Mao Zedong

I

Introduction

Mao Zedong (1893-1976), Chinese Communist leader who was chairman of the Communist party of China and the principal founder of the People's Republic of China.

II

Early Years

Mao, also known as Mao Tse-tung, was born on December 26, 1893, in the village of Shaoshan, Hunan Province. The scholarly son of a poor peasant who had prospered by hard work, Mao graduated from the Changsha teacher training school in 1918. He served briefly in the Nationalist army in the 1911-1912 republican revolution against the Manchu government of the Qing dynasty and was a library assistant at Beijing University when the anti-Japanese May Fourth Movement began. He was in touch with the new Western thought, which had influenced both these developments and in which Marxism played an increasingly large part.

Mao returned to Changsha in 1920 as head of a primary school. When his attempts to organize mass education were suppressed, he turned to politics, helping to found the Chinese Communist party in Shanghai in 1921. In 1923, when the Communist party allied with the Nationalist party (Kuomintang) against feuding local warlords, Mao became a full-time party worker.

After witnessing a rising of impoverished peasants in his home province, in early 1927 Mao wrote Report of ... the Peasant Movement in Hunan, arguing that peasant discontent was the major force in China and deserved Communist support. His advice was rejected because the Moscow-based Comintern wanted to maintain the Communist alliance with the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek. Nevertheless, Chiang, who wanted to avoid Soviet influence, broke with the Communists in April. Kuomintang forces suppressed an “Autumn Harvest” uprising of peasants, a remnant of which Mao led to safety in mountainous Jiangxi (Kiangsi). Chiang promptly dismantled the Kuomintang grass-roots organizations, suspecting Communist infiltration, while Mao, in Jiangxi, continued to extend Communist influence over the peasants. The result was that, in a country where village power was critical, the Communists gained the advantage.

III

War Years

Elected first chairman of the new Chinese Soviet Republic in 1931, Mao defied the urban-oriented Communist Central Committee to initiate moderate land reform, a policy attractive to the peasants. Working with the former warlord Zhu De (Chu Teh), he evolved new guerrilla tactics that drew the Kuomintang forces deep into the hostile countryside, where they were harassed by the peasant militia and destroyed piecemeal by the Red Army. In 1934, however, Chiang made a last effort to counter these tactics by throwing a blockade around the Communist bases. Bursting through, Mao and the Red Army undertook the 9,600-km (6,000-mi) Long March north-west to Shaanxi (Shensi), where they set up new bases.

Meanwhile, the Japanese, anxious to expand commercial and territorial interests in China, had invaded Dongbei (1931) and north-eastern China (1932). Mao, acting more as a patriot than a socialist, persuaded his colleagues to oppose the Japanese, and in 1937 Chiang again reluctantly allied himself with the Communists. Relinquishing revolutionary policies during World War II, the Communists carried out hitherto unimplemented Nationalist reforms, such as reduced land rents, fair taxes, and representative village government. Aided by these measures and at the same time brutally treated by the Japanese, the peasants of North China rallied to increase manyfold the Red Army and militia.

Mao's first wife Yang Kaihui, daughter of one of his teachers, was shot by the Nationalists in 1930. In the same year Mao married He Zichen, who accompanied him on the Long March. Mao divorced her in 1937. In 1939 he married the film actress Lan P'ing, who became known as Jiang Qing (Chiang Ch'ing) and after 1964 played an increasingly important role in the party.

The successful Communist guerrilla resistance against the Japanese contrasted with the Nationalists' retreat to south-western China. By 1946 the Communist party was identified with the interests of the peasant majority. Mao, head of the Communist party since the Long March, had become a national leader. Unwilling to cooperate after World War II, Mao and Chiang resumed the civil war. By 1949 corruption and inflation had destroyed the remaining credit of the Nationalists, and the Communists had captured most of China. The People's Republic of China was proclaimed and Mao was elected chairman.

IV

Chairman Mao

At first Mao followed the Soviet model for constructing a socialist society through redistribution of land (which obliterated the landlord class), heavy industrialization, and centralized bureaucracy. During the years in Shaanxi, however, Mao had evolved a Chinese Communist alternative that reflected China's different demography, his own experience with the peasants, and his hostility to bureaucracy. Economically he stressed self-reliance through labour-intensive rather than technologically advanced cooperative agriculture and through local community effort. Politically he created the concept of “mass-line” leadership, which integrated intellectuals with peasant guerrilla leaders as a fundamental economic and social strategy.

In 1956, reacting to Soviet condemnation of Stalin, Mao began to air his own policies. The advice to “let a hundred flowers bloom” was intended to conciliate intellectuals by allowing them to criticize the bureaucracy. His speech “On the Ten Great Relationships” rejected Soviet emphasis on heavy industry, arguing that increasing peasant purchasing power was the key to rapid—and socialist—economic development. His 1957 speech “On Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People” repudiated the Soviet denial of contradictions in socialist society, insisting that conflict was both inevitable and healthy. In 1958 he applied his policies in the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to substitute for the bureaucratic state a cellular system of autonomous local communes (referring to the Paris Commune of 1871) and projects, united by common ideology.

The Great Leap failed. Mao retired (1959) as head of state, and disillusioned Communist leaders returned to the East European socialist practice of giving autonomy to large undertakings, suppressing small ones, and tolerating leadership by an educated elite. Convinced that maximum popular participation was the fastest route to full socialism, Mao fought back. In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1969) he mobilized youth into the Red Guard to attack the party establishment. After much rioting and the near destruction of the party, he allowed the army to restore order and the party to be rebuilt.

Widely known through posters and his “little red book”, The Thoughts of Chairman Mao, Mao was revered in China and studied in the developing world. Made supreme commander of China in 1970, he sought a balance between his own radical followers and the moderate, pragmatic establishment, but their relationship remained uneasy. Mao died in Beijing on September 9, 1976.