 Mao Zedong (December 26, 1893 - September 9, 1976) was a Chinese Marxist
military and political leader, who led China's communist revolution after
decades of foreign occupation and civil war in the 20th century. Following the
Communist Party of China’s military victory over the Kuomintang (KMT) in the
Chinese Civil War, Mao announced the establishment of the People’s Republic of
China on October 1, 1949 in Beijing.
Mao pursued the ideal of strong and prosperous China, endeavoring to build a
modern, industrialized nation. However, the failings of Mao's most significant
socio-political programs - including the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap
Forward, and the Cultural Revolution - are widely criticized.
Early Life
The eldest child of a moderate family, Mao was born on December 26, 1893 in a
village called Shaoshan in Xiangtan county, Hunan province, and thus spoke Xiang
rather than Mandarin. His ancestors had migrated from Jiangxi province during
the Ming Dynasty, married indigenous women, and had settled there as farmers.
During the 1911 Revolution, Mao served in a local regiment in Hunan. However,
having felt unaccustomed to a life of military service, he returned to school in
Changsha, where he realized the importance of health and knowledge.
Having graduated from the First Provincial Normal School of Hunan in 1918, Mao
traveled with Professor Yang Changji, his high school teacher and future
father-in-law, to Beijing during the May Fourth Movement in 1919.
Professor Yang held a faculty position at Peking University. Because of Yang's
recommendation, Mao worked as an assistant librarian at the University with Li
Da-zhao as curator. Mao registered as a part-time
student at Beijing University and audited many lectures and seminars by famous
intellectuals, such as Chen Du-xiu, Hu Shi, Qian Xuan-tong,
etc. Over his stay in Beijing, he read as much as possible, which introduced him
to Communist theories. He married Yang Kai-hui,
Professor Yang's daughter and also his fellow student, despite an existing
marriage arranged by his father at home. Mao never acknowledged this marriage.
Mao turned down an opportunity to study in France because of poverty. Later, he
claimed that it was because he firmly believed that China's problems could be
studied and resolved only within China. As distinct from his contemporaries, Mao
went the opposite direction, studying the peasant majority of China's population
where he began his life as a professional revolutionist.
On July 23, 1921, Mao, aged 27, attended the first session of the Congress of
the Communist Party of China in Shanghai. Two years later, he was elected one of
the five commissars of the Central Committee of the Party during the third
Congress session.
Mao stayed for a while in Shanghai, an important city that the CPC emphasized
for the Revolution. But after the Party had encountered major difficulties in
organizing labor union movements, and relations with its nationalist ally, the
Kuomintang had become poor, Mao was disillusioned at the revolution there and
moved back to Shaoshan. During his stay at home, Mao rekindled his interest in
the revolution, having been informed of the 1925 uprisings in Shanghai and
Guangzhou. He then went to Guangdong, the base of the Kuomintang, as a return of
his political ambitions and took part in the preparations for the second session
of the National Congress of Kuomintang.
In early 1927, Mao returned to Hunan where, in an urgent meeting held by the
Communist Party, he made a report based on his investigations of the peasant
uprisings in the wake of the Northern Expedition. This is considered the initial
and decisive step towards the successful application of Mao's revolutionary
theories.
Political Ideas
Mao was introduced to Marxism in Beijing, before he was married to Yang Kai-hui.
There were three books that left great impressions on my mind, Mao recollected,
They helped build up my solid faith in Marxism. Among the three important books
was Manifesto of the Communist Party.
It was a gradual process for Mao to become a Marxist. During 1920 in Hunan, Mao
contributed a number of essays to the newspapers advocating the autonomy of
Hunan Province as he firmly believed that the provincial autonomy was a prelude
to the success of local prosperity, which would add to the existence of a
stronger and prosperous China.
In 1920, Mao developed his theory of violent revolution, which he adopted from
the Russian revolution, and which could probably be attributed to his early
reading experience of Outlaws of the Marsh, one of the four masterpieces of
Chinese ancient literature.
Mao's theory seeks to subvert the alliance of imperialism and feudalism in
China. As a strategic communist, Mao had not ignored the nationalists, whom he
thought to be both economically and politically vulnerable. Mao concluded that
the revolution could not be steered by nationalists, and that such violent
revolution should be conducted by the proletariat with help from them under the
supervision of a communist party.
In the 1920s, Mao helped to conduct many labor struggles based upon his study,
propagation, and organization of the contemporary labor movements. However,
these struggles were subdued by the government. And Mao fled from Changsha after
he was labeled a radical activist. He pondered over the failures and finally
realized that workers were unable to lead the revolution because they made up
just a small portion of China's population, and that unarmed labor struggles
could not resolve the problems.
