Mao Zedong


M‡o ZŽd?ng (December 26, 1893 - September 9, 1976) was the
leader of the Communist Party of China from 1935. Under his leadership it
became the ruling party of mainland China as the result of Communist victory
in the Chinese Civil War and the founding of the People's Republic of China.
In mainland China, Mao is widely credited for creating a mostly unified
China that was free of foreign domination for the first time since the Opium
War while at the same time criticized for economically and politically
disastrous policies taken after his consolidation of power.

Early Life

The eldest son of four children of a moderately prosperous peasant farmer,
Mao Zedong was born in the village of Shao Shan in Xiangtan County, Hunan province.

During the 1911 Revolution he served in the Hunan provincial army. In the
1910s, Mao returned to school, where he became an advocate of physical
fitness and collective action.

After graduation from Hunan Normal School in 1918, Mao travelled with his
high school teacher and future father-in-law Professor Yang Changjin to
Beijing during the May Fourth Movement when Yang lectured in Peking
University. From Yang's recommendations, he worked under Li Dazhao, the head
of the university library and attended speeches by Chen Duxiu. Also in
Beijing, he married his first wife, Yang Kaihui, a Peking University student
and the daughter of Mao's high school teacher. (When he was 14 Mao's father
had arranged a marriage for him with a fellow villager, but Mao never
recognized this marriage.)

Instead of going abroad like many of his radical compatriots, Mao spent the
early 1920s traveling in China, and finally returned to Hunan where he took
the lead in promoting collective action and labor rights.

At age 27, Mao attended the First Congress of the Communist Party of China
in Shanghai in July 1921. Two years later he was elected to the Central
Committee of the party at the Third Congress.

During the first KMT-CCP united front Mao served as the director of the
KMT's Peasant Training Institute, and early 1927 he was dispatched to Hunan
province to report on the recent peasant uprisings in the wake of the
Northern Expedition. The report that Mao produced from this investigation is
considered the first important work of Maoist Theory.

Political theories

During this time, Mao developed many of this political theories. The most
signficant notion was his view of peasants as the source of revolution.
Traditional Marxist-Leninist theory had seen the vanguards of revolution to
be urban workers, whereas Mao argued that in China's case, it was the
peasant from which revolution would develop. During this time, Mao also
developed a three stage theory of guerilla warfare and his concept of the
people's democratic dictatorship.

War and Revolution

Mao escaped the white terror in the spring and summer of 1927 and led the
ill-fated Autumn Harvest Uprising at Changsha, Hunan that fall. Mao barely
survived this mishap (he escaped his guards on the way to his execution) and
he and his rag-tag band of loyal guerillas found refuge in the Jinggang
Mountains, in south-east China. There, from 1931 to 1934, Mao helped
established the Chinese Soviet Republic and was elected as the chairman. It
was during this period that Mao married He Zizhen, after his first wife had
been killed by KMT forces.

Mao, with the help of Zhu De, built a modest, but effective guerilla army,
undertook experiments in rural reform and government, and provided refuge
for Communists fleeing the rightist purges in the cities. Under increasing
pressure 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 Enlai) 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 elimate the Communists.
To evade the KMT forces, the Communists engaged on "The Long March", a
Cretreat from Jiangxi in the south-east to Shaanxi in the north-west of
China. It was in the 9600 km year-long journey that Mao emerged as the top
Communist leader, aided by the Zunyi Conference and the defection of Zhou
Enlai onto Mao's side.

From his base in Yan'an, Mao led the Communist resistance against the
Japanese in the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945).

Mao further consolidated power over the Communist Party in 1942 by launching
a "Rectification" campaign against rival CPC members such as Wang Ming, Wang
Shiwei, and Ding Ling. Also while in Yan'an, Mao divorced He Zizhen and
married the actor Lan Ping, who would become known as Jiang Qing.

Leadership over the PRC

After defeating the Japanese, the Communists defeated the Kuomintang in an
ensuing civil war, and established the People's Republic of China in October
1949. It was an event that culminated over two decades of Communist
Party-led popular struggle. From 1954 to 1959, Mao was the Chairman of the PRC.

Following the consolidation of power, Mao launched a phase of rapid, forced
collectivization, lasting until around 1958. This included the so-called
Hundred Flowers campaign, in which Mao indicated he was willing to consider
different opinions about how China should be governed. Given the freedom to
express themselves, many Chinese began questioning the dogmas of the
Communist Party. After allowing this for a few months, Mao's government
reversed its policy and rounded up those who criticized the Party in what is
called the Anti-Rightist Movement.

