introduction of mao zedong essay

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Mao Zedong

Introduction, general overviews.

• Early Biographies (Pre-1976)
• Later Biographies (Post-1976)
• Memoirs and Interviews
• Materials on Mao’s Family Members
• Mao and his Colleagues
• Personality and Leadership
• Mao’s Early Politics
• Mao and Marxism
• Scholarly Collections
• Official Selections
• Mao’s Poetry
• Developing the Rural Revolution
• Yan’an and Mao’s Rise to the Party Leadership
• Mao, the Great Leap Forward, and Its Aftermath
• Mao and the Cultural Revolution
• Envisioning the Cult of Mao
• Mao and Foreign Policy
• The Fate of Mao and Maoism in Reform China
• Mao as Icon
• Mao beyond China
• Debates and Assessments

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Mao Zedong by Delia Davin LAST REVIEWED: 22 February 2018 LAST MODIFIED: 22 February 2018 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199920082-0037

Mao Zedong (b. 1893–d. 1976) was one of the most remarkable political leaders of the 20th century, an all-powerful leader in China, and a major world figure. His career as a Communist revolutionary lasted fifty-five years. Half this time was spent in revolutionary struggle, and half, after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, in the struggle to build a revolutionary state. Mao’s rise to leadership was gradual: starting as an obscure Communist Party functionary, he was in turn a labor organizer, a guerrilla commander, and a leader in the Communist base areas before finally becoming chairman of the party in 1943. As the unchallenged leader of the new People’s Republic of China in 1949, with his colleagues Mao began the revolutionary transformation of China through land reform, collectivization, industrialization, and the comprehensive politicization of daily life. Under Mao’s leadership the country was unified and began a process of modernization and industrialization that would allow it to become a major power after his death. However, within a few years of taking power, Mao began to suspect his colleagues of backsliding and refusing to recognize the danger to socialism that he believed a new elite would pose. His disputes with them convulsed China and dominated the last twenty years of his life. His efforts to achieve his vision of a China that was both egalitarian and prosperous failed and ultimately visited enormous suffering on his people. Moreover, his ruthlessness toward his opponents and his cynical exploitation of his cult of personality during the Cultural Revolution disillusioned many of his followers. His successors reversed Mao’s policies, seeking a new legitimacy for the party state in improved standards of living, achieved through a return to a marketized economy. Mao’s life and record still spark great interest inside and outside China. The large and growing literature on Mao covered in this article includes biographies, monographs on almost every aspect of his life and work, assessments of his legacy, and multivolume editions of his writing. Mao scholars struggle to come to terms with his legacy. He has been portrayed by some as China’s redeemer and by others, as a monster. Chinese appraisals are inevitably affected by the official line that he was a great revolutionary leader who made very serious errors. Late-20th- and early-21st-century Western scholarship tends to insist on Mao’s complexity and his many dimensions.

There are a number of overviews of Mao’s life and work aimed at the general reader or the undergraduate market. Davin 2009 , Lynch 2004 , and Spence 1999 are conventional chronological biographies; Karl 2010 tends toward a history of the Chinese revolution with Mao as the major protagonist; and Cheek 2002 includes translations of key documents, with commentaries. Meisner 2007 gives greater attention to Mao as a political thinker. All the overviews wrestle with problems of selection in attempting to provide the historical background necessary to a general reader unfamiliar with Chinese history. Most use some primary sources but rely heavily on secondary ones.

Cheek, Timothy, ed. Mao Zedong and China’s Revolutions: A Brief History with Documents . Bedford Series in History and Culture. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002.

Excellent introductory text for students. Part biography, part historical overview, it traces Mao’s career up to the Communist victory in 1949 and through three decades of revolution, to Mao’s death in 1976. The second half of the volume offers a selection of key writings by and about Mao.

Davin, Delia. Mao Zedong . 2d ed. Pocket Biographies. Stroud, UK: History Press, 2009.

A very brief overview in twenty-thousand words. Focus on Mao’s life and activities, with less on his ideas and writings.

Karl, Rebecca E. Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History . Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

DOI: 10.1215/9780822393023

An examination of Mao’s life and role in parallel with the 20th-century history of China and its relationships with the rest of the world. Aimed at the general reader.

Lynch, Michael. Mao . Routledge Historical Biographies. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.

Another introduction to Mao and Maoism that sets Mao’s life in the broader context of 20th-century Chinese history, discussing the development of the Chinese Communist Party, the creation of the People’s Republic of China, the Cultural Revolution, and Mao’s role in the Cold War and the Sino-Soviet dispute.

Meisner, Maurice. Mao Zedong: A Political and Intellectual Portrait . Political Profiles. Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity, 2007.

Strong focus on Mao’s ideas and his “sinification of Marxism.” The first part covers Mao’s political formation, interest in liberal and anarchist ideas, acceptance of Marxism-Leninism, and growing belief in the revolutionary potential of the peasants. The second part discusses Mao’s success as a modernizer and unifier and his degeneration into autocracy.

Spence, Jonathan. Mao . Lives. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999.

Short, highly readable study by one of the most distinguished historians of modern China. Conveys a sense of Mao’s contradictory character and the way he transformed China.

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“A revolution is not a dinner party,” Mao Zedong declared. Rather, as he helpfully clarified in 1927, it is “an insurrection, an act of violence.” He might have warned that nation building is no picnic, either. Mao rose to supremacy within the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.), through several bloody purges of “revisionists” and “rightists.” After long years as a marginal peasant leader, he finally brought his revolution to all of China, forcing his great rival Chiang Kai-shek to flee to Taiwan (then called Formosa). Founding the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Mao exulted, “The Chinese people, comprising one quarter of humanity, have stood up.” He soon knocked them down, overwhelming the gradual processes of China’s modernization with the frenzy of permanent revolution.