Mao began to depend on Chinese peasants who later became staunch supporters of
his theory of violent revolution, which eventually distinguished Mao from all
his predecessors and contemporaries. Mao himself was from a peasant family and
with his natural relationship with the farmers and peasants at home, he
developed his reputation among them. Most importantly, he introduced them to
Marxism.
War and Revolution
In 1927 Mao conducted the famous Autumn Harvest Uprising in Changsha, Hunan, as
commander-in-chief. The army led by Mao, entitled Revolutionary Army of Workers
and Peasants, was defeated and scattered after some fierce battles. Afterwards
the exhausted troops were forced to leave Hunan for Sanwan, Jiangxi, where Mao
re-organized the scattered soldiers, rearranging them from a military division
into a smaller regiment. And Mao ordered that each company must have a party
branch office with a commissar as its leader who would give political
instructions based upon superior mandates. This military rearrangement in Sanwan,
Jiangxi initiated the CPC's absolute control over its military force and has
been considered to have the most fundamental and profound impact upon the
Chinese revolution. Later on, they moved to Jinggang Mountains, Jiangxi.
On the Jinggang mountains, Mao persuaded two local insurgent leaders who pledged
their allegiance to him. And there Mao rejoined his army with that of Zhu De.
Thus he created the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army of China, Red Army in short
(the Fourth Front of Workers' and Peasants' Red Army of China).
From 1931 to 1934, Mao helped establish the Soviet Republic of China and was
elected Chairman of this small republic among the mountainous areas in Jiangxi.
Here, Mao was married to He Zi-zhen. His wife Yang Kai-hui,
who sacrificed for the revolution, had been arrested and executed in 1930, just
three years after their departure.
In Jiangxi, Mao's authoritative domination, especially that of the military
force was challenged by the Jiangxi branch of the CPC and military officers.
Mao's opponents, among whom the most prominent was Li Wen-lin,
the founder of the CPC's branch and Red Army in Jiangxi, were against Mao's land
policies and proposals to reform the local party branch and army leadership. Mao
reacted first by accusing the opponents of opportunism and then set off a series
of systematic suppressions of them. Later the suppressions were turned into
bloody physical elimination. The estimated number of the victims amounted to
several thousands. Through the so-called revolutionary terrorism, or red
terrorism, Mao's authority and domination in Jiangxi was secured and reassured.
However, this had left unforgettable scars on Mao's mind.
Mao, with the help of Zhu De, built a modest but effective army, undertook
experiments in rural reform and government, and provided refuge for Communists
fleeing the rightist purges in the cities. Mao's methods are normally referred
to as Guerrilla warfare; but he himself made a distinction between guerrilla
warfare and Mobile Warfare.
Mao's Guerrilla Warfare and Mobile Warfare was based upon the fact of the poor
armament and military training of the red army which consisted mainly of
impoverished peasants, who, however, were all encouraged by revolutionary
passions and aspiring after a communist utopia.
Around 1930, there had been more than ten regions, usually entitled soviet
areas, under control of the CPC. And the number of Red Army soldiers ran to no
less than a hundred thousand. The prosperity of soviet areas startled and
worried Chiang Kai-shek, chairman of the Kuomintang government, who waged five
waves of besieging campaigns against the central soviet area. More than one
million Kuomintang soldiers were involved in these five campaigns, four out of
which were defeated by the red army led by Mao.
Under increasing pressures from the KMT encirclement campaigns, there was a
struggle for power within the Communist leadership. Mao was removed from his
important positions and replaced by individuals (including Zhou En-lai)
who appeared loyal to the orthodox line advocated by Moscow and represented
within the CPC by a group known as the 28 Bolsheviks.
 Chiang Kai-shek, who had earlier assumed nominal control of China due in part to
the Northern Expedition, was determined to eliminate the Communists. By October
1934, he had them surrounded, prompting them to engage in the Long March, a
retreat from Jiangxi in the southeast to Shaanxi in the northwest of China. It
was during this 9,600 kilometer (5,965 mile), year-long journey that Mao emerged
as the top Communist leader, aided by the Zunyi Conference and the defection of
Zhou En-lai to Mao's side. At this Conference, Mao
entered the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China.
From his base in Yan'an, Mao led the Communist resistance against the Japanese
in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). Mao further consolidated power over
the Communist Party in 1942 by launching the Cheng Feng, or Rectification
campaign against rival CPC members such as Wang Ming, Wang Shi-wei,
and Ding Ling. Also while in Yan'an, Mao divorced He Zi-zhen
and married the actress Lan Ping, who would become known as Jiang Qing.
