Mao rallied the peasant class behind him and his communist cause. Peasants were tired of being marginalized by the government that they decided to fight under Mao. Mao promised them freedom and real, but as time progressed change came at a cost. Many Chinese starved when Mao enacted the Great Leap Forward, although it was meant to do good for the Chinese people it did the opposite. Following the Great Leap Forward Mao’s Cultural Revolution began. Mao’s Red Guards harassed the people and the people began to realize that maybe Mao was never going to fulfill his promise of freedom. Things only got worse when Mao died in 1976. Up to Mao’s death the people still had respect for him, but when Deng Xiaoping took power the people started questioning when real change was going to happen. As we have…show more content… They supported it when it was fighting for the people’s rights, but once it took power it no longer cared. That is what destroyed the faith of the people in the government. It had been falling for a while, but the people still held on to the belief that Mao was to help them. That all changed when he died and the people realized that they would never get the rights they wanted if the government stayed its course. They saw how corrupt and how little their voice mattered in the grand scheme of things. They wanted to make their voices heard and they saw as democracy as something that could make it happen. Whether or not they believed democracy would be better than communism was not the case. They were fed up with the way communism was treating them and saw democracy as an alternative just as they had once seen communism as better alternative to Chiang Kai-shek’s government. Ultimately the people did not get the democracy they had hoped for as their movement was shut down following the massacre at Tiananmen. Only time will tell if one day the Chinese people will get the democracy they
