毛泽东 has always been 毛泽东; the name never changed, but the way we romanize it has. read more
A2A. 毛泽东 has always been 毛泽东; the name never changed, but the way we romanize it has. Sean McDirmid is correct, the Wade-Giles system that romanized 毛泽东 into Mao Tse-Tung was heavily biased towards Southern Nanjing pronunciation, and not representative of how Mandarin actually sounds. read more
And THAT way, Mao's name is spelled "Mao Zedong." This is also the reason why the city name "Peking" is now "Beijing". That kind of thing happens a lot with Arabic, and less so with Russian; those are other languages which don't use the a-b-c- kind of alphabet. read more