Mao
Tse-tung founded the People's Republic of China in 1949. He had also
been one of the founders of the Chinese Communist party in 1921, and he
is regarded, along with Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin, as one of the three
great theorists of Marxian communism.
Mao Tse-tung was born on Dec.
26, 1893, into a well-to-do peasant family in Shao-shan, Hunan province.
As a child he worked in the fields and attended a local primary
school, where he studied the traditional Confucian classics. He was
frequently in conflict with his strict father, whom Mao learned
successfully to confront--with the support of his gentle and devoutly
Buddhist mother. Beginning in 1911, the year that the republican forces
of Sun Yat-Sen launched the overthrow of the Ch'ing (or Manchu)
dynasty, Mao spent most of 10 years in Chang-sha, the provincial
capital. He was exposed to the tides of rapid political change and the
new culture movement then sweeping the country. He served briefly in
the republican army and then spent half a year studying alone in the
provincial library--an experience that confirmed him in the habit
ofindependent study.
By 1918, Mao had graduated from the Hunan
First Normal School and had gone to Peking, the national capital, where
he worked briefly as a library assistant at Peking University. Mao
lacked the funds to support a regular student status and, unlike many of
his classmates, mastered no foreign language and did not go abroad to
study. It may be partly due to his relative poverty during his student
years that he never identified completely with the cosmopolitan
bourgeois intellectuals who dominated Chinese university life. He did
establish contact with intellectual radicals who later figured
prominently in the Chinese Communist party. In 1919, Mao returned to
Hunan, where he engaged in radical political activity, organizing groups
and publishing a political review, while supporting himself as a
primary-school principal.
In 1920, Mao married Yang K'ai-hui, the
daughter of one of his teachers. Yang K'ai-hui was executed by the
Chinese Nationalists in 1930. In that year Mao married Ho Tzu-chen, who
accompanied him on the Long March. Mao divorced her (1937), and in
1939 he married Chiang Ch'ing.
When the Chinese Communist party
(CCP) was organized in Shanghai in 1921, Mao was a founding member and
leader of the Hunan branch. At this stage the new party formed a united
front with the Koumintang, the party of the republican followers of Sun
Yat-sen. Mao worked within the united front in Shanghai, Hunan, and
Canton, concentrating variously on labor organization, party
organization, propaganda, and the Peasant Movement Training Institute.
His 1927 "Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan" expressed his view of
the revolutionary potential of the peasantry--although this view was
not yet phrased in a proper Marxian form.
In 1927, Chiang Kai-Shek, who had gained control of the Kuomintang after
the death of Sun Yat-sen, reversed that party's policy of cooperation
with the Communists. By the next year, when he had control of the
Nationalist armies as well as the Nationalist government, Chiang purged
all Communists from the movement. As a result, Mao was forced to flee
to the countryside. In the mountains of south China he established with
Chu Teh a rural base defended by a guerrilla army. It was this almost
accidental innovation--the fusion of Communist leadership with a
guerrilla force operating in rural areas with peasant support--that was
to make Mao the leader of the CCP. Because of their growing military
power, Mao and Chu were able by 1930 to defy orders of the
Russian-controlled CCP leadership that directed them to try to capture
cities. In the following year, despite the fact that his position in
the party was weak and his policies were criticized, a Chinese soviet
was founded in Juichin, Kiangsi province, with Mao as chairman. A
series of extermination campaigns by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist
government forced the CCP to abandon Juichin in October 1934 and to
commence the Long March. At Tsun-i in Kweichow, Mao for the first time
gained effective control over the CCP, ending the era of Russian
direction of party leadership. Remnants of the Communist forces reached
Shensi in October 1935, after a march of 10,000 km (6,000 mi). They
then established a new party headquarters at Yen-an.
When the
Japanese invasion of 1937 forced the CCP and the Kuomintang once again
to form a united front, the Communists gained legitimacy as defenders of
the Chinese homeland, and Mao rose in stature as a national leader.
During this period he established himself as a military theorist and,
through the publication in 1937 of such essays as "On Contradiction" and
"On Practice," laid claim to recognition as an important Marxist
thinker. Mao's essay "On New Democracy" (1940) outlined a unique
national form of Marxism appropriate to China; his "Talks at the Yen-an
Forum on Literature and Art" (1942) provided a basis for party control
over cultural affairs.
The soundness of Mao's self-reliance and
rural guerrilla strategies was proved by the CCP's rapid growth during
the Yen-an period--from 40,000 members in 1937 to 1,200,000 members in
1945. The shaky truce between the Communists and Nationalists was
broken at the end of the war. Efforts were made--by the United States,
in particular--to forge a coalition government. Civil war erupted,
however, and the following 3 years (1946-49) saw the rapid defeat of the
Kuomintang. Chiang's government was forced to flee to Taiwan, leaving
the People's Republic of China, formed by the Communists in late 1949,
in control of the entire Chinese mainland.