Modernizing autocrats elsewhere in Asia—Turkey’s Atatürk, Iran’s Reza Shah Pahlavi, and Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-shek—also dragooned their peoples into traumatic social and political experiments. But Mao tormented the Chinese on a far bigger scale, condemning tens of millions to early death with the Great Leap Forward, and then exposing many more to persecution and suffering during the Cultural Revolution.

Just five years after his death, the C.C.P. officially blamed the “mistaken leadership of Mao Zedong” for the “serious disaster and turmoil” of the Cultural Revolution, and the garishly consumerist and inegalitarian China of today seems to mock Mao’s fantasies of a Communist paradise. Nevertheless, China’s leaders today continue to invoke “Mao Zedong Thought.” Taiwan, now rowdily democratic, has begun to dismantle the personality cult of Chiang Kai-shek, removing his statues and erasing his name from major monuments. But Mao still gazes across Tiananmen Square from the large portrait hanging on the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Visitors from the countryside often line up all day for a fleeting glimpse of his embalmed corpse south of the square, and in folk religions throughout China Mao is revered as a god.

This persistence of Mao in official discourse and popular imagination may seem an instance of ideological pathology—the same kind that makes some Russian nationalists get misty-eyed about Stalin. Indeed, the Communist state’s vast propaganda apparatus first exalted Mao to divine status. But then a non-ideological view of Mao has rarely been available in the West, even as he has gone from being a largely benign revolutionary and Third Worldist icon to, more recently, sadistic monster. This is largely due to China’s ever shifting place in the Western imagination. Three new books—Patrick Wright’s “Passport to Peking” (Oxford; $34.95), Frank Dikötter’s “Mao’s Great Famine” (Walker & Co.; $30), and Timothy Cheek’s anthology “A Critical Introduction to Mao” (Cambridge; $27.99)—attest to the difficulty of definitively fixing Mao’s image, a project that amounts to writing a history of China’s present.

Early visitors to Mao’s guerrilla base camp in Yan’an in the nineteen-thirties—notably the American writer Edgar Snow—managed to project onto the revolutionary the ideals of American progressivism. Snow’s popular report “Red Star Over China” (1937) presented a “Lincolnesque” leader who aimed to “awaken” China’s millions to “a belief in human rights,” introducing them to “a new conception of the state, society, and the individual.” More perceptively, Theodore White, then a reporter for Time , who visited Yan’an in 1944, concluded that the Communists were “masters of brutality” but had won peasants over to their side. Other “China Hands”—an assortment of journalists, American Foreign Service officials, and soldiers who succeeded in meeting the Communists—preferred Mao to Chiang Kai-shek, who, though corrupt and unpopular, was receiving enormous amounts of military aid from the United States. “The trouble in China is simple,” Joseph Stilwell, the commander of U.S. Forces in China-India-Burma, told White. “We are allied to an ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, peasant son of a bitch.” But, as the Cold War intensified, the China Hands found themselves ignored in the United States. Following Chiang Kai-shek’s defeat and flight to Taiwan in 1949, the Republican Party angrily accused the Truman Administration of having “lost” China to Communism. Then they berated it for hindering Chiang Kai-shek’s reconquest of the mainland. The China Hands in particular came under sustained fire from early and zealous Cold Warriors for their supposed sympathy with the Chinese agents of Soviet expansionism. Henry Luce, who saw the Christian convert Chiang Kai-shek as a vital facilitator of the “American Century,” fired White from Time .

The Korean War, which China entered on the side of North Korea, fixed Mao’s image in the United States as another unappeasable Communist. The Eisenhower Administration now vigorously backed Chiang Kai-shek, signing a mutual-defense treaty with him in 1954, and threatening China with a nuclear strike the following year. The State Department imposed a full trade embargo on China and prohibited travel there. Sinologists were reduced to speculating from afar whether Mao was more nationalist than Marxist.

The god of Communism had failed for many admirers of the Russian Revolution by the time Mao reunified mainland China, in the early nineteen-fifties. Still, many Western intellectuals, recoiling from the excesses of McCarthyism, and hampered by lack of firsthand information, gave the benefit of the doubt to Mao in the decade that followed. Travelling to China in 1955, Simone de Beauvoir drew a sympathetic picture of a new nation overcoming the aftereffects of foreign invasions, internecine warfare, natural disasters, and economic collapse. Neither Paradise nor Hell, China was another peasant country where people were trying to break out of “the agonizingly hopeless circle of an animal existence.”

The British visitors to China described in Patrick Wright’s entertaining “Passport to Peking” tried to maintain a similarly open mind. Then as now, plenty of liberal as well as left-wing Brits resented their government’s reflexive adherence to Washington’s foreign policy. When China’s urbane Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai made his first public appearance in Europe, many were persuaded that China was more than a clone of Soviet totalitarianism, and that “peaceful coexistence” was a real possibility. “Come and see,” Zhou said, and a motley bunch of politicians, artists, and scientists took up his invitation in 1954. Among them were a few fellow-travellers, most notably the artist Paul Hogarth. Some, like members of the Labour Party delegation headed by former Prime Minister Clement Attlee, were seasoned anti-Communists. Others were simply self-absorbed tourists, routinely stumbling into comic misunderstandings. The British artist Stanley Spencer first accosted Zhou Enlai with a rapturous account of his native village of Cookham, and then went on about the delights of a little island in the Thames called Formosa, not realizing the name was shared by his hosts’ fiercest international adversary.