The Great Leap Forward was intended by Mao as an alternative model for
economic growth which contradicted the Soviet model of heavy industry that
was advocated by others in the party. Under this economic program Chinese
agriculture was to be collectivized and rural small-scale industry was to be
promoted. In the middle of the Great Leap, Khrushchev canceled Soviet
technical support because Mao was too radical in pushing for world wide
communist revolution. This, along with severe droughts, caused the Great
Leap to fail to meet its goals and resulted in widespread famines in which
millions of Chinese died. With this failure, the Great Leap ended in 1960,
and Mao was forced to write a self-criticism.

The withdrawal of Soviet aid, border disputes, disputes over the control and
direction of world Communism, whether it should be revolutionary or status
quo, and other disputes pertaining to foreign policy contributed to the
Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s.

Following these events, other members of the Communist Party including Liu
Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping decided that Mao should be deprived of power. They
attempted to marginalize Mao, without denouncing him, allowing him to remain
a figurehead, but without any real authority.

Mao responded to this by launching the Cultural Revolution, in the late
1960s, in which the Communist hierarchy was circumvented by giving power
directly to the Red Guards, groups of young people, often teenagers, who set
up their own tribunals and punished with judicious zeal. This Cultural
Revolution tore apart the fabric of society and set back many of the
advances made in the previous decade and a half.

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 Parkinson's disease and remained
passive as various factions within the Communist Party mobilized for the
power struggle anticipated after his death. During this decade, Mao created
a cult of personality in which his image was displayed everywhere and his
quotations were included in bold face or red letters in even the most
mundane of writings.

After his 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 Guofeng who advocated a return to orthodox socialist central planning
along the Soviet model. The other was the reformers, led by Deng Xiaoping,
who wanted to overhaul the Chinese economy based on pragmatic policies and
to deemphasize the role of ideology in determining economic and political
policy.

Furthermore, many within the People's Republic of China itself point to the
phenomenal economic growth that has occurred in Mainland China as a result
of the Deng Xiaoping reforms after Mao's death as evidence of the
incorrectness of Mao's economic policies. Since the Deng era, China has
sustained the highest rate of per capita economic growth for the past two
decades.

Mao's Legacy

Mao's legacy has produced a large amount of controversy with some focus on
the failures of the Great Leap and the disasters of the Cultural Revolution,
and others pointing out that the large number of deaths during the period of
consolidation of power after victory in the Chinese civil war was small
compared to the number of deaths caused by famine, anarchy, war, and foreign
invasion in the years before the Communists took power.

Supporters of Mao point out that before 1949, for instance, the illiteracy
rate in Mainland China was 80 percent, and life expectancy was a meager 35
years. At his death, illiteracy had declined to less than seven per cent,
and average life expectancy had increased to more than 70 years. In
addition, China's population which had remained constant at 400 million from
the Opium War to the end of the Civil War, mushroomed to 700 million as of
Mao's death.

However Mao's opponents point out that similar gains in life expectancy
occurred in the East Asian Tigers most notably Taiwan which was ruled by
Mao's opponents, the Kuomintang. Furthermore, the experiences of the Tigers
and the Deng Xiaoping reforms suggest that Mao's economic policy was not the
optimal one for China. Other critics of Mao fault him for not encouraging
birth control and for creating a demographic bump which later Chinese
leaders responded to by the one child policy.

The ideology surrounding Mao's interpretation of Marxism-Leninism, also
known as Maoism, has influenced many communists around the world, including
third world revolutionary movements such as Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, Peru's
Shining Path and the revolutionary movement in Nepal. Ironically, China has
moved sharply away from Maoism since his death, and most of Mao's followers
regard the Deng Xiaoping reforms to be a betrayal of Mao's legacy.

The official view of the People's Republic of China is that Mao Zedong was a
great revolutionary leader who made serious mistakes in his later life. In
particular Mao is criticized for creating a cult of personality. In mainland
China many people still consider Mao a hero in the first half of his life,
but hold that he became a monster after gaining power. However, in an era
where economic growth has caused corruption to increase in mainland China,
there are those who regard Mao as a symbol of moral incorruptibility and
self-sacrifice in contrast to the current leadership.

Mao Zedong's picture appears on all new renminbi currency from the People's
Republic of China. This is intended primarily as an anti-counterfeiting
measure as Mao's face is widely recognized in contrast to the figures that
appear in older currency.