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A Biography of Mao Zedong




Mao Zedong (also known as Mao Tse-tung) may be the most powerful person who has ever lived. He controlled almost a billion people for more than twenty five years. He controlled more than 9 million square kilometers of land. He controlled a country whose present value is more than $980 billion American. He overthrew an army of more than 4 million to get it, and killed many more to keep it. This project details the life of this once godlike ruler.

LIFE BEFORE THE CCP

The socialist system will eventually replace the capitalist system; this is an objective law independent of man’s will. However much reactionaries try to hold back the wheel of history, sooner or later revolution will take place and will inevitably triumph.

"Speech at the Meeting of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R in Celebration of the 40th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution" 6/11/1957

The legends of Mao Zedong say he was born into a poor peasant family, but he was actually born on the 26th of December, 1893, in the home of a fairly well-to-do peasant in Hunan. Mao placed his humble origins in the fact his father was born poor and made his own money.

Even so, Mao did not escape village life until the age of 17 when he went to middle school in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province. That year, 1911, the revolution led by Dr. Sun Yat-Sen overthrew the imperial government and Mao became caught up in the political instability. He left his studies at the school and after a period in a revolutionary army he began to study at a Hunan Provincial library on his own. He became well acquainted with the works of Darwin, Mill and Rousseau before he ran out of money and joined a teaching course. There he read and loved Chinese literature, especially tales of bandits and heroes, as well as advancing his personal health and fitness which would serve him well in the future.

Instead of becoming a teacher at the completion of his course in 1918, he went to Beijing and became a poorly paid assistant in the university library. There he found two allies, the library chief Li Dazhao, and a professor of literature, Chen Duxiu, who were radical Marxists and later founded the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP.

The actual founding of the CCP can be dated to the ‘May 4 Uprising’ in 1919 when thousands of students took to the streets to protest against the concessions given to Japan under the Paris Peace Conference. This created a general feeling of anti-imperialist and anti-Japanese sentiment. Mao has been reported as saying "It was by this time I had become in theory, and, to some extent, in action, a Marxist."

THE RISE OF THE CCP

No political party can possibly lead a great revolutionary movement to victory unless it possesses revolutionary theory and a knowledge of history and has a profound grasp of the practical movement.

"The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War" 10/1938, Selected Works, Vol. II, p 208.

In 1920 Mao became principal of a primary school in Changsha, where in his spare time he helped set up the Changsha branch of the Communist Party. In 1921 he was one of 12 delegates at the ‘First Congress’ of the Communist Party at a time when national membership of the party totalled 57, and he became the CCP’s General Secretary for Hunan.

By 1925 the membership was still only 900, and the CCP had joined Sun Yat-Sen’s Nationalist party, the Kuomintang (KMT). Plans for an ambitious 'Northern Expedition' were made to bring all of China under KMT control. In March that year Sun Yat-Sen died, and the official leadership of the KMT was left vacant. But a young general, Chiang Kai-Shek, took control and the Northern Expedition preparations went ahead. Mao was an active member of the KMT and was even criticized by CCP members who thought he was too zealous. Mao preferred political activity among the peasants with the KMT to the worker-orientated CCP.

Within a year of the launch of the expedition in early 1926 almost half of China was under KMT control and Chiang Kai-Shek looked like succeeding but for the rapidly rising CCP. Mao had found that peasants were very responsive to the idea of the overthrowing of landlords; however some powerful KMT officials were landlords or relatives of landlords. Nevertheless, Mao was sent to investigate the peasant situation in Hunan in January 1927; in his report he referred to supporting insurrection among peasants against ‘local bullies and bad gentry’ as he could not afford to affront to the landlords directly.

Mao’s political views left him fairly lonely as he had the support of neither the KMT’s right wing nor Stalin in the ‘Workers’ State’ - Karl Marx had described the peasantry as ‘the class that represents barbarism in the midst of civilization’ - but he knew, as did Stalin, that the CCP with its rate of growth could eventually take over the KMT leadership.

THE CIVIL WAR

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

"Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan" 3/1927, Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 28.

Chiang recognized this too. In April of 1927 he ordered a ruthless massacre of the communists and militant workers in the cities. Shanghai was the main communist city in China and it was ‘hit’ first; purges in other cities followed. Over the next few months CCP membership dropped from 60,000 to 10,000.

