One of his main ideas was the vision of the peasants as the engine of the revolution. Traditionally, Marxist-Leninist ideas had seen industrial workers as the force that would lead to revolution. Mao realized that this was not the case in China, and that the revolution should be developed from the peasantry. At that time, China did not have a significant population of workers, but it did have a large mass of discontented peasants, which would end up supporting Mao's ideas.
The prevailing view in the West and in the Chinese Communist Party after the seizure of power by Deng Xiaoping, holds that the Great Leap Forward was a failure, caused largely by political mistakes led by Mao Zedong, which caused death by starvation of a large number of peasants, estimated between 15 million and 45 million.
