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Mao Zedong (help·info) (December 26, 1893 – September 9, 1976; Mao Tse-tung in Wade-Giles) was the chairman of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China from 1943 and the chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China from 1945 until his death in 1976. Under his leadership, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) became the ruling party of Mainland China after victory over Chinese Nationalists, the Kuomintang, in the Chinese Civil War. On October 1, 1949, Mao declared the formation of the People's Republic of China at Tiananmen Square. From the 1950s until his death, Mao initiated various economic and political campaigns, such as the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people. His knowledge of these deaths is disputed.

Introduction

Mao created a mostly unified China free of foreign domination for the first time since the Opium Wars. With Zhu De, Mao co-founded the People's Liberation Army as the Red Army on August 1, 1927 after Chiang Kai-Shek began leading a series of purges against the communists. After gaining power, Mao initiated a transformation of the economic and social system through a process of collectivisation culminating in The Great Leap Forward of 1958-62, which has subsequently been recognised as an economic disaster for China. The changes in social and agricultural policies which he ordered during this period, known in China as Three Years of Natural Disasters, caused the massive famine of 1959–1961. Mao created a totalitarian one-party-state, contributed to the Sino-Soviet Split, and initiated the Cultural Revolution, which purged, tortured, and publicly humiliated millions. These millions included many of those fellow Communists who had forced Mao to end the policies that contributed to the famine of 1959–1961. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao encouraged the wholesale destruction of a large part of China's cultural heritage.

Mao Zedong is sometimes referred to as Chairman Mao in the West and in China simply as the Chairman. At the height of his personality cult, Mao was commonly known in China as the "Four Greats": "Great Teacher, Great Leader, Great Supreme Commander, Great Helmsman". Mao was an avid reader, particularly of Chinese history and it has been argued that his skill at outmaneuvering his political opponents as well as his belief in the overriding importance of unifying and revolutionizing China, regardless of the sacrifices imposed on his people, owed much to his understanding of Chinese imperial history. His political writings were influential in the development of Marxist thought and he also wrote poetry which retains some popularity in China.

Early life

The eldest son of four children of a moderately prosperous peasant farmer and money lender, Mao Zedong was born in the village of Shaoshan in Xiangtan county (湘潭縣), Hunan province. His ancestors had migrated from Jiangxi province during the Ming Dynasty and had pursued farming for generations.

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

After graduation from Hunan First Normal University in 1918, Mao traveled with his high-school teacher and future father-in-law, Professor Yang Changji, to Beijing during the May Fourth Movement, when Yang held a faculty position at Peking University. Due to Yang's recommendation, he worked as an assistant in the university library (which was headed by Li Dazhao). At the same time, Mao registered as a part-time student at Peking University and sat in lectures of many leading scholars, such as Chen Duxiu, Hu Shih, and Qian Xuantong. As he was working, he read extensively, which brought him a life-long influence. Also in Beijing, he married his first wife, Yang Kaihui, a Peking University student and Yang Changji's daughter. However, when Mao was 14, his father had arranged a marriage for him with a fellow villager, Luo, but Mao never recognized this marriage.

Instead of going abroad, which was the path of 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 on July 23,1921. Two years later he was elected to the Central Committee of the party at the Third Congress. He worked for a while in Shanghai, where the CCP was based at the time, but after the party suffered major setbacks in organizing the labor union movement and problems abounded with the alliance with the Nationalist Party, Kuomintang, he became disillusioned with the revolutionary movement and moved back to his home village of Shaoshan, apparently retired from politics. During this time he also developed depression, which plagued him occasionally for the rest of his life. However, he gained back his interest in the revolution after the violent uprisings in Shanghai and Guangzhou, Canton in 1925, which triggered the "Avenge the Shame" movement in all of China, and moved back into active politics, moving to Canton where the KMT had its strongest base.

