Mao Zedong Totalitarian Leaders Analysis

Totalitarian leaders are frequent employers of political propaganda through the emphasis of commonness and shared history of their people to further their political agenda. By appealing to the collective sentiment of the people, these leaders spread the seed of false hope to gain support of their people and later use that to forge a national identity. In effort to coerce everyone into participating in the nationalist movement, brutal consequences are strictly enforced upon those who do not conform. Mao Zedong of the People’s Republic of China, Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, and Adolf Hitler of Nazi Germany are the three political figures that embody this idea. Mao Zedong seeks to strengthen his Communist state, now known as the People’s Republic of China, after …show more content…
Mao wants to mobilize the entire populations in effort to propel China into the ranks of the world industrial powers, and he does so after establishing a cult of personality (#). Just like any dictatorship, he earned the trust of the population by appealing to their sense of loyalty to the state and their devotion to the Chairman. Relying wholly on the enthusiasm of the masses, Chairman Mao introduces the Great Leap Forward in 1958 (@) with goals to maximize output at home. Thousands of communes were created for mass collectivization in agriculture and citizens would steel out their own household products and utensils for steel production (#). Over the course of history, China has been raided many foreign forces so the idea of producing steel to create weapons to protect the nation from future enemies sounds very promising. Unlike the pleasant message painted by Chairman Mao, the program itself was a total failure because poor quality weapons created from homemade steel were unfit to be used in battle and the disastrous agricultural revolution resulted in mass famine across the country. Mao Zedong later launches another radical program called The Great Proletariat Cultural