Mao Zedong, leader of Communist faction with headquarters in Yan'an, China, flew to Chungking on August 28, with U.S. Ambassador Major General Patrick J. Hurley to meet Chiang Kai-Shek. General Hurley went to Yan'an to fetch Mao and guarantee his safety.
Gallery of Mao Zedong
1945
Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong
Gallery of Mao Zedong
1945
Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong
Gallery of Mao Zedong
1946
Mao with his fourth wife, Jiang Qing, called "Madame Mao."
Gallery of Mao Zedong
1946
Mao Zedong and Mao Anying
Gallery of Mao Zedong
1948
Chairman Mao Zedong (1893-1976) of the Communist Party of China writing with a brush at his desk in a cave headquarters in northwest China during the Chinese Civil War.
Gallery of Mao Zedong
1949
Mao Zedong declares the founding of the modern People's Republic of China.
Gallery of Mao Zedong
1949
Moscow, Russia
Mao at Joseph Stalin's 70th birthday celebration
Gallery of Mao Zedong
1949
Mao Zedong
Gallery of Mao Zedong
1949
Peking, China
The Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong declaring the birth of the People's Republic of China over the microphones.
Gallery of Mao Zedong
1958
Mao Zedong, leader of Chinese Communist Party, president of Popular China in 1949-1959 and 1968-1976.
Gallery of Mao Zedong
1966
Mao Zedong (1893-1976), president of Chinese Communist Party, then president of China in 1949-1959 and 1968-1976.
Gallery of Mao Zedong
1950
An oil painting of Chinese leader Mao Zedong (1893-1976) by a member of the Peking Artists' Association.
Gallery of Mao Zedong
1955
Peking, China
Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai meeting with Dalai Lama (right) and Panchen Lama (left) to celebrate Tibetan New Year.
Gallery of Mao Zedong
1955
Photo of Mao Zedong sitting, published in "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung."
Gallery of Mao Zedong
1959
Peking, China
Mao Zedong with Nikita Khrushchev, Ho Chi Minh, and Soong Ching-ling during a state dinner.
Gallery of Mao Zedong
1959
Guyuan Rd, Shaoshan Shi, Xiangtan Shi, Hunan Sheng, China
Smiling Chairman Mao Zedong standing in the middle of teachers and students of the Shaoshan School.
Mao Zedong (1893-1976), Chinese Communist leader who was Chairman of the Communist Party of China and the principal founder of the People's Republic of China, as a young man.
The future leader of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong leading the Communists on the Long March with political commissioner Zhou Enlai and commander in chief of the People's Liberation Army Zhu De at his side.
Mao Zedong, leader of Communist faction with headquarters in Yan'an, China, flew to Chungking on August 28, with U.S. Ambassador Major General Patrick J. Hurley to meet Chiang Kai-Shek. General Hurley went to Yan'an to fetch Mao and guarantee his safety.
Chairman Mao Zedong (1893-1976) of the Communist Party of China writing with a brush at his desk in a cave headquarters in northwest China during the Chinese Civil War.
Chairman Mao Zedong interviews the Red Guards at Tiananmen Rostrum in 1966 in Beijing, China. The Red Guards emerged in Beijing and it is a revolutionary mass organization that is built by university and high school students during the great proletarian cultural revolution.
Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, wears a "Red Guard" armband as he waves to a rally celebrating the Cultural Revolution in Beijing on August 8. The "Red Guard" armband signifies Mao's support for the teen-aged groups that have been enforcing Party cultural decisions and rooting out "bourgeois" behavior among the Chinese people.
China's Stalin, Gen Mao Zedong, and his comrade, Pres Chang Kuo-Tao, of the new "frontier government", pose exclusively for an Acme cameraman in the courtyard of the Supreme Communist headquarters.
Mao Zedong swims the Yangtze River in Wuhan to dispel any rumors about his ill health (or death). This event is considered one of the signal events of the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.
Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong (1893-1976) addresses a meeting calling for even greater efforts against the Japanese at the Kangdah (Anti-Japanese) Cave University.
(These early philosophical writings underpinned the Chines...)
These early philosophical writings underpinned the Chinese revolutions, and their clarion calls to insurrection remain some of the most stirring of all time. Drawing on a dizzying array of references from contemporary culture and politics, Zizek's firecracker commentary reaches unsettling conclusions about the place of Mao's thought in the revolutionary canon.
(The book is written in the context of China's guerrilla w...)
The book is written in the context of China's guerrilla war against Japanese occupiers; this conflict was mentioned often by Mao. In this book Mao discusses the differences between guerrilla and "orthodox" military forces, as well as how such forces can work together for a common goal. Other topics covered include propaganda and political concerns, the formation of guerrilla units, the qualities of a good guerrilla officer, discipline in a guerrilla army, and guerrilla bases.
Mao Zedong was a Chinese statesman whose status as a revolutionary in world history is probably next only to that of Lenin. He was the leader of the Chinese Communist Party from 1943 till 1976 and held the post of the chairman of the People's Republic of China from 1949 to 1959.
Background
Mao Zedong was born in Shaoshan, Hunan, Qing Empire (now China) on December 26, 1893. Mao Zedong did not venture outside his home province until he was 25. His father, Mao Yichang, was a formerly impoverished peasant who had become one of the wealthiest farmers in Shaoshan. Mao's mother, Wen Qimei, was a devout Buddhist who tried to temper her husband's strict attitude.
