Mao Tse-Tung

Mao Zedong

 or Mao Tse-tung

(born Dec. 26, 1893, Shaoshan, Hunan province, China—died Sept. 9, 1976, Beijing) Chinese Marxist theorist, soldier, and statesman who led China's communist revolution and served as chairman of the People's Republic of China (1949–59) and chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP; 1931–76). The son of a peasant, Mao joined the revolutionary army that overthrew the Qing dynasty but, after six months as a soldier, left to acquire more education. At Beijing University he met Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, founders of the CCP, and in 1921 he committed himself to Marxism. At that time, Marxist thought held that revolution lay in the hands of urban workers, but in 1925 Mao concluded that in China it was the peasantry, not the urban proletariat, that had to be mobilized. He became chairman of a Chinese Soviet Republic formed in rural Jiangxi province; its Red Army withstood repeated attacks from Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist army but at last undertook the Long March to a more secure position in northwestern China. There Mao became the undisputed head of the CCP. Guerrilla warfare tactics, appeals to the local population's nationalist sentiments, and Mao's agrarian policies gained the party military advantages against their Nationalist and Japanese enemies and broad support among the peasantry. Mao's agrarian Marxism differed from the Soviet model, but, when the communists succeeded in taking power in China in 1949, the Soviet Union agreed to provide the new state with technical assistance. However, Mao's Great Leap Forward and his criticism of “new bourgeois elements” in the Soviet Union and China alienated the Soviet Union irrevocably; Soviet aid was withdrawn in 1960. Mao followed the failed Great Leap Forward with the Cultural Revolution, also considered to have been a disastrous mistake. After Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping began introducing social and economic reforms. See also Jiang Qing; Liu Shaoqi; Maoism.

---

Mao Tse-tung, Mao Ze Dong

1893--1976, Chinese Marxist theoretician and statesman. The son of a peasant farmer, he helped to found the Chinese Communist Party (1921) and established a soviet republic in SE China (1931--34). He led the retreat of Communist forces to NW China known as the Long March (1935--36), emerging as leader of the party. In opposing the Japanese in World War II, he united with the Kuomintang regime, which he then defeated in the ensuing civil war. He founded the People's Republic of China (1949) of which he was chairman until 1959. As party chairman until his death, he instigated the Cultural Revolution in 1966

---

Mao Tse-Tung 

Born Dec. 26, 1893, in the village of Shaoshan, Hsiang-t’an District, Hunan Province; died Sept. 9, 1976, in Peking. Chinese political and governmental figure. The son of a prosperous peasant.

Mao Tse-tung graduated from a teachers* school in the city of Changsha in 1918 and worked in the library of the University of Peking in 1918-19. At this time, Mao Tse-tung approved of many of the ideas of anarchism. In 1920 he joined Communist circles. In 1921 he took part in the First Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC). In 1923-25 and from 1928 he was a member of the Central Committee of the party. In 1927, along with Chu Teh and other CPC activists, he established a revolutionary base in the Chingkang mountains, on the border between Hunan and Kiangsi provinces. In 1928 he was appointed political commissar of the IV Corps of the Chinese Red Army. In 1931 at the First All-China Congress of Representatives of Soviet Districts, held in Jui-chin, Kiangsi Province, he was elected chairman of the Central Executive Committee and chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Chinese Soviet Republic. From 1933 he was a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the party. Even in that period, evidence of Mao Tse-tung’s nationalist inclinations could be observed.

In 1934-36, Mao was one of the leaders of the march of the Chinese Red Army to a new base of operations in the northwestern part of the country. In January 1935 he became a member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the party. At this time Mao and his supporters gradually took over the leadership of the party. In his struggle for the leading position in the party, Mao spoke out against CPC figures who defended proletarianinternationalist views.

In 1943, Mao Tse-tung became chairman of the Central Committee of the CPC. With the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Mao was elected chairman of the Central People’s Government Council of the Republic and was named chairman of the People’s Revolutionary Military Council. In 1954 he was elected chairman of the People’s Republic of China and appointed chairman of the State Defense Committee of the republic, remaining in these posts until April 1959.

In the second half of the 1950’s nationalist elements led by Mao intensified their activities within the leading bodies of the CPC. This was not the first time they had acted in opposition to the internationalist forces in the CPC. From 1941 to 1945 in particular, the so-called movement for regularizing the style of work in the party (the Cheng Feng movement) had been introduced in the CPC on Mao’s initiative. During this campaign a blow had been struck at those Communists who upheld proletarian internationalism, supported the Comintern line, and advocated friendship with the USSR. The movement sought to strengthen Mao’s leadership in the party and the predominance of the influence of his ideological and political prescriptions, which were given the name “the ideas of Mao Tse-tung.” It was written into the rules of the CPC, adopted at the Seventh Congress in 1945, that the party “in all its work is guided by the ideas of Mao Tse-tung.” The Eighth Congress of the CPC in 1956 adopted hew party rules, which dropped the clause about the ideas of Mao Tse-tung and proclaimed Marxism-Leninism to be the ideological foundation of the CPC. In 1957, Mao and his supporters fought to have the decisions of the Eighth Congress reviewed and altered. In 1958, Mao put forward his adventurist policy of the “three Red banners” (the new “general line,” the “great leap forward,” and the “people’s communes”), which undermined the planned bases of socialist construction in China and brought the economy into a state of crisis.

In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, Mao proclaimed a special foreign-policy line for the CPC, characterized by a striving for great-power hegemony, by anti-Sovietism, and by a splitting course within the socialist commonwealth and world communist movement. Hiding behind a mask of Marxism, he intensified his work of revising Marxist-Leninist doctrine from the standpoint of petit bourgeois, nationalist, and “left” sectarian conceptions. Maoism has evoked a sharply critical response from the overwhelming majority of Communist and workers’ parties.

In 1966, on Mao’s initiative, the “cultural revolution” was unleashed, representing, in fact, a new stage in the struggle to consolidate the system of one-man rule and to counter the proponents of the proletarian internationalist line. In the rules adopted by the Ninth Congress of the CPC in 1969, the ideas of Mao Tse-tung were once again announced as the theoretical foundation of the party’s work, and Mao himself was proclaimed party leader for life. The Tenth Congress of the CPC (1973) set forth a new set of party rules that confirmed that the basic guiding ideology of the CPC remained the ideas of Mao Tse-tung. The first Central Committee plenum after the Tenth Congress re-elected Mao Tse-tung chairman of the Central Committee of the CPC.

V. I. ELIZAROV