During the Chinese Civil War's first KMT-CCP united front, Mao served as the director of the Peasant Training Institute of the Kuomintang. In 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 ideas

Main article: Maoism

During his early political career, Mao developed his political thinking. His ideas have had a monumental impact on generations of Chinese and have significantly affected the rest of the world.

Mao sought to transform traditional Marxism into a political ideology that could be implemented in a primarily agrarian economy such as China. Marx, whom Mao read voraciously, had focused his analysis of capitalism on the industrial economies of Western Europe and, accordingly, wage labor. China at the time was more of an agrarian economy, and most of its laborers were peasants. Mao believed that the only way communism could be implemented in China was by making revolutionary changes to the social systems and the economy in the countryside.

Mao also believed that he built on the theories of Hegel and Marx to create a new theory of dialectical materialism. During this time, Mao also pursued notions like the concept of the people's democratic dictatorship and the concept of a three-stage theory of guerrilla warfare.

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 autumn. Mao barely survived this mishap (he escaped his guards on the way to his execution). He and his rag-tag band of loyal guerillas found refuge in the Jinggang Mountains in southeastern China. There, from 1931 to 1934, Mao helped establish the Chinese Soviet Republic and was elected chairman. It was during this period that Mao married He Zizhen, after Yang Kaihui had been killed by KMT forces.

Mao, with the help of Zhu De, built a modest but effective army, undertook experiments in rural reform and government, and provided refuge for Communists fleeing the rightist purges in the cities. Mao's methods are normally referred to as Guerrilla warfare; but he himself made a distinction between guerrilla warfare (youji zhan) and Mobile Warfare (yundong zhan).

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 eliminate the Communists. By October 1934, he had them surrounded, prompting them to engage in the "Long March," a retreat from Jiangxi in the southeast to Shaanxi in the northwest of China. It was during this 9600-km, year-long journey that Mao emerged as the top Communist leader, aided by the Zunyi Conference and the defection of Zhou Enlai to Mao's side. At this Conference, Mao entered the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China.

From his base in Yan'an, Mao led the Communist resistance against the Japanese in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). Mao further consolidated power over the Communist Party in 1942 by launching the Cheng Feng, or "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 actress Lan Ping, who would become known as Jiang Qing.

During the Sino-Japanese War, Mao Zedong's strategies were opposed by both Chiang Kai-shek and the United States. The US regarded Chiang as an important ally, able to help shorten the war by engaging the Japanese occupiers in China. Chiang, in contrast, sought to build the ROC army for the certain conflict with Mao's communist forces after the end of World War II. This fact was not understood well in the US, and precious lend-lease armaments continued to be allocated to the Kuomintang. In turn, Mao spent some of the war fighting the Kuomintang for control of certain parts of China. Both the Communists and Nationalists have been criticised for fighting amongst themselves rather than allying against the Imperial Japanese Army.

However, Americans sent a special diplomatic envoy, called the Dixie Mission, to the Communists by 1944. According to Edwin Moise, in Modern China: A History 2nd Edition:

Most of the Americans were favourably impressed. The CCP seemed less corrupt, more unified, and more vigorous in its resistance to Japan than the Guomindang. United States fliers shot down over North China...confirmed to their superiors that the CCP was both strong and popular over a broad area. In the end, the contacts with the USA developed with the CCP led to very little.

After the end of World War II, the US continued to support Chiang Kai-shek, now openly against the Communist Red Army (led by Mao Zedong) in the civil war for control of China. The US support was part of its view to contain and defeat "world communism." Likewise, the Soviet Union gave quasi-covert support to Mao (acting as a concerned neighbor more than a military ally, to avoid open conflict with the US) and gave large supplies of arms to the Chinese Communists, although newer Chinese records indicate the Soviet "supplies" were not as large as previously believed, and consistently fell short of the promised amount of aid.

On January 21, 1949, Kuomintang forces suffered massive losses against Mao's Red Army. In the early morning of December 10, 1949, Red Army troops laid siege to Chengdu, the last KMT-occupied city in mainland China, and Chiang Kai-shek evacuated from the mainland to Taiwan (Formosa) that same day.

