Mao Zedong (or Mao Tse-tung) (1893-1976)

Portrait of Mao Zedong above the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the main gateway of the Forbidden City in the centre of Beijing, China. It was from this gateway overlooking Tiananmen Square that Mao proclaimed the formation of the People's Republic of China on 1st October 1949.

Chairman Mao Zedong was one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party and the leader of the People's Republic of China from 1949 until his death in 1976.

A Chinese poster from 1949 praises progress under the Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung, but also reminds the Chinese people of their pride in the past.

Chinese communist politician and theoretician, leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 1935-76. Mao was a founder of the CCP in 1921, and became its leader in 1935. He organized the Long March 1934-35 and the war of liberation 1937-49, following which he established a People's Republic and communist rule in China. He was state president until 1959, and headed the CCP until his death. His influence diminished with the failure of his 1958-60 Great Leap Forward, but he emerged dominant again during the 1966-69 Cultural Revolution, which he launched in order to promote his own antibureaucratic line and to purge the party of ‘revisionism’.

Mao adapted communism to Chinese conditions, as set out in the Little Red Book (1960), in which he stressed the need for rural rather than urban-based revolutions in Asia; for reducing rural-urban differences; and for perpetual revolution to prevent the emergence of new elites. He advocated a ‘mass line’ form of leadership, involving the broad mobilization of the people in economic, social, and political movements. He was also an advocate of a non-aligned strategy for the developing world, and helped to precipitate the Sino-Soviet split after 1960, which arose when the USSR withdrew military and technical support from China. His writings and thoughts dominated the functioning of the People's Republic 1949-76, and some 740 million copies of his Quotations have been printed to date, while his works as a whole total over 2,000 publications.

Early life Mao was the son of a peasant farmer, and was born in the village of Shaoshan in Hunan province. He had an elementary classical education in his youth, but specialized in modern subjects at Changsha First Normal School, where he was later head teacher. He served briefly in the Nationalist army during the 1911 Revolution against the Manchu Qing dynasty and was a library assistant at Beijing University 1918-19, before working for the CCP in Hunan province during 1921-27. In June 1923 he was elected to the CCP Central Committee, and in January 1924 he became chief of CCP propaganda under the Kuomintang (Guomindang nationalist) leader Sun Zhong Shan (Sun Yat-sen), but was later dismissed by Sun's successor, Jiang Jie Shi (Chiang Kai-shek).

Civil war In 1927 Mao organized a peasant uprising against Jiang Jie Shi's nationalist forces in Hunan, and when it failed, led the remnants of his army to Jiangxi province in southeast China. He became chair of the Council of the People's Commissars (Chinese Soviet Republic) in 1931, and 1931-34 set up a communist people's republic (soviet) in Jiangxi. In an effort to evade the Kuomintang's suppressive tactics, he led the Red Army, together with Zhu De, on the Long March north to Yan'an, in Shaanxi 1934-35. In Yan'an, Mao built up a second people's republic 1936-47. He gained peasant support to the communist cause by reducing land rents and introducing fair taxes. Mao, whose first wife had been shot by the nationalists and who had divorced his second wife, married Jiang Qing in Yan'an in 1939. From this base, he organized the war of liberation against the Japanese occupying forces, setting up an alliance with the Kuomintang in 1936. After 1945 and the defeat of Japan, the war was continued against the Kuomintang, with the CCP Red Army successfully employing mobile, rural-based guerrilla tactics. They took Beijing on 31 January 1949, and afterwards met little resistance on their march south. After the defeat of the Kuomintang forces at Nanjing in 1949, Jiang Ji Shi fled to Taiwan with his government and 1.5-2 million supporters, and a People's Republic was subsequently established in Beijing on 1 October 1949, with Mao as the elected chair of the republic.

The Great Leap Forward After Liberation, Mao initially followed a traditional Soviet programme of land redistribution and heavy industrialization and was re-elected chair of the CCP by the first National People's Congress in 1954. However, from 1956, after the Soviet condemnation of Stalin, he launched a ‘let a hundred flowers bloom’ campaign (the Hundred Flowers campaign) in which criticisms were raised of the power of the new bureaucracy and he began to reject the emphasis on development through heavy industries. In 1958-62 Mao introduced a series of sweeping economic changes under his second five-year plan. The aim of this programme, known as the Great Leap Forward, was to restructure the economy and polity along communist lines, and to this end Mao created large new agro-industrial communes, which were also designed to end the traditional divide between town and country and act as local political units. The Great Leap Forward eventually collapsed, chiefly because of poor planning, and effectively led to the deaths of over 20 million people from famine, as well as to Mao's own resignation as state president in 1959 and his replacement by the more moderate Liu Shaoqi.

The Cultural Revolution (1966-69) In 1966 Mao dramatically launched the Cultural Revolution. With the assistance of the radical ‘Gang of Four’, led by Jiang Qing, he mobilized millions of students to smash the existing political organizations and parts of the state apparatus. Various warring factions of Red Guards appeared, and ‘liberal revisionist’ officials at high and middle levels, including Liu Shaoqi, were denounced as ‘capitalist roaders’ and removed from their posts. When sections of the Red Guards began to develop independently of the Maoist centre, Mao collaborated with the defence minister, Lin Biao, to intervene with military force. Finally it was the People's Liberation Army (PLA) which suppressed the Red Guards and ended the Cultural Revolution, and the army's victory was crowned at the 9th Party Congress in April 1969, with the formal designation of Lin as Mao's successor.

The 1970s At the beginning of the 1970s a new struggle between Mao and Lin broke out, leading to a reported attempt by Lin to seize power in September 1971. Lin's coup attempt was forestalled by Mao with the help of his prime minister Zhou Enlai, who subsequently worked alongside Mao in the reconstruction of China after the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution. The Mao-Zhou alliance also made an important change in China's foreign policy after 1971 by moving towards reconciliation with the USA and Japan, and the trend towards rapprochement with the USA was further strengthened after the 10th Congress of the CCP in August 1973. In 1973-75 Mao also launched various radical campaigns against Confucianism, ‘bourgeois rights’, and ‘capitulationism’.

Mao in retrospect After his death in September 1976, Mao was succeeded as chairman of the CCP by the more moderate Hua Guofeng and the ‘Gang of Four’ were arrested. In 1978 the leadership of China effectively passed to Deng Xiaoping, a victim of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ and former ally of Liu Shaoqi. Deng criticized the policy excesses of Maoism and devised a pragmatic new communist philosophy which sought to combine the use of the market (to encourage increased production and prosperity) with continuing tight CCP control over political activities. In July 1981 the CCP Central Committee published an authoritative official verdict on Mao Zedong and the last 20 years of his life. It assessed Mao as ‘70% good and 30% bad’, praising his contribution to the building of the CCP, PLA, and People's Republic, but criticized him for becoming tyrannical and obsessed with a misguided leftist line from the mid 1950s, culminating in the disastrous Cultural Revolution. Today, Maoism is viewed as just one of the many contributions to Chinese communist thinking.