During the Sino-Japanese War, Mao Zedong's strategies were opposed by both Chiang Kai-shek and the United States. The US regarded Chiang as an important
ally, able to help shorten the war by engaging the Japanese occupiers in China.
Chiang, in contrast, sought to build the ROC army for the certain conflict with
Mao's communist forces after the end of World War II. This fact was not
understood well in the US, and precious lend-lease armaments continued to be
allocated to the Kuomintang. In turn, Mao spent part of the war (as to whether
it was most or only a little is disputed) fighting the Kuomintang for control of
certain parts of China. Both the Communists and Nationalists have been
criticized for fighting amongst themselves rather than allying against the
Japanese Imperial Army.
After the end of World War II, the US continued to support
Chiang Kai-shek, now
openly against the Communist Red Army (led by Mao Zedong) in the civil war for
control of China. The US support was part of its view to contain and defeat
world communism. Likewise, the Soviet Union gave quasi-covert support to Mao
(acting as a concerned neighbor more than a military ally, to avoid open
conflict with the US) and gave large supplies of arms to the Communist Party of
China, although newer Chinese records indicate the Soviet supplies were not as
large as previously believed, and consistently fell short of the promised amount
of aid.
On January 21, 1949, Kuomintang forces suffered massive losses against Mao's Red
Army. In the early morning of December 10, 1949, Red Army troops laid siege to
Chengdu, the last KMT-occupied city in mainland China, and
Chiang Kai-shek
evacuated from the mainland to Taiwan (Formosa) that same day.
Leadership of China
The People's Republic of China was established on October 1, 1949. It was the
culmination of over two decades of civil and international war. From 1954 to
1959, Mao was the Chairman of the PRC. During this period, Mao was called
Chairman Mao or the Great Leader Chairman Mao. The Communist Party assumed
control of all media in the country and used it to promote the image of Mao and
the Party. The Nationalists under General Chiang Kai-shek
were vilified as were countries such as the United States of America and Japan.
The Chinese people were exhorted to devote themselves to build and strengthen
their country. In his speech declaring the foundation of the PRC, Mao announced:
The Chinese people have stood up!
 Almost everyone in China had a book called the Quotations From Chairman Mao
Ze-dong which was regarded as a source of infallible truth in discussions or arguments at schools or the
workplace. He took up residence in Zhongnanhai, a compound next to the Forbidden
City in Beijing, and there he ordered the construction of an indoor swimming
pool and other buildings. Mao often did his work either in bed or by the side of
the pool, preferring not to wear formal clothes unless absolutely necessary,
according to Dr Li Zhi-sui, his personal physician. (Li's book, The Private Life
of Chairman Mao, is regarded as controversial especially by those sympathetic to
Mao.)
Following the consolidation of power, Mao launched a phase of rapid
collectivization, lasting until around 1958. The CPC introduced price controls
as well as a Chinese character simplification aimed at increasing literacy. Land
was taken from landlords and more wealthy peasants and given to poorer peasants.
Large scale industrialization projects were also undertaken.
Programs pursued during this time include the Hundred Flowers Campaign, in which
Mao indicated his supposed willingness to consider different opinions about how
China should be governed. Given the freedom to express themselves, liberal and
intellectual Chinese began opposing the Communist Party and questioning its
leadership. This was initially tolerated and even encouraged. However, after a
few months, Mao's government reversed its policy and persecuted those, totaling
perhaps 500,000, who criticized, and were merely alleged to have criticized, the
Party in what is called the Anti-Rightist Movement. Authors such as Jung Chang
have alleged that the Hundred Flowers Campaign was merely a ruse to root out
dangerous thinking. Others such as Dr Li Zhi-sui have suggested that Mao had
initially seen the policy as a way of weakening those within his party who
opposed him, but was surprised by the extent of criticism and the fact that it
began to be directed at his own leadership. It was only then that he used it as
a method of identifying and subsequently persecuting those critical of his
regime. The Hundred Flowers movement led to the condemnation, silencing, and
death of many intellectuals, also linked to Mao's Anti-Rightist Movement, with
death tolls possibly in the millions.
Great Leap Forward
In January 1958, Mao launched the second Five Year Plan known as the Great Leap
Forward, a plan intended as an alternative model for economic growth to the
Soviet model focusing on heavy industry that was advocated by others in the
party. Under this economic program, the relatively small agricultural
collectives which had been formed to date were rapidly merged into far larger
people's communes, and many of the peasants ordered to work on massive
infrastructure projects and the small-scale production of iron and steel. All
private food production was banned; livestock and farm implements were brought
under collective ownership.