The Chinese, who, Wright says, “had learned a lot from Moscow about the art of seducing foreign visitors,” laid on extravagant banquets for the British. (The headline in the Daily Mail was “ SOCIALISTS DINE ON SHARK ’ S FINS .”) The mammoth Chinese construction of factories, canals, schools, hospitals, and public housing awed these visitors from a straitened country that American loans and the Marshall Plan had saved from financial ruin. They were impressed, too, by the new marriage laws that considerably improved the position of Chinese women, by the ostensible abolition of prostitution, and by the public-health campaigns.

Yet no “useful idiots” of the kind who had made the Soviet Union under Stalin appear the savior of humanity emerged from the trip. The parade held in Beijing to mark the fifth anniversary of the People’s Republic reminded the philosopher A. J. Ayer of the Nuremberg Rallies. Though impressed by the “dedicated and dignified” Mao, the trade unionist Sam Watson was dismayed by Chinese talk of the masses as “another brick, another paving stone.” Mao asked Attlee to help reverse the American policy of encircling his country through defense treaties with Southeast Asian countries and the rearming of Japan. Attlee firmly informed Mao that “two-way traffic was needed” for peace, and asked Mao to help persuade the Soviet Union to free its satellite states in Eastern Europe.

Other European visitors to China were relative pushovers. François Mitterrand, who visited China at the height of the devastating famine in 1961, denied the existence of starvation in the country. André Malraux hailed Mao as an “emperor of bronze.” Richard Nixon, who consulted Malraux before “opening up” China to the United States in 1972, and Henry Kissinger were no less awed by Mao’s raw power and historical mystique. Two decades after Nixon himself denounced China as Stalin’s puppet state in the East, the country seemed to the United States a likely counterweight to the Soviet Union. Accordingly, American attitudes to China in the nineteen-seventies were marked by what the Yale historian Jonathan Spence characterized as “reawakened curiosity” and “guileless fascination,” followed soon by “renewed skepticism” as travel and research in China became progressively easier.

In the seventies and eighties, American scholars and journalists could finally experience the realities they had only guessed at, and they began compiling a grim record of China under Mao—a task that was speeded up by Deng Xiaoping’s repudiation of the Cultural Revolution after Mao’s death, in 1976. More Chinese also began to travel outside their country. Some, safely settled in the West, published memoirs of the Cultural Revolution. This fast-growing genre, which flourished particularly after the brutal suppression of the protests in Tiananmen Square, in June, 1989, described the violence and chaos suffered by ordinary Chinese during Mao’s quest for ideological and moral renewal. One émigré Chinese writer, who had previously been Mao’s private doctor, published the first intimate account of the Chinese leader, “The Private Life of Chairman Mao” (1994). It depicted a luxury-loving narcissist who was at once autocratic, whimsical, and calculating.

Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s best-selling biography “Mao: The Unknown Story” (2005) went much further, describing a man who was unstintingly vile from early youth to old age. Far from Edgar Snow’s champion of human rights, this particular Mao was working toward “a completely arid society, devoid of civilization, deprived of representation of human feelings, inhabited by a herd with no sensibility.” In Chang and Halliday’s account, Mao killed more than seventy million people in peacetime, and was in some ways a more diabolical villain than even Hitler or Stalin. The authors claimed—among other comparisons they made to twentieth-century atrocities—that the victims of the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward (1958-62) were worse off than the slave laborers at Auschwitz.

In “Mao’s Great Famine,” Frank Dikötter, a professor of modern Chinese history at the University of Hong Kong, deepens this trend in Mao studies. Boldly and engagingly revisionist in his previous books—which stressed the benefits of opium smoking to the Chinese and judged China under Chiang Kai-shek to be vibrantly cosmopolitan—Dikötter hopes that his new book will help make the famine “as well known as the two other man-made catastrophes of the twentieth century, the Holocaust and the Gulag.” Drawing on fresh research and a new tally, Dikötter revises upward the commonly accepted estimate of thirty million deaths in these four years, exceeding the thirty-eight million proposed by Chang and Halliday. His conclusion: out of a total population of six hundred and fifty million, “at least 45 million people died unnecessarily between 1958 and 1962.” This is still a conservative estimate, he judges, and by the end of the book Dikötter speculates that the body count could be as high as sixty million. Not only that: Mao also precipitated the biggest demolition of real estate, the most extensive destruction of the environment, and the biggest waste of manpower in history.

How did this come about? Dikötter is not much interested in a wide-ranging account that would necessarily include China’s internal political and economic situation in the nineteen-fifties, the shifting hierarchy of the C.C.P., or the Chinese sense of siege following the Korean War and the sharpening of Cold War divisions in Asia. He describes in some detail Mao’s personal competitiveness with Khrushchev—made keener by China’s abject dependence on the Soviet Union for loans and expert guidance—and his obsession with developing a uniquely Chinese model of socialist modernity. Hence the Great Leap Forward, which Mao designed to boost China’s industrial and agricultural output and move the country ahead of the Soviet Union as well as Britain in double-quick time. An urban myth in the West held that millions of Chinese had only to jump simultaneously in order to shake the world and throw it off its axis. Mao actually believed that collective action was sufficient to propel an agrarian society into industrial modernity. According to his master plan, surpluses generated by vigorously productive labor in the countryside would support industry and subsidize food in the cities. Acting as though he were still the wartime mobilizer of the Chinese masses, Mao expropriated personal property and housing, replacing them with People’s Communes, and centralized the distribution of food.