When Mao's efforts to
open relations with the United States in the late 1940s were rebuffed,
he concluded that China would have to "lean to one side," and a period
of close alliance with the USSR followed. Hostility to the United
States was deepened by the Korean War. During the early 1950s, Mao
served as chairman of the Communist party, chief of state, and chairman
of the military commission. His international status as a Marxist
leader rose after the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953.
Mao's
uniqueness as a leader is evident from his commitment to continued
class struggle under socialism--a view confirmed in his theoretical
treatise "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People"
(1957). Dissatisfaction with the slowness of development, the loss of
revolutionary momentum in the countryside, and the tendency for CCP
members to behave like a privileged class led Mao to take a number of
unusual initiatives in the late 1950s. In the Hundred Flowers movement
of 1956-57 he encouraged intellectuals to make constructive criticism of
the party's stewardship. When the criticism came, it revealed deep
hostility to CCP leadership. At about the same time, Mao accelerated
the transformation of rural ownership by calling for the elimination of
the last vestiges of rural private property and the formation of
people's communes, and for the initiation of rapid industrial growth
through a program known as the Great Leap Forward. The suddenness of
these moves led to administrative confusion and popular resistance.
Furthermore, adverse weather conditions resulted in disastrous crop
shortfalls and severe food shortages. As a consequence of all these
reverses, Mao lost his position as chief of state and found his
influence over the party severely curtailed. It was also during the
late 1950s that Mao's government began to reveal its deep-seated
differences with the USSR.
During the 1960s, Mao made a comeback,
attacking the party leadership and the new chief of state, Liu
Shao-Ch'i, through a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which peaked
from 1966 to 1969. The Cultural Revolution was largely orchestrated by
Mao's wife, Chiang Ch'ing. It was perhaps Mao's greatest innovation
and was essentially an ideological struggle for public opinion carried
out in the form of a frantic national debate. Mao proved to be a master
tactician. When he could not get his ideas across in the Peking press,
he used the Shanghai press to attack the Peking leadership. Students,
mobilized as "Red Guards," became his most avid supporters. As tensions
mounted and events threatened to get out of hand, Mao was obliged to
rely increasingly on the military, under the leadership of Lin Piao. In
return for this military support, the party named Lin as Mao's
successor in its 1969 constitution. By 1971, however, Lin was reported
to have died in a plane crash after having plotted to assassinate Mao,
and Mao was once more firmly in control.
On the popular level the
thrust of the Cultural Revolution was to teach the Chinese masses that
it was "right to revolt"--that it was their privilege to criticize those
in positions of authority and to take an active part in decision
making. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao's sayings, printed in a
little red book, and buttons bearing his image were distributed to the
masses; his word was treated as an ultimate authority, and his person
the subject of ecstatic adulation. Despite this temporary assumption of
an authority higher than the CCP, Mao continued to state his belief in
the Leninist notion of collective party leadership. He showed his
opposition to the "personality cult" by explicitly asking that the
number of statues of him be reduced.
Toward the end of his life,
Mao put forward a new analysis of the international situation in which
the world's states are divided into three groups: the underdeveloped
nations, the developed nations, and the two superpowers (the United
States and the USSR), both of which seek worldwide hegemony. This
analysis underscored China's position as a leader of the Third World
(i.e., the underdeveloped group) and helped to rationalize a
rapprochement with the United States. The fostering of closer relations
with the United States was looked upon as a way to lessen the influence
of the USSR, whose relations with China had continued to deteriorate.
In 1972, Mao lent his prestige to this policy change by receiving U.S.
president Richard M. Nixon in Peking.
Mao died in Peking on Sept.
9, 1976. The following month Chiang Ch'ing and her radical associates,
known as the "Gang of Four", were arrested. Mao's chosen successor, Hua
Kuo-Feng, was stripped of his influential posts as the party came under
the control of moderates led by Teng Hsio-P'ing. In 1981 the party
criticized the excesses of the Cultural Revolution while praising Mao
for his leadership in earlier years. The Constitution of 1982 stated
that economic cooperation and progress were more important than class
struggle and banned all forms of personality cults. During the early
and late 1980s, a general movement away from Mao's beliefs was noted,
and his statue was removed from a number of sites throughout China. In
February 1989, a member of the Central Advisory Commission to the
Communist party wrote in an official Peking newspaper, the Guangming
Daily, that "Mao was a great man who embodied the calamities of the
Chinese people, but in his later years he made big mistakes over a long
period, and the result was great disaster for the people and the
country. He created a historical tragedy."
Along with the
founders of the Han and Ming dynasties, Mao Tse-tung was one of only
three peasants who rose to rule all of China in a single lifetime.
Mao's greatest achievements were the unification of China through the
destruction of Nationalist power, the creation of a unified People's
Republic, and the leadership of the greatest social revolution in human
history. This revolution involved collectivization of most land and
property, the destruction of the landlord class, the weakening of the
urban bourgeoisie, and the elevation of the status of peasants and
industrial workers. As a Marxist thinker and the leader of a socialist
state, Mao gave theoretical legitimacy to the continuation of class
struggle in the socialist and communist stages of development. He
stressed the importance of land redistribution for the benefit of the
rural peasantry, and his theories have strongly influenced the
nonindustrialized Third World.
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