they are doing is not realistic
no matter how passionate they are, whether it is the extremely high yield or homemade steel. In
the end, they failed to achieve their overly ideal goals and they didn’t want to admit it because it
would make them seem like not been response passionate enough to Mao’s campaign. That
caused a huge famine instead of the boosted yield and successful steel industry Mao imagined.
As for social policies that aimed to change people’s mind, the impacts were much better. For
example, encouraging women to get education and work in order to enhance their social status,
make people keep the cleanness of their house and public areas and get healthcare like
vaccination in order to prevent diseases. These all went well as none of these goals is against
objective rules of how things worked. In fact, all these goals can be achieved as long as people
are willing to change their mind and put effort to it. And Mao was influential enough to mobilize the
major population which were mainly peasants to follow these policies.
Mao also had some social policies that lead to some negative effect but still achieve their initial
aims. For example, the terrible treatment of landlords including public shaming and labor camps.
These lead to a lot of tragedies as many landlords either died in the torture or committed suicide,
and their family were been treated unfairly. The situation worsened during the cultural revolution
as intellectuals were also been tortured. There were self-criticize meetings and fear everywhere
and there was no trust between people. Family units were broken, schools dismissed. Even though
there were so much negative impact, Mao’s aims of winning peasants support and make sure there
is no capitalism in the country were realized.
Someone may argue that as a social campaign, the four pest campaign also didn’t work well
because of against science fact that sparrow is actually good for the crop. The initial aim of this
policy is to protect the crops, but crops were turned out to be damaged because sparrows were
killed and couldn’t eat the crop-eating insects. However, this policy is also about economy. As a
social campaign, the part of mobilizing people to kill the four pests was successful. As for the
negative impact of damaging the crops, it can be count as the failure of economic policy because
it is a failure of protecting agriculture.
In conclusion, as an authoritarian ruler, Mao believes in mass mobilization so much that he
sometimes ignored the objective rules. So that the impact of his social policies confirmed the aims
while that of economic policies couldn’t.