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Organized in very short chapters, Dikötter’s book takes its reader through a brisk tour of the follies, inefficiencies, and deceptions of Mao’s commandeered economy: impossible targets, exaggerated claims, maladroit innovation, lack of incentive, corruption, and waste. Ordered to go forth and make steel, Chinese flung anything they could find—pots, pans, cutlery, doorknobs, floorboards, and even farming tools—into primitive furnaces. Meanwhile, fields were abandoned as farmers fed furnaces in giant coöperatives, worked in similarly wasteful irrigation schemes, or migrated to urban factories in their millions.

Having mobilized the masses, Mao continually searched for things for them to do. At one point, he declared war on four common pests: flies, mosquitoes, rats, and sparrows. The Chinese were exhorted to bang drums, pots, pans, and gongs in order to keep sparrows flying until, exhausted, they fell to earth. Provincial recordkeepers chalked up impressive body counts: Shanghai alone accounted for 48,695.49 kilograms of flies, 930,486 rats, 1,213.05 kilograms of cockroaches, and 1,367,440 sparrows. Mao’s Marx-tinted Faustianism demonized nature as man’s adversary. But, Dikötter points out, “Mao lost his war against nature. The campaign backfired by breaking the delicate balance between humans and the environment.” Liberated from their usual nemeses, locusts and grasshoppers devoured millions of tons of food even as people starved to death.

While food shortages deepened, the Chinese regime continued to insist on huge grain procurements from the countryside. The aim was not only to maintain outstanding export commitments but also to protect China’s image in the world. According to Dikötter, Mao ordered the Party to procure more grain than ever before, declaring that “when there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.” In 1960, the worst year of the famine, which was exacerbated by drought as well as flash floods, grain was sent, often gratis, to Albania, Cuba, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Poland.

Not all Chinese died of starvation or of the diseases that accompany malnutrition. “Coercion, terror, and systematic violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward,” Dikötter writes, estimating that at least two and a half million were worked, tortured, or beaten to death or simply executed by Party officials, and between one and three million people committed suicide. Some of those who survived did so by selling or abandoning their children or by digging up and devouring the dead.

Dikötter closes his vivid catalogue of horrors with the “turning point” of the Party meeting in early 1962, where Mao’s colleague and head of state Liu Shaoqi admitted that a “man-made disaster” had occurred in China. Dikötter evokes Mao’s fear that Liu Shaoqi could discredit him just as completely as Khrushchev had damaged Stalin’s reputation. The book ends with a chilling foretaste of the next catastrophe to overwhelm China: “Mao was biding his time, but the patient groundwork for launching a Cultural Revolution that would tear the party and the country apart had already begun.”

This narrative line is plausible: exhorting young Chinese to assault the allegedly expanding bourgeoisie within the Party, Mao hoped to preserve his power and revolutionary legacy from bureaucratic “revisionists” like Liu Shaoqi, who was among the leaders who died at the hands of the Red Guard. Yet Dikötter’s account of Mao’s inner life scants some crucial details that would give a richer picture of his motivations and his constant maneuvering within the Party, while also undercutting the image of him as an indefatigable megalomaniac; for instance, the fact that Mao, after resigning as head of state in 1959, was unhappy with his diminished role in day-to-day decision-making, or that he had already called for a major change of course in November, 1960, and criticized himself at the Party Conference in 1962.

Dikötter is, indeed, generally dismissive of facts that could blunt his story’s sharp edge. Explaining Mao’s well-known defense of farmers’ evading grain procurers in 1959 and his advocacy of “right opportunism,” Dikötter writes, “Mao took on the pose of a benevolent sage-king protective of the welfare of his subjects,” but, he says, historians have erred in seeing this period as “one of ‘retreat’ or ‘cooling off.’ ” This would be persuasively contrarian if Dikötter hadn’t mentioned four pages previously that while Mao was pretending to be a “benign leader,” from November, 1958, to June, 1959, “the pressure temporarily abated.”

Focussing relentlessly on Mao’s character and motivations, Dikötter confirms the man’s reputation as sadistic, cowardly, callous, and vindictive. Yet his bold portrait bleaches out much of the period’s historical and geopolitical backdrop (the uprising in Tibet in 1959, anti-American riots in Taiwan, border clashes with India, the Sino-Soviet rift), and he misses, too, the abusive relationship between Mao and the Chinese people: how sincerely and deeply, for instance, they trusted and revered their leader before being betrayed by him.

Dikötter’s explanation of the Great Leap Forward omits the fact that—despite the damaging effects of the Korean War and the American trade embargo—China had, by 1956, made remarkable progress in securing social stability, achieving economic growth, and improving living conditions. According to Roderick MacFarquhar, a leading historian of Mao’s China, “what Mao accomplished between 1949 and 1956 was in fact the fastest, most extensive, and least damaging socialist revolution carried out in any communist state.” The distinguished expatriate writer Liu Binyan recalled the early nineteen-fifties as a time when “everyone felt good . . . and looked to the future with optimism”; most were eager to do their bit for their country.

Little did these enthusiasts know that they were about to be kicked in the teeth. Dikötter doesn’t make the imaginative move into ordinary people’s lives, their longings for stability and dignity, which Mao’s utopianism so cruelly trampled. The manifold victims in “Mao’s Great Famine,” keenly computed but cursorily described, remain a blur. And Dikötter’s comparison of the famine to the great evils of the Holocaust and the Gulag does not, finally, persuade. A great many premature deaths also occurred in newly independent nations not ruled by erratic tyrants. Amartya Sen has argued that “despite the gigantic size of excess mortality in the Chinese famine, the extra mortality in India from regular deprivation in normal times vastly overshadows the former.” Describing China’s early lead over India in health care, literacy, and life expectancy, Sen wrote that “India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame.”