This was actually beneficial to Mao and his ‘peasant Marxism’ hiding in the hills in two ways. Firstly, he no longer to compete with the worker orientated urban brand of communism anymore. Secondly, because Chiang had cut down the left wing of the KMT, he was forced to lean on the right and this began to estrange the KMT from the peasants.

Impatient to respond to the purge, Mao managed to gain control of 4 regiments and with this tiny force he led an assault on Changsha called the ‘Autumn Harvest Uprising’ where he expected the workers of the city would rise and conquer like good Marxists. However Mao took such great losses he and his forces were forced to draw back after just one week with only a thousand dispirited soldiers left; from then on Mao stayed in his guerilla base in the high mountains of Jinggangshan and worked outward from there. He would work through villages one by one, finding the landlords, gathering together the peasants to discuss the ‘crimes’ of the landlord, and then having the landlord executed at the hands of the peasants - with the supervision of armed Red Army guards. The offer of political stability, moderate taxes and the distribution of the landlord’s land were naturally very attractive rewards, and by February 1930 Mao was able to declare the ‘South-West Soviet Provincial Government’.

Despite Mao’s successes in the south, Chiang Kai-Shek defeated nearly all the northern warlords, and set up a stable united government that was to last until the Sino-Japanese war erupted in 1937. 1928 to 1937 has come to be regarded the ‘Nationalist Decade’.

Still Chiang could not overcome the communists. The Red Army of 10,000, assembled over just 3 years, and the high rate of expansion of CCP territory forced Chiang to begin an ‘Encirclement Campaign’ in December 1930. The eager Red guerillas destroyed the KMT troops with ease. At the same time the CCP leadership, pleased with Mao’s progress, ordered him to attack the nearby cities, Changsha and Nanchang. Both attacks were disastrous and Mao was soon powerful enough to defy such orders from the CCP leadership.

Between 1930 and 1934, five ‘Encirclement Campaigns’ were launched; all failed but the last, which blockaded the base to near starvation. Mao broke out with 85,000 troops and 15,000 Party officials, who were forced to begin the ‘Long March’, a legendary epic of retreat from the harassment of KMT forces. In the first three weeks 25,000 men died; only 20,000 men, some recruited en route, arrived at Yanan base a full year later. The marchers saw 11 provinces, 6000 miles and 200 million people; they endured endless skirmishes with KMT troops, propaganda campaigns in villages and food shortages. In 1935 when the marchers captured Zunyi, the Chinese Politburo elected Mao as the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.

Mao still had his HQ in a cave, and if it had not been for the Japanese invasion two years later, Mao may never have been able to defeat Chiang who had enough troops to defeat Mao in any prolonged confrontation. Nevertheless, on a visit to rally his troops in the north east, Chiang Kai-Shek was arrested by a young KMT army general who had read of Mao’s attempts to unite the warring parties to defeat the Japanese and was frustrated with Chiang turning a blind eye to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and north eastern China. Mao surprised everyone by sending Zhou Enlai, one of his long time friends and right-hand man, to plead for Chiang’s life, to prove to everyone defeating the Japanese was to be given absolute priority. Chiang was forced to agree to a shaky alliance in 1937 to slow down Japan’s invasion; Japan only stepped up its campaign.

From 1937 until 1945 Chiang was forced to juggle his forces between combat with the Japanese to maintain national support and the CCP to stop them from gaining power. Meanwhile Mao was in his element, because although the Japanese had destroyed cities and transport routes, they lacked the manpower to move into the countryside and affect the peasants, so his power was almost untouched. But when America entered the war in 1941, Chiang was sure of the ultimate defeat of the Japanese and so began to channel more and more materials to the anti-communist effort, although chronic bribery and corruption within the KMT meant the general population sympathized with Mao.

When America ended the war in 1945, it gave most of its surplus war materials to Chiang, who needed them; they were faced with a Red Army of 1 million and a People’s Militia (guerillas) of 2 million; the KMT may well have been beaten in straight combat. Mao received most of the captured equipment of the Russians from their Japanese prisoners in Manchuria.

