Mao Tse-Tung (1893–1976)

The political activism of Mao Tse-tung (also romanized as Mao Zedong) and his quest for social justice made him the most important and controversial Chinese revolutionary of the 20th century. Under his leadership, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) went from a demoralized and nearly broken revolutionary force to become the ruling party of mainland China after victory over Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) and the Chinese Nationalists (Kuomintang or KMT) in the protracted Chinese Civil War (1927–1949). On October 1, 1949, Mao announced the creation of the People's Republic of China (PRC) at Tiananmen Square in Beijing and, for the first time since the Opium Wars (1839–1842), the politics of mainland China was not dominated by foreign imperial interests. After the communist victory, Mao's activism turned to the initiation of a series of large-scale cultural, economic, and political campaigns that sought to implement communist ideals of social justice and equity in what had been a very hierarchical agrarian society. Campaigns like collectivization of land and industry were quite popular and successful, but the Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956–1957), the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962), and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1969), all of which had broad support, did not achieve their goals and resulted in the suffering and death of tens of millions of Chinese. Mao's writings were influential in the development of Marxist theory outside the Soviet Union and Western Europe from the 1930s until his death, had an enormous impact on generations of Chinese, and significantly influenced the strategy and tactics of revolutionary movements in the era of decolonization after World War II.

The eldest of four children, Mao was born into a modest but comfortable peasant household in Shaoshan village in the southern Chinese province of Hunan. During the 1911 Revolution, he served in the Hunan provincial army and graduated from Hunan First Normal University, a teacher-training college, in 1918. In Beijing during the 1919 May Fourth Movement, the first mass student political mobilization in Chinese history, which served to popularize Marxism and political action among its members, Mao returned to Hunan in the early 1920s and took a leading role in promoting collective protest and labor organizing. Mao attended the First (Organizing) Congress of the Communist Party of China in Shanghai in July 1921 (when the party had 70 members) and was elected to the party's Central Committee 2 years later. During the first KMT-CCP united front in the mid-1920s, Mao worked as the director of the Peasant Training Institute of the KMT and, in that capacity, he returned to Hunan province in early 1927 to investigate the recent peasant uprisings against local landlords allied with the KMT. The report on peasant radicalism that Mao produced from his investigation became the first important work of Maoist theory.

Mao escaped the terror campaign unleashed by the KMT against the CCP in China's urban areas in the spring and summer of 1927, massacres that killed four out of five communist cadres and nearly destroyed the CCP. Mao barely escaped execution himself and found refuge with a band of guerillas in the Jinggang [Page 897]Mountains in southeastern China. There he helped found the Chinese Soviet Republic (1931–1934) and was elected chairman. During this period he married He Zizhen (1909–1984) after his wife Yang Kaihui (1901–1930) was killed by KMT forces. With the help of other cadres, Mao built a small but effective armed force that engaged in what he called “mobile warfare” (i.e., guerilla warfare) and undertook experiments in rural reform and government structure. Under constant threat from KMT encirclement campaigns, a power struggle emerged within the communist leadership and Mao was removed from his positions by a pro-Moscow faction that advocated an orthodox proletarian, rather than a Maoist peasant, revolution. By October 1934, the KMT had the Chinese Soviet Republic surrounded and the communist cadres embarked on the Long March, a now-legendary withdrawal from Jiangxi province in the southeast to Shaanxi province in the northwest of China, during which they confiscated property and weapons from local warlords and landlords and recruited peasant fighters. Fatalities were high, however: Out of 100,000 soldiers who started the march, only 7,000 survived. It was during this 9,600-kilometer, year-long journey that Mao finally emerged as the top communist leader and the party gained a very positive reputation among the peasants from the determination and dedication of the surviving participants of the Long March and from Mao's orders that peasant property could not be harmed or confiscated and peasants had to be treated with respect and aided whenever possible.

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