The discrepancy between democratic India and authoritarian China is due to a complex interplay of political, geographical, and economic factors. Certainly, it cannot be explained through the fantasies and delusions of an Oriental despot. Mao’s individual pathology goes only so far in explaining China today, and it is pretty much useless in figuring out the Chairman’s enduring, even growing, influence outside China. What, for instance, is one to make of the irruptions of Maoism in the age of globalization? The Maoists of Nepal, who overthrew the monarchy in 2006 and won nationwide elections in 2008, remain a formidable political force. The Indian Maoists, whom India’s Prime Minister describes as the country’s gravest internal-security threat, are ranged against mining corporations and security forces in a vast swath of central India. Consisting largely of forest-dwelling peoples and landless peasants, these insurgent groups mouth a Mao-inspired rhetoric against foreign imperialists and local “compradors.” But, like Che Guevara and the Vietcong, they also adopt Mao’s tactic of marshalling rural populations against the cities, establishing, in addition to a cohesive party and militia, their own administrative structures and organizations.

This model of mass mobilization was Mao’s singular contribution to the making of the modern Chinese nation-state, though it also nearly unmade China after 1949. The most stimulating chapters in the academic collection “A Critical Introduction to Mao,” edited by Timothy Cheek, discuss Mao’s “Sinification” of a European tradition of revolution. Mao belonged to a Chinese generation of activists and thinkers who developed a fierce political awareness at the end of a long century of internal decay, humiliations by Western powers and by Japan, and failed imperial reforms. Whatever their ideological inclinations, they all believed in a version of Social Darwinism—the survival of the fittest applied to international relations. They worried about the social and political passivity of ordinary Chinese, and were electrified by the possibility that a strong, centralized nation-state would protect them from the depredations of foreign imperialists and domestic warlords. As Sun Yat-sen, China’s first modern revolutionary, explained in a speech shortly before his death, in 1925, “If we are to resist foreign oppression in the future, we must overcome individual freedom and join together as a firm unit, just as one adds water and cement to loose gravel to produce something as solid as a rock.”

Others took on the arduous task of welding a defunct empire into a nation-state, most prominently Chiang Kai-shek, whose urban-based Nationalist Party first brought a semblance of political unity to postimperial China. But it was Mao who, helped by a savage Japanese invasion and Chiang Kai-shek’s ineptitude, came up with an ideologically like-minded and disciplined organization capable of enlisting the loyalty and passions of the majority of the Chinese population in the countryside. More enduringly, Mao provided a battered and proud people with a compelling national narrative of decline and redemption. As he stressed shortly before the founding of the People’s Republic, “The Chinese have always been a great, courageous and industrious nation; it is only in modern times that they have fallen behind. And that was due entirely to oppression and exploitation by foreign imperialism and domestic reactionary governments.” This would change: “Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. . . . We will have not only a powerful army but also a powerful air force and a powerful navy.” Unlike India and Nepal, China contains very few active Maoists today, but strains of Mao’s anti-imperialist rhetoric grow more potent every year. As Timothy Cheek, a historian at the University of British Columbia, explains, “Most people in China appear to accept the assumptions in this story about China’s national identity, about the role of imperialism in China’s history and present, and about the value of maintaining and improving this thing called China. Increasingly, moreover, China’s middle classes accept the additional story in Maoism—the story of rising China: China was great, China was put down, China is rising again.”

Though better informed about Mao’s calamitous blunders, Chinese intellectuals today are far from united in their assessment of him. Attacked for his despotism by liberal-minded scholars, Mao is admired by New Left intellectuals for his assault on Communist bureaucracies and advocacy of “extensive democracy” during the Cultural Revolution. Summing up the diverse and contested meanings of Mao in China, Xiao Yanzhong, a professor at People’s University in Beijing, describes Mao scholarship as “a bellwether that can indicate changes in China’s politics, economy, and society, as well as the states of mind of the Chinese people.”

Certainly, the C.C.P., which remains as opposed to free elections as ever, has no choice but to derive its legitimacy from Mao Zedong even as it drifts further away from his ideals. Shortly after the sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic last year, the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, visited the tomb of Mao Anying, Mao’s favorite son, who died in the Korean War. Laying a wreath, Wen abruptly addressed a stone statue of the dead soldier. “Comrade Anying,” he said, “I have come to see you on behalf of the people of the motherland. Our country is strong now and its people enjoy good fortune. You may rest in peace.”

Comrade Wen surely realizes that, absent Mao’s exploits, the Chinese people would have started to enjoy their present good fortune three decades earlier. But would China have found a strong political basis for its prosperity without Mao? This is the harder counterfactual question. Asked for his views on the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai replied that it was too early to say; and he must have hoped for a similarly delayed verdict on the Chinese Revolution, the human costs of which truly did make the Reign of Terror look like a dinner party. Zhou, in pleading for the long view, was not being entirely shifty (nor is George W. Bush, who, after unleashing violent revolution in Iraq, has also entrusted his score sheet to future historians).

We have surely made up our minds about Mao. But the Chinese judgment on Mao’s revolution has been complicated and deferred by the longevity of the Communist regime and the country’s extraordinary economic successes. Another revolution, such as the one that has occurred in Taiwan, could bring, along with political freedoms, a new self-image to China, which would likely disown Mao. But it is also possible that the Chinese nation will continue in the decades ahead to acknowledge Mao as its father—disgraced, discredited, and irreplaceable. ♦

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Mao and the Chinese Communist Party

The communists and the nationalists.