There were attempts at negotiation between Mao and Chiang but they produced nothing and full-scale civil war began in 1946. Initial victories by Chiang meant nothing as Mao retreated in good order and turned to harass. Corruption and inflation sabotaged the KMT effort. In 1949 Beijing fell and Chiang was forced to withdraw to Taiwan. The People’s Republic of China was declared on the 1st of October in 1949.

CHAIRMAN MAO

A well disciplined party armed with the theory of Marxist-Leninism, using the methods of self-criticism and linked with the masses of the people; an army under the leadership of such a Party; a united front of all revolutionary classes and all revolutionary groups under the leadership of such a Party - these are the three main weapons with which we have defeated the enemy.

"On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship" 30/6/1949, Selected Works, Vol. IV, p. 422.

Aged 56, Mao now was Chairman of the most powerful political party to have existed to date. While he was not always the only leader in power - he shared eminence with Zhou Enlai, Lin Biao and Liu Shaoqi - the central theme of the intense ideological work carried out amongst the people was the exaltation of Mao himself.

In the first years of the Communist regime, conservative estimates of the number killed for voicing their opinions of the Communist party stand at around 3 million; hostile estimates are much higher. Dissenters were taken prisoner, executed or told ‘You are sick, comrade’, and subjugated to formidable brainwashing procedures.

Agrarian reform was high on the agenda; production was only 75% of what it was in 1936 and famine loomed. About a third of the peasants had been integrated into the ‘landlordless’ system and to snap the rest into place, Mao ordered, ‘the greatest reform in history’ (in terms of people involved), the Agrarian Reform Law. It literally exterminated the landlord class, and the land was handed out to delighted peasants. The system was considerably successful but that could partly be put down to a run of good seasons.

Economic reforms placed heavy emphasis on manufacturing and mining. Transport and communications, especially railways (to allow the movement of food around the country), were rebuilt with speed, and education and health were expanded. By 1952 the government claimed the economy was at pre-civil war levels.

The first Five Year Plan was launched in 1953. Foreign visitors were pleasantly shocked at the rate by which the country had transformed. Mao, however, was not so pleased and in 1955 ordered the collectivization of farming - farming families were forced into ‘producer cooperatives’ where tools and materials were pooled, seen as the ideal socialist arrangement. A run of bad seasons as well as the ensuing confusion made peasants seriously disillusioned about the system.

The Hundred Flowers Campaign

The Communist Party does not fear criticism because we are Marxists, the truth is on our side, and the basic masses, the workers and peasants, are on our side.

Speech at the Chinese Communist Party’s National Conference on Propaganda Work 12/3/1957, 1st pocket edition, p. 14.

In response to Krushchev’s secret speech in 1956 detailing Stalin’s ‘crimes’, Mao delivered a speech intended for intellectuals promising new freedom of speech and the elimination of the Party’s single ‘line’. ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, Let All the Schools of Thought Contend’, said Mao.

However, Mao became concerned when he observed the November 1956 revolt in Hungary which would have overthrown the Communist government there but for the military intervention of Russia, which was caused by a similar relaxation of censorship. Still, the discussion went ahead on the 8th of May 1957, with the inclusion of criteria for ‘distinguishing between fragrant flowers and poisonous weeds’, the main one of which was that ‘words and actions can be judged right if they…tend to strengthen, not cast off or weaken, the leadership of the Communist Party.’

A huge torrent of criticism flowed out; attacks on the most basic philosophies including many along the line of ‘the old ruling class has been overthrown to make way for a new one’, and complaints that the party officials were acting like plain clothes police meant Mao terminated the idea in just 6 weeks, arresting all the dissenters and either brainwashing them, sending them to work in the fields or having them otherwise silenced.

Relations with the USSR deteriorated rapidly in 1957 and 58; Krushchev accused Mao of straying from true Marxist doctrine. In 1960, Russian technicians and economic aid were withdrawn and the Russians accused the Chinese of wanting to start a nuclear war. China responded by attempting to form a third world superpower by aligning other communist Asian nations, but this was largely a failure.

