Mao Zedong
(1893–1976), leader of the Chinese Communist Party and chairman of the People's Republic of China. Mao was one of the leading figures of the twentieth century. Beyond serving as the head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), his ideas and policies served as a model for many other political leaders in the Communist world.
Mao was born in the village of Shaoshan, Xiang Tan County, Hunan Province in 1893. As a boy he resisted working on the family farm and instead sought every opportunity to obtain an education. In 1911 he joined the army and after six months service returnedto his education. Six months spent reading on his own in the library proved of immense value and in 1913 he returned to formal schooling. Patriotism was perhaps the major motivating force in his life, and he saw education as a means to improve the lot of the Chinese people and the nation.
Mao Zedong in a classic portrait. (ROMAN SOUMAR/CORBIS)In 1919 he became involved in the May Fourth Movement (a reform movement aimed at strengthening China); through the movement he met Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, the founders (1921) of the Chinese Communist Party, of which Mao was an original member. In July 1921 he led the Hunanese delegation to the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. Thereafter, he devoted himself to revolutionary activities mainly in Hunan and Guangzhou. At first shut out of CCP leadership by a pro-Soviet faction that favored a traditional urban proletariat revolution, Mao came to power after the Long March (1934–1935) from southeastern to northwestern China. From that time forward, Mao's vision of a peasant revolution took hold. Mao's agrarian Marxism won the CCP the support of the people to the detriment of the Nationalists. His supremacy in the party was confirmed at the Seventh CCP Congress in April 1945, where "Mao Zedong Thought" was adopted as the official ideology. Following Japan's surrender in 1945 at the end of World War II, the CCP defeated the Nationalists in China's civil war (1945–1949).
In the first ten years after the establishment of the People's Republic (1 October 1949), Mao, as the chairman both of the government and the party, worked to unify the nation and rebuild it after decades of war. He instituted land reform and oversaw the transition to a socialist economy. However, de-Stalinization in the USSR from 1956 brought about a radical shift in Mao's thinking.
Determined to avoid what he saw as the rise of bourgeois elements in the Soviet Union, he instituted his Great Leap Forward (1958–1960), an attempt to industrialize China at the rural level. Not only was the attempt a failure, the diversion of resources from agriculture caused widespread famine. Undeterred from his vision, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966; it was an attempt to keep the CCP and society at large from restratifying, but its result was societal chaos. Nevertheless, the CCP concluded officially in 1981 that Mao's contributions to the Chinese revolution far outweighed the "gross mistakes" he committed during his final years. Mao died on 9 September 1976 and his body remains on display in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
Further Reading
Chen, Jerome. (1965) Mao and the Chinese Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Meisner, Maurice. (1986) Mao's China And After: A History of the People's Republic. New York: The Free Press.
Spence, Jonathan. (1999) Mao Zedong. New York: Penguin.
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