• The road to power
• Formation of the People’s Republic of China
• The emergence of Mao’s road to socialism
• Retreat and counterattack
• The Cultural Revolution

• Who was Mao Zedong?
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In September 1920 Mao became principal of the Lin Changsha primary school , and in October he organized a branch of the Socialist Youth League there. That winter he married Yang Kaihui, the daughter of his former ethics teacher. In July 1921 he attended the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party , together with representatives from the other communist groups in China and two delegates from the Moscow-based Comintern (Communist International). In 1923, when the young party entered into an alliance with Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Party (Kuomintang [Pinyin: Guomindang]), Mao was one of the first communists to join the Nationalist Party and to work within it. During the first half of 1924, he lived mostly with his wife and two infant sons in Shanghai , where he was a leading member of the Nationalists’ Executive Bureau.

1893-1911   A Young Rebel

Mao Zedong is born in Hunan Province in 1893. Mao often argued with his strict, domineering father, who pushed him to pursue a Confucian education. Mao pursued his classical studies but his true loves were China’s classic adventure novels: The Water Margin  and Journey to the West .

As the imperial examination system crumbled, Mao also discovered the writing of turn-of-the-century reformers, eagerly gobbling up the work of Kang Youwei , Liang Qichao and Chen Duxiu .

As a teenager, Mao studied history, philosophy and geography at a school in the provincial capital of Changsha. One of his very first literary efforts was an essay in 1912 on Shang Yang, the great Legalist ruler.

1917   Contributions to New Youth

Mao was an avid reader of Chen Duxiu’s journal, New Youth . In 1917, Mao made his first contribution to the magazine, an essay on physical education .

Mao’s essay spoke to a lifelong obsession with physical and mental strength. He did extensive work to strengthen his mind and body, swimming in icy rivers and taking pride in his “well-sculpted physique.”

1919   A Librarian in Beijing

Upon graduating from school in Changsha in 1918, Mao moved to the capital and became a librarian at Beijing University, where he worked for Li Dazhao . There Mao finally met many of his intellectual idols, but as a bystander, checking out books for them from the library. Mao perhaps developed some resentment towards the intellectuals who dismissed the young student with a rural accent. Leaving his library post, Mao was inspired by the  May Fourth Movement to become a political organizer back in his native province of Hunan.

1919   Raising the Countryside

Back in Hunan, Mao was one of the first of the first reformers to focus on the political energy locked up in China’s peasants. In 1919, he penned an essay, “ The Present State of China’s Great Union of the Popular Masses ,” expressing early stirrings of Mao’s irrepressible iconoclasm.

The young Mao

1921   Founding the CCP

Mao was setting up local communist cells in Hunan when he received the invitation to travel to Shanghai for the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party . Party founders Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao were unable to make it to that first meeting, and Mao’s attendance lent him higher standing in the party afterwards.

1927   The Peasant Solution

While Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao set off to organize China’s cities along standard communist terms, Mao returned to his focus on Hunan peasants. He continued to articulate his belief that peasants represented the most viable source of revolutionary support and submitted this idea to the Party in his “ Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan ,” in 1927.

This report contains one of Mao’s most famous lines, “a revolution is not a dinner party,” or  geming bushi qing ke chi fan , (革命不是请客吃饭).

1927   Echoing Liang Qichao’s Idea of Destruction

Mao’s iconoclasm was a fuller expression of Liang Qichao’s ideas of destructivism, expressed early in his exile to Japan . Mao took these ideas to their limits, creating a Chinese version of Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction.”

Many years later, in a 1940 essay , Mao stated this contradiction most clearly in the famous line, “There is no construction without destruction,” bupo buli  (不破不立).

1934-1935   The Long March

Penned in China’s south by Chiang Kai-shek ‘s Nationalist forces, the young Chinese Communist Party organized a “liberated” communist state in parts of Jiangxi Province. As attacks by the Nationalists increased, the Red Army was forced to retreat 6,000 miles across western China in its famous “ Long March .” Only 10% of the communist soldiers survived.

During the march, Mao and Zhou Enlai took advantage of the chaos to ensconce themselves as paramount leaders of the Chinese Communist Party and the Red Army.

The Long March

1936   Edgar Snow

Much of what we know of Mao’s childhood is quoted from an interview with American journalist Edgar Snow, who traveled to speak with Mao at the Communist’s base in Yan’an.

Snow spoke to Mao about his relationship to his father, his influences, hopes and dreams, and included a biography of Mao in his book  Red Star Over China .

1942   The Yan’an Camp

During Japanese War and World War II the Communist Part spent nearly a decade in Yan’an, developing many important aspects of Maoism. From this base of power, Mao would launch the last phase of a revolution that swept Chiang from power and established the People’s Republic.

Mao used the war years to develop ideology that would govern the party’s direction for decades. He put forward the system of self-criticism and made famous speeches on the political role of the arts and the media.

Mao was joined by an American delegation during World War II (to liaise between the Communists and Nationalists) and initial perceptions of Mao by the Americans were quite positive, at least by comparison to Chiang. Mao’s government was not as corrupt as the Nationalists, and didn’t suffer from Chiang Kai-shek’s timidity during the war.

