Mao Zedong

The Routledge Dictionary of Politics, Third Edition

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) can best be characterized with an aphorism that suits well his own literary style, unusually erudite among modern communist leaders. He is the man who ruled a quarter of the world’s population for a quarter of a century. The son of a peasant farmer, he discovered Marxism while in Beijing (having already broken with Chinese tradition in disobeying his father and leaving the peasant life). Mao was one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in 1921, and from then until the setting up of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 he was fully engaged in revolutionary and military activities. He proved a great guerrilla leader and military tactician, fighting successively the established Chinese authorities, the Japanese, and the nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek. He was Chairman of the CCP from 1935 until his death in 1976, and became Chinese head of state in 1949. His most important contribution was the radical rethinking of Marxist-Leninism to suit the overwhelmingly agricultural and traditionalist societies of Asia, and his insistence on finding his revolutionary élite from the peasantry rather than the urban proletariat. This alone, and his success in achieving the theoretical goal, would have made him a master tactician of Marxism. However, he went much further in his thought, continually trying to make a communist regime much less dependent on the bureaucratic élite of the party than any other leader in power (as opposed to the outsiders like Rosa Luxemburg or the later Trotsky). In a series of radical attacks on the institutionalized ‘cadres’ of the party and state he fought, often alone among his élite, a battle to keep close contacts with the actual aspirations of Chinese peasant life. Classically educated himself (he was a poet of considerable distinction), he tended to express his ideas in the idiom of classical Chinese tradition rather than the jargon of Marxist-Leninism, and indeed Stalin, among others, felt that he either actually did not know, or did not wish to know, very much about the ‘scientific socialism’ of the orthodox canon. Certainly he appears to have used Marxism simply as a handy weapon to fight the encrusted tradition of Chinese feudalism.

Three of his great campaigns against institutionalized and undemocratic party élitism are characteristic. In 1956, when the communist world was rocked by the Hungarian uprising, and when its repercussions were met with extra repression in Eastern Europe, Mao reacted in quite the opposite way. Launching a campaign he called ‘The Hundred Flowers’, he urged the Chinese actively to criticize the shortcomings of party leaders, insisting that any injustices must be brought to light, and that no party that was vulnerable to such attacks deserved to rule. The campaign was brought to a rapid halt, demonstrating what was little realized in the West at the time, that Mao had far from perfect control over his own party leaders, and was often without a majority in the politburo.

A few years later he ignored the arguments of technicians and economists and tried to rush China’s economic development, to build true communism, in a massive and short term plan. Typical of this (he called it The Great Leap Forward) was his plan to push Chinese steel production to 30 million tons a year by urging the building of thousands of tiny ‘backyard’ steel furnaces. As with most of his economic plans, it was a disaster, completely ignoring the need for massive capital injection and large plants with increasing returns to scale. Again it was stopped short, after little more than a year, by pressure from his fellow leaders.

The final push by Mao to stop the development of a new party-based ruling middle class was the cultural revolution. This he launched in 1965, fearing, quite correctly, that he was losing all control of the party. The movement urged the forming of radical ‘Red Guards’ who would go into the countryside and raise what was very nearly a populist revolution against the communist state. His commitment to the peasant life was so strong, and his dislike of the whole principle of division of labour was so great, that he tried to force all technocrats, students and party bureaucrats to be made to work in the countryside along with the peasants and to give up not only their privileges, but also their technical authority. Thousands were killed, and hundreds of thousands forced to give up their specialities, confess their revisionism, and do penance. Though the cultural revolution only lasted, at its height, for a year, it did massive damage to China’s economic and technical development. After Mao’s death most of those associated with this movement were purged as thousands of much needed technicians streamed back to the cities, discipline was restored in the universities, and the post-Mao leadership struggled to return China to a more orthodox approach to socio-economic modernization. His political thought, neatly expressed in a small book called, officially, The Thoughts of Chairman Mao, and, more popularly, The Little Red Book, became the unofficial bible not only in China, but world-wide. His insistence on Chinese autonomy was in part responsible for the widening gulf between the Soviet Union and China which led, especially after the rapprochement between the USA and the People’s Republic in the 1970s, to a serious ideological split in the communist world. Mao so totally rejected the co-operation of the Soviet Union that he even tried to stop Soviet military supplies getting to the North Vietnamese, whom he was supporting in the Vietnam War. Though a brilliant, if idiosyncratic leader, it is unclear whether his leadership, so opposed in style and ideology to European communism, helped or hindered China. Even with the reforms and slow changes in Chinese political life in the last quarter of the 20th century, Mao remained a potent symbol legitimating contemporary Chinese governments for some time. Whether this influence will long survive the gradual spread of capitalism into China is improbable.