The movie "The Blue Kite" shows us the true horror of what was the Maoist years of china. In it we see how a small family must deal with the ever changing reality of there world and the madness all around them. Mao may forever be known as having liberated China from the KMT but history will remember the negativity of his reforms far more them any good he may have done.
 The Great Leap Forward was a terrible failure and caused millions of deaths. It was a process Mao had devised to bring China inline with the modern world. Mao felt that hard work and labor could over come technical skill and knowledge, this proved to be a fatal mistake. Mao’s personal hatred for intellectuals clouded his ability to see there worth. He forced his people to use poorly thought out farming methods to grow crops. Then imposed quotas on them in which there where no real rewards or incentives for meeting the quota, only punishment for failing to meet it.
The people also lost a lot of food from the crops when many of the workers where pulled away from the harvests, to work on another of Mao’s failed incentives steal production. Mao told the people that by making steal they would be on par with the modern world. He also said that it would be used to liberate Taiwan, which was still occupied by the hated KMT. That ultimately never happened because the impurities of the steal made it worthless, plus there was foreign interference that made any plans for invasion of Taiwan to risky.
Another mistake Mao made was distancing himself from the Soviet Union. Mao was angered by Khrushchev’s criticism of the former leader of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin and his criticism of Mao’s ill-fated Great Leap Forward. This and more led to Mao cutting all ties to the Soviet Union there by losing all of Russia’s economic and scientific aid and most of there political aid. Mao in the end created a police state in which people where dying of malnutrition, disease and being worked to death. This is all represented in "The Blue Kite" where people are afraid to do anything to draw attention to themselves and there quality of life is extremely poor.
If it had ended there the Maoist period would have been remembered by some as horrible, some as livable, and others as some what good. Then Mao took it one step farther, feeling that he had lost the level of influence he wanted in his government. Mao decided to start a whole new revolution. Mao called it the cultural revolution. He encouraged the new generation of Chinese young men and women to rise up and over throw there elders, who had positions of power above them. People like teachers, bosses and even communist party political officials. Chinese society was on the edge of anarchy and Mao just watched it happen. In "The Blue Kite" we see the effects of all this has on one family and the people around them, except for the political aspects. It shows us the terrible things most Chinese people went threw during the Maoist era.
Mao’s unwavering belief that he and he alone knew what was best for China caused more harm then the KMT ever had and exposed China to the worst period in its history. In the end the only real cause of all the problems of the Maoist era was Mao himself.