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Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution: In Theory and Impact

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International Journal of East Asia Studies

Siriporn Dabphet

This study examines “Mao Zedong Thought” in leading the Chinese Communist Party, China, and the Thought that led to the eruption of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and its impacts. It is found that Mao Zedong Thought was mainly developed from Marxism-Leninism, his background and experience. The key elements of Mao Zedong Thought are Marxist revolution, the importance of the peasants, mass mobilization and voluntarism, continuous revolution, proletarian revolution, self-criticism, class struggle, and the primacy of Mao Zedong Thought. He was also interested in employing conflict theory to change the culture and socio-political system of China. Campaigns launched under Maoist ideology had an important and serious impact on China and Chinese people. Reasons for the Cultural Revolution, which erupted in 1966, are quite complex. For Mao, it is as an ideal of social transformation and his response to revisionism that threatened his thought of social equality and class struggle. Although purging the Party leaders, condemned as revisionists, was his personal reason, it was the Thought on continuous revolution and mobilizing the masses. The Cultural Revolution went beyond the stage of historical development and failed to lead effectively. It greatly impacted on various parts of China and changed the Chinese people’s world outlook and values.

Ratan Lal Basu

Jody Musgrove

Given that the Cultural Revolution is now regarded widely as a crazy aberration, can you explain why Mao Zedong should have launched such a movement?

This paper intends to construct a framework of understanding the Cultural Revolution and the complexities of such an event on the basis of historically novel forms of political, social and ideological relations. It brings the Cultural Revolution back in a good light so as to show its immense, autonomous historical importance as well as its continuing relevance. It studies and establishes the relationship between Mao's political and ideological discourse manifested and practised in the Cultural Revolution and the transformation of China's political economy in the present era. It concludes that the theoretical and practical problematics which the Cultural Revolution struggled to resolve can transcend space and time and continue to yield to our reading in a new light.

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After the end of Ma Zedong's Great Leap Forward, began the Chinese Cultural Revolution that was led by Mao. This Revolution drastically changed Chinese culture, politics, and way of life between 1966 and 1976.

Journal of Contemporary Educational Research

Donia Zhang

This paper presents an analysis of the former Chinese Communist Party leader Chairman Mao Zedong’s political career (reigned 1949-1976), with regards to his success and failures. Mao was one of the most prominent Communist theoreticians who governed a quarter of humankind for a quarter of a century. His political philosophy, particularly his Method of Leadership, focusing on the “masses” is discussed here. The analytical arguments are centered on three phases of his leadership: the rise, the apex, and the fall. In the first phase, the paper attributes his victory before 1949 to his profound understanding of Chinese peasants. In the second phase, it elaborates on his successful method of leadership in the early 1950s. And in the third and last phase, it criticizes his disastrous political movements, particularly the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. The study hopes to offer an objective and a balanced view of Chairman Mao, who had a complex personality and was a highly controversial figure in human history. The article also wishes to help readers gain a better understanding of China’s top leader in recent history, and how China came to be what it is today.

"Mao Zedong envisioned a great struggle to “wreak havoc under the heaven” when he launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966. But as radicalized Chinese youth rose up against Party officials, events quickly slipped from the government’s grasp, and rebellion took on a life of its own. Turmoil became a reality in a way the Great Leader had not foreseen. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins recaptures these formative moments from the perspective of the disenfranchised and disobedient rebels Mao unleashed and later betrayed. The Cultural Revolution began as a “revolution from above,” and Mao had only a tenuous relationship with the Red Guard students and workers who responded to his call. Yet it was these young rebels at the grassroots who advanced the Cultural Revolution’s more radical possibilities, Yiching Wu argues, and who not only acted for themselves but also transgressed Maoism by critically reflecting on broader issues concerning Chinese socialism. As China’s state machinery broke down and the institutional foundations of the PRC were threatened, Mao resolved to suppress the crisis. Leaving out in the cold the very activists who had taken its transformative promise seriously, the Cultural Revolution devoured its children and exhausted its political energy. The mass demobilizations of 1968–69, Wu shows, were the starting point of a series of crisis-coping maneuvers to contain and neutralize dissent, producing immense changes in Chinese society a decade later."

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Mao Zedong’s Rise to Power Essay (Critical Writing)

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Historians provide various explanations for Mao Zedong’s rise to power. This person can be regarded as a skillful political strategist and tactician who could manipulate, forestall, and coerce his opponents into defeat. Yet, he can also be considered as an opportunist always able to take advantage of various circumstances, even those ones when he made obvious mistakes.

Thus, it is necessary to show how modern scholars describe and assess Mao Zedong. In particular, we can compare Maurice Meisner’s evaluation of Mao with the assessment offered by David Apter and Tony Saich. To some degree, the works of these historians represent opposing views on Mao Zedong political struggles.

Meisner emphasizes his efforts to appeal to various social classes. He shows what Mao Zedong gained the trust of his potential supporters. In turn, Apter and Saich attach greater importance to his rivalry with various people who could undermine his authority.

First, it should be mentioned that these scholars pursue a similar objective; in particular, they strive to explain how Mao Zedong gained supremacy in the Communist Party, and became a symbol of a leader for the Chinese people. Yet, these texts differ greatly in the style of presentation.

In his work Maurice Meisner looks at Mao’s succession to power from a strictly chronological standpoint. He discusses a series of events that contributed to Mao’s ascendance to power. His attention is focused on the Long March, the Japanese invasion of China, the establishment of Red Capital in Yan’an and so forth.

He shows how these events helped to gain the support of people with “proletariat consciousness” (Meisner, 45). In their turn, Apter and Saich discuss separate strategies and tactics that Mao employed to overpower his opponents among politicians, intellectuals, administrators and military.

Additionally, it is important to compare the data that these scholars analyze. For instance, Maurice Meisner discusses quantitative demographic data that shows how many people supported Mao and many people lost their lives because of his initiatives. Still, he also gives preference to quantitative research methods.

