Let me tell you why so many Chinese people defend Mao Zedong. In Chinese history education, the horrific events that occurred during the 27 years Mao was in power after 1949—the mass starvation of the three-year famine, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution—are all glossed over vaguely in a few sentences and never taught in detail. In China, everyone pretends that period of history doesn’t exist. Writers and scholars who describe it face severe criticism and are silenced. As for the history of resistance against the Japanese invaders before 1949, the actual resistance was carried out by the Nationalist (KMT) army, and it was also the Nationalist army that represented China in accepting Japan’s surrender. Yet this history has been cleverly erased. In history textbooks, it is simply “the Chinese army” that resisted the Japanese invaders. As a result, in the minds of Chinese people, Mao has one great achievement: he led the Chinese people to defeat the Japanese invaders. Mao did carry out land reform and distributed landlords’ land to the peasants. However, after Mao took control of China, all peasants’ land was nationalized, all peasants were put into communes, and then came large-scale famine along with extremely low work motivation among the peasants. Of course, neither the history of the famine nor the failure of the communes is taught in any detail to Chinese students. So, in the minds of Chinese people, Mao’s second great achievement is that he liberated the Chinese peasants and gave them land. Regarding the Korean War, because of Chinese history education, the vast majority of Chinese people do not know that it was North Korea that invaded South Korea and started the war. Therefore, most Chinese people believe that the evil United States invaded Korea and tried to invade China, and that Mao led the Chinese people to defeat the evil United States in Korea. This is, in their eyes, Mao’s third great achievement. The main general in the Korean War was Peng Dehuai, yet Peng was later persecuted to death by Mao. Most Chinese people don’t know this either, because that part of history has been deliberately ignored. So that’s why so many Chinese people consider Mao a great man. The fundamental reason is that the Chinese Communist Party, in order to maintain the stability of its regime, needs to deify the founder of that regime.