Instead of continuing the Five Year Plan that had succeeded from 1953-7, Mao decided on a far more ambitious ‘Great Leap Forward’. Mao wanted to do in a decade what Russia had done in four. By the end of 1958 he had succeeded in driving almost the entire population into ‘communes’, organized, self-governing and self sufficient groups of 5,000 to 10,000 households. In rural areas 26,000 communes replaced the 750,000 collectives already in place. Soon urban communes were abandoned as impractical, but efforts to make rural communes work were far more wholehearted. Families were forced into military-type lifestyles, women were compulsory participants in communal work, hours were long and meal breaks were short. It has been spoken of as ‘the three bitter years’, however, the failure was never fully acknowledged to save face with Russia. For the first time since 1935, Mao was demoted from the top job, replaced by Liu Shaoqi. In 1960 farmers returned to the previous system of collectives; communes remained as administrative centers. In 1962 a third Five Year Plan was forged.

The Cultural Revolution

Study Chairman Mao’s writings, follow his teachings and act according to his instructions.

Lin Biao

In 1964, Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, better known as The Little Red Book, was published. It was compiled by the young Army Marshal Lin Biao. It contains hundreds of excerpts from Mao’s writings and speeches, covering most communist philosophy. In 1966 it began a huge wave of slogans, quotes and mottos in what has been called the Cultural Revolution, almost certainly started by Mao himself in an attempt to regain the leadership. Thousands of youths left studies and jobs to join the ‘Red Guards’, basically a marauding band who knew the quotations off by heart, opposed revisionism, careerism, bureaucracy and every other thinkable transgression against Marxist-Leninism, all which led to anarchy in a previously composed, organized society. They ruthlessly attacked ‘bourgeois’ professors, ‘bureaucrats’ and ‘non-revolutionary’ industry. Different groups within the Reds often argued and sometimes fought over interpretations of the red book, and the situation was only resolved in 1969 when the army was brought in to quell the crisis. Many of the revolutionaries were sent back to their jobs; others were sent to work in the fields to ‘learn from the peasants.’

A similar revolution occurred in the Party leadership; Mao’s successor, Liu Shaoqi, suddenly admitted to many ‘crimes’ against Marxist-Leninist-Maoism, and was subsequently ridiculed and made a symbol of hate for the Red Guards. Mao was reinstated as leader and his greatest ally, the Army, made up half of the party leadership elected at the Ninth Congress. The Army commander was Lin Biao, who was soon designated as Mao’s intended successor.

Yet Lin was killed in a plane crash in 1971, allegedly while trying to escape from an assassination attempt on Mao. Suddenly all the little red books, each with a glowing preface by Lin were tarnished. Mao himself denounced the book as not nearly as influential as it was supposed to be.

The Army’s power in the leadership was drastically reduced again, and soon China began to establish positive relations with the USA. President Nixon visited Beijing in 1972 and began diplomatic ‘normalization’ by changing its policy on Taiwan, still governed by Chiang Kai-Shek. President Ford visited in 1975 to reaffirm this so called Shanghai Communique.

Mao passed away on the 9th of September 1976.

CHINA AFTER MAO

A savage battle was fought over the leadership after Mao’s demise; eventually Deng Xiaoping was elected party chairman and proceeded to put far more conservative economic policies in place, as well as liberation of freedom of speech and the press, although open attacks on the Party were still not tolerated. He died in 1997, and today China’s head of state is Hu Jintao.

MAO’S HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE

Comrade Mao Zedong is the greatest Marxist-Leninist of our era. He has inherited, defended and developed Marxist-Leninism with genius, creatively and comprehensively, and has brought it to a higher and completely new stage.

Lin Biao, 16/12/1966

Mao is one of three peasants in China’s history who has risen to rule its billion or so people in a single lifetime. He destroyed Nationalist power, unified China and oversaw the greatest social reform in man’s history. He is recognized as a leader in Marxist doctrine, and his theories have been acclaimed in many third-world unindustrialized nations.

He did, indeed, develop Marxist-Leninism comprehensively, changing it from the traditional worker orientated system to a joint worker-peasant society. This was far more suited to the region, as the ‘broad masses’ of Asian nations were peasants in unindustrialized countries where food was considered far more important than political freedom. Countries affected by the Communist movement in Asia include Indonesia, East Timor, Malaysia, Laos, Mongolia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Nepal, Thailand, North & South Korea and Vietnam.

He will be remembered as a military tactician. His adaptation of guerilla techniques from the writings of ancient military experts stood him in good stead in the civil war, which he probably would have lost in any other circumstances. Mao will also be remembered as a socialist, a poet and ruthless ruler. He has earned his place among the most powerful rulers of the world.

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