He focuses on Mao’s description and perceptions of his successes and failures. The data that this historian discusses mostly comes from primary sources such as Mao’s books, articles, and interviews conducted with this political leader.

He also uses secondary sources, especially, the books published by other historians and journalists. In contrast, Apter and Saich don’t use quantitative data. They give preference to qualitative data that allows the reader to understand the opinions of Mao and his opponents. Their data come from primary sources such as letters, diaries, pamphlets, and books published during that period.

There are some similarities in conclusions that these authors arrive at. One of his arguments is that Mao was able to transform his failed initiatives into victories. For example, the Long March which resulted in thousands of casualties, was later transformed into a symbol of “will, spirit, and revolutionary consciousness” (Meisner, 34).

Mao understood that this March could have been ruinous for the Communist Party, but he never admitted his errors and attributed them to his political rivals.

This idea is shared by David Apter and Tony Saich who also think that Mao Zedong was good at “turning defeats into lessons, and lessons into claims to truth” (Apter and Saich, 37). Overall, the authors agree that he was able to shift the blame for his failures on others.

However, these scholars have different perspectives on Mao Zedong’s strategy. For instance, David Apter and Tony Saich focus on the so-called “four struggles” of Mao (Apter and Saich, 35). This term describes Mao’s attempts to win military, ideological, intellectual, and administrative leadership in China (Apter & Saich, 35).

These authors show how he was able to manipulate, coerce, and discredit his potential rivals such as Zhang Guotao, Liu Zhidan, Wang Ming, and Wang Shiwei. These people could eventually challenge Mao’s authority and his status within the communist Party.

Maurice Meisner does not try to refute this argument, but in his view, Mao’s success can be explained by his ability to appeal to various social classes, especially to people with the so-called “proletariat consciousness” (Meisner, 45).

According this scholar, Mao was able to construct such an image of himself that could earn him the trust of peasants, workers, and bourgeois. He believed that revolutionary consciousness could be possessed by people of various social backgrounds. In part, this rhetoric enabled him to attract more potential supporters of the Communist Party.

Additionally, these historians agree that the establishment of a communism regime in Yan’an played a pivotal role for the success of Mao Zedong and the Communist Party in general. This period shaped future policies of the party.

However, these scholars differ greatly when they interpret the legacies of Yan’an. Maurice Meisner emphasizes the idea that this period intensified people’s belief in the strength of revolutionary forces, and their ability to overcome material hardships and bureaucratic barriers (Meisner, 50).

Maurice Meisner also mentions some social practices that emerged from the Yan’an years, for instance, the combination of industrial and agricultural production. In contrast, David Apter and Tony Saich argue that this period only identified the enemies of the communist revolution. In this case, one can speak about intellectuals such as Wang Shiwei or Wang Ming.

Moreover, one can mention administrators and military like Guotao and Zhidan. According to these scholars, the potential opponents of Mao were regarded as “the demons of Yan’an” (Apter & Saich, 68). In their opinion, the Yan’an period shaped future policies of the Communist Party toward those people who could disagree with Mao or his regime.

Hence, it is possible to say that both these texts describe a set of strategies that Mao Zedong adopted to become a leader. Maurice Meisner discusses how this person was able to augment the ranks of his supporters.

This scholar also explains how Mao Zedong’s ability to put his failures in a more positive light. In contrast, David Apter and Tony Saich show how he defeated his possible rivals. These authors focus on different aspects of Mao’s struggle against potential opponents.

On the whole, it is not very easy to determine which of these texts is more useful or convincing. Maurice Meisner’s work illustrates how Mao Zedong was able to win ideological struggle in the country.

This work enables the readers to understand his populist strategies. In turn, the article by David Apter and Tony Saich shows whom Mao regarded as enemies of his rule. It seems that this work throws more light on Mao Zedong.

The thing is that his politics was largely based on his willingness to find enemies of the state and blame them for every misfortune. Moreover, his methods such as manipulation and coercion remained unchanged during his rule. In my view, David Apter and Tony Saich were able to capture the essence of Mao Zedong regime.

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Introduction

Mao was born on December 26, 1893, in the village of Shaoshan in southeastern China. His parents were farmers. In 1911 Mao fought in a revolution against China’s rulers. The revolution forced China’s last emperor from power.

While studying at Beijing University, Mao became interested in Communism . Communists wanted all people to own everything together. Mao came to believe that China should have a Communist government. In 1921 he joined the Chinese Communist Party.

Rise to Power

In the early 1920s the Communists worked together with another party, the Nationalists. In 1926, however, a new Nationalist leader named Chiang Kai-shek turned against the Communists. Mao fought back.

Mao set up a Communist base in southeastern China. The Nationalists attacked it. Mao then led his forces on a journey called the Long March. In 1935 they arrived at a new base in the northwest.

In 1937 the Communists and the Nationalists joined forces to fight the Japanese, who had invaded China. The Japanese were defeated in 1945. Then the fighting between the Nationalists and the Communists resumed. Mao’s forces won the war in 1949. Mao formed the People’s Republic of China and became its chairman (leader).

Chairman Mao

Mao tried to transform China’s economy. In 1958 he started a program called the Great Leap Forward. Among other changes, he made peasants work on huge farms called communes. The program failed. Farm production went down so much that many people starved to death.

In 1966 Mao began a movement called the Cultural Revolution. His goal was to strengthen the Communists’ hold on China. Mao shut down the schools and formed groups of young people called Red Guards. The Red Guards attacked people who disagreed with the government. They also destroyed much property.

The Cultural Revolution weakened China. Even so, it continued as long as Mao lived. He died in Beijing on September 9, 1976.

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