Leadership of China

The People's Republic of China was established on October 1, 1949. It was the culmination of over two decades of civil and international war. From 1954 to 1959, Mao was the Chairman of the PRC. During this period, Mao was called Chairman Mao (毛主席) or the Great Leader Chairman Mao(伟大领袖毛主席). The Communist Party assumed control of all media in the country and used it to promote the image of Mao and the Party. The Nationalists under General Chiang Kai-Shek were vilified as were countries such as the United States of America and Japan. The Chinese people were exhorted to devote themselves to build and strengthen their country. Almost every Chinese had a book called the Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung(《毛主席语录》)，which was regarded as a source of infallible truth in discussions or arguments at schools or the workplace. He took up residence in Zhongnanhai, a compound next to the Forbidden City in Beijing, and there he ordered the construction of an indoor swimming pool and other buildings. Mao often did his work either in bed or by the side of the pool, preferring not to wear formal clothes unless absolutely necessary, according to Dr. Li Zhisui, his personal physician. (Li's book, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, is regarded as controversial by some of those still sympathetic to Mao.)

Following the consolidation of power, Mao launched a phase of rapid collectivization, lasting until around 1958. The CCP introduced price controls as well as a Chinese character simplification aimed at increasing literacy. Land was taken from landlords and more wealthy peasants and given to poorer peasants. Large scale industrialization projects were also undertaken.

Programs pursued during this time include the Hundred Flowers Campaign, in which Mao indicated his supposed willingness to consider different opinions about how China should be governed. Given the freedom to express themselves, liberal and intellectual Chinese began opposing the Communist Party and questioning its leadership. This was initially tolerated and even encouraged. However, after a few months, Mao's government reversed its policy and persecuted those, totalling perhaps 500,000, who criticized, and were merely alleged to have criticized, the Party in what is called the Anti-Rightist Movement. Authors such as Jung Chang have alleged that the Hundred Flowers Campaign was merely a ruse to root out "dangerous" thinking. Others such as Dr Li Zhisui have suggested that Mao had initially seen the policy as a way of weakening those within his party who opposed him, but was surprised by the extent of criticism and the fact that it began to be directed at his own leadership. It was only then that he used it as a method of identifying and subsequently persecuting those critical of his regime.

Great Leap Forward

Main article: Great Leap Forward

In January 1958, Mao launched the second Five Year Plan known as the Great Leap Forward, a plan intended as an alternative model for economic growth to the Soviet model focusing on heavy industry that was advocated by others in the party. Under this economic program, the relatively small agricultural collectives which had been formed to date were rapidly merged into far larger people's communes, and many of the peasants ordered to work on massive infrastructure projects and the small-scale production of iron and steel. All private food production was banned; livestock and farm implements were brought under collective ownership.

Under the Great Leap Forward, Mao and other party leaders ordered the implementation of a variety of unproven and unscientific new agricultural techniques by the new communes. Combined with the diversion of labour to steel production and infrastructure projects and the reduced personal incentives under a commune system this lead to an approximately 15% drop in grain production in 1959 followed by further 10% reduction in 1960 and no recovery in 1961. In an effort to win favour with their superiors and avoid being purged, each layer in the party hierarchy exaggerated the amount of grain produced under them and based on the fabricated success, party cadres were ordered to requisition a disproportionately high amount of the true harvest for state use primarily in the cities and urban areas but also for export. The net result, which was compounded in some areas by drought and in others by floods, was that the rural peasants were not left enough to eat and many millions starved to death in what is thought to be the largest famine in human history. This famine was a direct cause of the death of tens of millions of Chinese peasants between 1959 and 1962. Further, many children who became emaciated and malnourished during years of hardship and struggle for surivival, died shortly after the Greap Leap Forward came to an end in 1962 (Spence, 553).