Under the Great Leap Forward, Mao and other party leaders ordered the
implementation of a variety of unproven and unscientific new agricultural
techniques by the new communes. Combined with the diversion of labor to steel
production and infrastructure projects and the reduced personal incentives under
a commune system this led to an approximately 15% drop in grain production in
1959 followed by further 10% reduction in 1960 and no recovery in 1961. In an
effort to win favor with their superiors and avoid being purged, each layer in
the party hierarchy exaggerated the amount of grain produced under them and
based on the fabricated success, party cadres were ordered to requisition a
disproportionately high amount of the true harvest for state use primarily in
the cities and urban areas but also for export. The net result, which was
compounded in some areas by drought and in others by floods, was that the rural
peasants were not left enough to eat and many millions starved to death in what
is thought to be the largest famine in human history. This famine was a direct
cause of the death of tens of millions of Chinese peasants between 1959 and
1962. Further, many children who became emaciated and malnourished during years
of hardship and struggle for survival, died shortly after the Great Leap
Forward came to an end in 1962.
The extent of Mao's knowledge as to the severity of the situation has been
disputed. According to some, most notably Dr Li Zhi-sui, Mao was not aware of
anything more than a mild food and general supply shortage until late 1959.
Whatever the case, the Great Leap Forward led to millions of deaths in China.
Mao lost esteem among many of the top party cadres and was eventually forced to
abandon the policy in 1962, also losing some political power to moderate
leaders. However, he was able to use his propaganda base to mitigate the damage
caused by the failure of the program, implying that he was only partly to
blame. As a result, he was able to remain Secretary of the Communist Party.
The Great Leap Forward was a disaster for China. Although the steel quotas were
officially reached, almost all of it made in the countryside was useless lumps
of iron, as it had been made from assorted scrap metal in home made furnaces
with no reliable source of fuel such as coal. According to Zhang Rong-mei, a
geometry teacher in rural Shanghai during the Great Leap Forward:
We took all the furniture, pots, and pans we had in our house, and all our
neighbors did likewise. We put all everything in a big fire and melted down all
the metal.
Moreover, most of the dams, canals and other infrastructure projects, which
millions of peasants and prisoners had been forced to toil on and in many cases
die for, proved useless as they had been built without the input of trained
engineers, whom Mao had rejected on ideological grounds.
In the Party Congress at Lushan in July/August 1959, several leaders expressed
concern that the Great Leap Forward was not as successful as planned. The most
direct of these was Minister of Defense Peng De-huai. Mao orchestrated a
denouncement of Peng and his supporters, stifling criticism of the Great Leap
policies.
There is a great deal of controversy over the number of deaths by starvation
during the Great Leap Forward. Until the mid 1980s, when official census figures
were finally published by the Chinese Government, little was known about the
scale of the disaster in the Chinese countryside, as the handful of Western
observers allowed access during this time had been restricted to model villages
where they were deceived into believing that Great Leap Forward had been a great
success. There was also an assumption that the flow of individual reports of
starvation that had been reaching the West, primarily through Hong Kong and
Taiwan, must be localized or exaggerated as China was continuing to claim record
harvests and was a net exporter of grain through the period. Censuses were
carried out in China in 1953, 1964 and 1982. The first attempt to analyze this
data in order to estimate the number of famine deaths was carried out by
American demographer Dr Judith Banister and published in 1984. Given the lengthy
gaps between the censuses and doubts over the reliability of the data, an
accurate figure is difficult to ascertain. Nevertheless, Banister concluded that
the official data implied that around 15 million excess deaths incurred in China
during 1958-61 and that based on her modeling of Chinese demographics during
the period and taking account of assumed underreporting during the famine years,
the figure was around 30 million. Various other sources have put the figure
between 20 and 43 million.
On the international front, the period was dominated by the further isolation of
China, due to start of the Sino-Soviet split which resulted in Khrushchev
withdrawing all Soviet technical experts and aid from the country. The split was
triggered by border disputes, and arguments over the control and direction of
world communism, and other disputes pertaining to foreign policy. Most of the
problems regarding communist unity resulted from the death of Stalin and his
replacement by Khrushchev. Stalin had established himself as the successor of
"correct" Marxist thought well before Mao controlled the Communist Party of
China, and therefore Mao never challenged the suitability of any Stalinist
doctrine (at least while Stalin was alive). Upon the death of Stalin, Mao
believed (perhaps because of seniority) that the leadership of the correct
Marxist doctrine would fall to him. The resulting tension between Khrushchev (at
the head of a politically/militarily superior government), and Mao (believing he
had a superior understanding of Marxist ideology) eroded the previous
patron-client relationship between the USSR and CPC.
