Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-Tung)

Founder of the Communist Party of China, head of state of the People's Republic of China 1949 - 1959, b. 26 December 1893 (Shao-shan, Hunan province, China), d. 9 September 1976 (Beijing [Peking]).

Born as the sun of a poor farmer who had acquired some wealth, Mao Zedong attended a village primary school. When he had to leave school at the age of 13 to help on the family farm, he ran away from home to continue his studies at secondary school level in the regional capital, Ch'ang-sha. There he witnessed the last days of the millenium-old Empire and the founding of the Republic by the nationalist revolutionary Sun Yat-sen. He joined the revolutionary army and served for six months until victory and the proclamation of the Republic in 1912.

After some years without direction Mao finished secondary school in 1918 and went to Beijing University. Working as a library assistant he quickly came into contact with western ideas. The success of the Russian revolution made Marxist ideas attractive to China's youth.

In 1919 the Paris Peace conference that concluded World War I had to decide what to do with Germany's colonial posessions. Instead of returning Germany's concessions in Shandong province to China, it resolved to hand them over to Japan. The Chinese answer, a huge protest demonstration on 4 May, was organised by the students, who from then on regarded themselves as responsible for China's liberation and modernisation. Mao was instrumental in organising a series of demonstrations of students, workers and urban middle class aimed at forcing the government to oppose Japan.

In 1921 Mao participated in the founding of the Communist Party. The new party entered into an alliance with Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) in 1923, and Mao joined the Kuomintang as a representative of the Communists.

In 1925 during a vacation in his native village Mao witnessed the outrage of the peasants over the murder of several Chinese by foreign agents. He realized that reliance on the workers, the essence of classical Marxism, was not appropriate for an underdeveloped country such as China, where the peasants represent the largest revolutionary force.

China was still fractured, ruled by warlords and a reactionary central government. While the Kuomintang tried to achieve change through collaboration with the dissatisfied merchants and landlords and excluded the poor peasants and workers from participation in progress, the Communists progressively trusted the force of the peasants. In 1927 Chiang Kai-shek, successor of Sun Yat-sen in the Kuomintang, turned against the Communists and massacred the workers of Shaghai who had just liberated the city for him.

The forced retreat of the Communists into the countryside led Mao to develop his strategy of revolution by encircling the cities through protracted guerilla warfare. In 1931 he founded the Chinese Soviet Republic in Kiangsi province in south eastern China. When the republic could no longer be defended against Chiang Kai-shek's forces in 1934, Mao took 85,000 troups on a 10,000 km march, known as the Long March, to regroup in China's north.

In 1936 the 8,000 survivors of the Long March joined forces with 22,000 troops of other communist generals in Shensi province in northern China. Public pressure - in the "Sian Incident" Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped by one of his own nationalist generals who wanted to fight the Japanese occupation - forced the Kuomintang to form a united front with the Communists and sign a formal agreement in 1937.

The united front existed for most of the liberation war against Japan, although the communist forces were by far the most determined and thus gained significant popular support. In 1945, when World War II had come to an end and victory against Japan had become imminent, Chiang Kai-shek turned again against the communist forces, and for half a decade China was engulfed in civil war, which ended in the victory of the Communists and retreat of the Kuomintang to Taiwan. In 1949 the Communists, having driven Japan out of the country, declared the foundation of the People's Republic with Mao as its Chairman.

Mao now began the task of the modernization of China. Realizing that China's only strength was its huge rural workforce he tried to utilize it for the urgent process of rapid industrialization. His policies were not always successful, and some turned into serious setbacks and social disasters. The "Great Leap Forward" of 1958, an attempt to develop an industrial base through labour-intensive village-based production methods, led to the disruption of agricultural production and mass starvation and the death of millions of peasants. The "Cultural Revolution" of 1966, seen by many as an attempt to fight bureaucratization of the Communist Party and the development of a new political overclass, was driven at least in part by Mao's desire to maintain complete control; it produced anarchy, chaos and indiscriminate suffering and threw the country back by a decade.

In Mao's defense it can be said that he tried to find solutions to China's particular situation: Having just emerged from 4,000 years of Imperial rule with its entrenched feudal system and rural poverty, the country could not be expected to espouse the new values of egality and democracy in a single generation. Without surplus land it could not follow the Russian model to generate agricultural export with which to import heavy machinery. Modernization was thus a mammoth task. Mao set China on the path of development, but his attempts to speed up the process proved counterproductive.

On the positive side, Mao developed the techniques of the liberation war against an enemy armed with modern weaponry. His guerilla tactics of moving among the supportive civilian population "like fish in water" were used successfully in other liberation wars. His writings make him an important theoretician of political economy, liberation strategy and Marxist thought. He was one of the most influencial architects of modern China. These achievements support the assessment of the Chinese Communist Party, who after Mao's death declared that Mao's merits outweighed his faults.

Photo: public domain (Wikipedia)

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