The extent of Mao's knowledge as to the severity of the situation has been disputed. According to some, most notably Dr. Li Zhisui; Mao was not aware of anything more then a mild food and general supply shortage until late 1959/1960.

But I do not think that when he spoke on July 2, 1959, he knew how bad the disaster had

become, and he believed the party was doing everything it could to manage the situation.

The Great Leap Forward was a disaster for China. Although the steel quotas were officially reached, almost all of it made in the countryside was useless lumps of iron, as it had been made from assorted scrap metal in home made furnaces with no reliable source of fuel such as coal. According to Zhang Rongmei, a geometry teacher in rural Shanghai during the Great Leap Forward:

We took all the furniture, pots, and pans we had in our house, and all our neighbors did likewise. We put all everything in a big fire and melted down all the metal.

Moreover, most of the dams, canals and other infrastructure projects, which millions of peasants and prisoners had been forced to toil on and in many cases die for, proved useless as they had been built without the input of trained engineers, whom Mao had rejected on ideological grounds.

In the Party Congress at Lushan in July/August 1959, several leaders expressed concern that the Great Leap Forward was not as successful as planned. The most direct of these was Minister of Defence Peng Dehuai. Mao orchestrated a denouncement of Peng and his supporters, stiffling criticism of the Great Leap policies.

There is a great deal of controversy over the number of deaths by starvation during the Great Leap Forward. Until the mid 1980s, when official census figures were finally published by the Chinese Government, little was known about the scale of the disaster in the Chinese countryside, as the handful of Western observers allowed access during this time had been restricted to model villages where they were deceived into believing that Great Leap Forward had been a great success. There was also an assumption that the flow of individual reports of starvation that had been reaching the West, primarily through Hong Kong and Taiwan, must be localised or exaggerated as China was continuing to claim record harvests and was a net exporter of grain through the period. Censuses were carried out in China in 1953, 1964 and 1982. The first attempt to analyse this data in order to estimate the number of famine deaths was carried out by American demographer Dr Judith Banister and published in 1984. Given the lengthy gaps between the censuses and doubts over the reliability of the data, an accurate figure is difficult to ascertain. Nevertheless Banister concluded that the official data implied that around 15 million excess deaths incurred in China during 1958-61 and that based on her modelling of Chinese demographics during the period and taking account of assumed underreporting during the famine years, the figure was around 30 million. Various other sources have put the figure between 20 and 43 million.

On the international front, the period was dominated by the further isolation of China, due to start of the Sino-Soviet split which resulted in Khrushchev withdrawing all Soviet technical experts and aid from the country. The split was triggered by border disputes, and arguments over the control and direction of world communism, and other disputes pertaining to foreign policy. Most of the problems regarding communist unity resulted from the death of Stalin and his replacement by Khrushchev. Stalin had established himself as the successor of "correct" Marxist thought well before Mao controlled the CCP, and therefore Mao never challenged the suitability of any Stalinist doctrine (at least while Stalin was alive). Upon the death of Stalin, Mao believed (perhaps because of seniority) that the leadership of the "correct" Marxist doctrine would fall to him. The resulting tension between Khrushchev (at the head of a politically/militarily superior government), and Mao (believing he had a superior understanding of Marxist ideology) eroded the previous patron-client relationship between the USSR and CCP.

Half-surrounded by hostile American military bases (reaching from South Korea, Japan, Okinawa, and Taiwan), China was now confronted with a new Soviet threat from the north and west. Both the internal crisis and the external threat called for extraordinary statesmanship from Mao, but as China entered the new decade the statesmen of the People's Republic were in hostile confrontation with each other.

The Great Leap policies were effectively given up following a Politburo meeting in January 1961 and Mao took a more backseat role whilst more moderate leaders such as Liu Shaoqi, who had become State President in 1959 and Deng Xiaoping rescued the economy by disbanding the people's communes, introducing elements of private control of peasant smallholdings and importing grain from Canada and Australia to mitigate the worst effects of famine.