Partly-surrounded by hostile American military bases (reaching from South Korea,
Japan, Okinawa, and Taiwan), China was now confronted with a new Soviet threat
from the north and west. Both the internal crisis and the external threat called
for extraordinary statesmanship from Mao, but as China entered the new decade
the statesmen of the People's Republic were in hostile confrontation with each
other.
The Great Leap policies were effectively given up following a Politburo meeting
in January 1961 and Mao took a more backseat role whilst more moderate leaders
such as Liu Shao-qi, who had become State President in 1959 and Deng Xiaoping
rescued the economy by disbanding the people's communes, introducing elements of
private control of peasant smallholdings and importing grain from Canada and
Australia to mitigate the worst effects of famine.
Cultural Revolution
Following these events, other members of the Communist Party, including Liu
Shao-qi and Deng Xiaoping, decided that Mao should be removed from actual power
and only remain in a largely ceremonial and symbolic role. They attempted to
marginalize Mao, and by 1959, Liu Shao-qi became State President, but Mao
remained Chairman. Liu and others began to look at the situation much more
realistically, somewhat abandoning the idealism Mao wished for.
Facing the prospect of losing his place on the political stage, Mao responded to
Liu and Deng's movements by launching the Cultural Revolution in 1966. According
to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, in Mao: the Unknown Story, Mao was bitter that
his Great Leap Forward program had been stopped by Liu and other party
leaders, and he was determined to exact revenge. The Cultural Revolution allowed
Mao to circumvent the Communist hierarchy by giving power directly to the Red
Guards, groups of young people, often teenagers, who set up their own tribunals.
The Revolution led to the destruction of much of China's cultural heritage and
the imprisonment of a huge number of Chinese intellectuals, as well as creating
general economic and social chaos in the country. Millions of lives were ruined
during this period, which is depicted by such Chinese films as To Live and
Farewell My Concubine.
It was during this period that Mao chose Lin Biao to become his successor. Mao
and Lin Biao formed an alliance leading up to the Cultural Revolution in order
for the purges to succeed. Mao needed Lin's clout for his plan to work. In
return, Lin was made Mao's successor. Somewhat later, it is unclear whether Lin
was planning a military coup or an assassination attempt; he died trying to flee
China, probably anticipating his arrest, in a suspicious plane crash over
Mongolia. It was declared that Lin was planning to depose Mao, and he was
posthumously expelled from the CPC. At this time, Mao lost trust in many of the
top CPC figures.
 In 1969, Mao declared the Cultural Revolution to be over, although the official
history of the People's Republic of China marks the end of the Cultural
Revolution in 1976 with Mao's death. In the last years of his life, Mao was
faced with declining health due to either Parkinson's disease or, according to
Li Zhi-sui, motor neuron disease, as well as lung ailments due to smoking and
heart trouble. Mao remained passive as various factions within the Communist
Party mobilized for the power struggle anticipated after his death. When Mao
could not swim any longer, the indoor swimming pool he had at Zhongnanhai was
converted into a giant reception hall, according to Li Zhi-sui.
Death
Mao Zedong died at the age of 82, on September 9, 1976 at 10 minutes past
midnight in Beijing. Mao had been in poor health for several years and had
declined visibly for some months prior to his death. His body lay in state at
the Great Hall of the People. A memorial service was held in Tiananmen Square on
September 18, 1976. There was a three minute silence observed during this
service. His body was later placed into the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong, although he
wished to be cremated and had been one of the first high-ranking officials to
sign the Proposal that all Central Leaders be Cremated after Death in November
1956.
As anticipated after Mao’s death, there was a power struggle for control of
China. On one side were the leftists led by the Gang of Four, who wanted to
continue the policy of revolutionary mass mobilization. On the other side were
the rightists, which consisted of two groups. One was the restorationists led by
Hua Guo-feng who advocated a return to central planning along the Soviet model.
The other was the reformers, led by Deng Xiaoping, who wanted to overhaul the
Chinese economy based on market-oriented policies and to de-emphasize the role
of Maoist ideology in determining economic and political policy.
Eventually, the moderates won control of the government. Deng Xiao-ping, with
clear seniority over Hua Guo-feng, defeated Hua in a bloodless power struggle
shortly afterwards.
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