Education
At age 8, Mao was sent to Shaoshan Primary School. So his formal education was limited to 6 years at a junior normal school where he acquired a meager knowledge of science, learned almost no foreign language, but developed a lucid written style and a considerable understanding of social problems, Chinese history, and current affairs.
By 1911 he moved to Changsha and after a half year in the army and some independent study, enrolled at the age of nineteen in what would soon become the Hunan First Normal School.
In 1918 Zedong visited Peking. Although his life there was miserable, he was working under the chief librarian of Peking University, who was one of the pioneer Marxists of China.
On his return to Hunan the following year, Mao was already committed to communism. While making a living as a primary school teacher, he edited radical magazines, organized trade unions, and set up politically oriented schools of his own in the orthodox manner of Communist agitation among city workers and students. With the inauguration of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) in 1921, of which Mao was one of the 50 founding members, these activities were pursued with added energy and to a greater depth. Meanwhile, the major political party, the Kuomintang (KMT), was reorganized, and a coalition was formed between the KMT and CCP on anti-warlord and anti-imperialist principles. Mao's principal task was to coordinate the policies of both parties, an ill-suited role on account of his lack of academic and social standing. In 1925, when the coalition ran into heavy weather, Mao was sent back to Hunan to "convalesce."
An unfortunate result of this rebuff was that he was completely left out of the nationwide strikes against Japan and Britain in the summer of 1925 year, during which many of his comrades made their mark as leaders of the trade union movement or party politics. A by-product of his "convalescence" was that he discovered the revolutionary potential of the peasants, who had in such great numbers been displaced and pauperized by the misrule of the warlords. From then on Mao switched his attention to this vast underprivileged class of people. He studied them, tried to understand their grievances, and agitated among them. Mao's newly acquired knowledge and experience enabled him to play a leading role in the peasant movement led by both the KMT and CCP.
By 1927 he was in a position to advocate a class substitution in the Chinese Revolution. Instead of the traditional proletarian hegemony, Mao proposed that the poor peasants fill the role of revolutionary vanguard. Shortly after the publication of his Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan, the KMT-CCP coalition broke up and the Communists were persecuted everywhere in the country.
Some survivors of the party went underground in the cities, to continue their struggle as a working-class party; the rest took up arms to defy the government and eventually to set up rural soviets in central and northern China. One of these soviets was Mao's Ching-kang Mountain base area between Kiangsi and Hunan, where he had to rely chiefly on the support of the poor peasants.
Under conditions of siege, the autonomy of these soviets threatened to disrupt the unity of the revolutionary movement, breaking it up into small pockets of resistance like premodern peasant wars. Doctrinally, this development was anything but orthodox Marxism. The center of the CCP, located underground in Shanghai, therefore assigned to itself the task of strengthening its leadership and party discipline. A successful revolution, in its view, had to take the course of a series of urban uprisings under proletarian leadership.
In its effort to achieve this, the center had to curb the growing powers of the soviet leaders like Mao, and it had the authority of the Comintern behind it. Its effort gradually produced results: Mao first lost his control over the army he had organized and trained, then his position in the soviet party, and finally even much of his power in the soviet government.
At the historic Tsunyi Conference of the party's Politburo in January 1935, Mao turned the tables against the pro-Russian leaders. On that occasion Mao was elected, thanks mainly to his support from the military, to the chairmanship of the Politburo. During the low ebb of the revolutionary tide and the hardships of the Long March, those who might have challenged Mao fell by the wayside, largely through their own fault. By the time the Communists arrived at Yenan, the party had attained a measure of unity, to be further consolidated after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. This was the first truly nationalist war China had ever fought, in which the nation as a whole united to face the common foe. However, from 1939 onward, as the war entered a long period of stalemate, clashes began to occur between KMT and Communist troops. Events in the early 1940s helped the CCP, in its search for independence, to become nationalistic. Russia, preoccupied with its war against Hitler, was unable to influence the CCP effectively, and soon the Comintern was dissolved. Mao seized this opportunity to sinicize the Chinese Communist movement in the famous rectification campaign of 1942-1944.
The personality cult of Mao grew until his thought was written into the party's constitution of 1945 as a guiding principle of the party, side by side with Marxism-Leninism. But Mao's thought had very little to say on the modernization and industrialization of China, on its socialist construction. Therefore, after 1949 the CCP was left to follow the example of Russia, with Russian aid in the years of the cold war. The importance and relevance of Mao therefore declined steadily while China introduced its first Five-Year Plan and socialist constitution. Once more the pro-Russian wing of the CCP was on the ascendancy, though still unable to challenge Mao's ideological authority. This authority enabled Mao to fight back by launching the Socialist Upsurge in the Countryside of 1955 and the Great Leap Forward in 1958. The failure of the Great Leap Forward impaired Mao's power and prestige even further.
Later Mao, with the help of the army and young students organized into the Red Guards, waged a fierce struggle against what he called the revisionists in power in his own party. This was the famous cultural revolution of 1966-1969. In this struggle it was revealed how elitist, bureaucratic, and brittle the CCP had become since 1949. With Mao's victory in the cultural revolution, China became the most politicized nation of the world.
By the time Mao was in his late 70s, his lifework was essentially done, although he retained power until the end. Physically debilitated, suffering from a lifetime of effort and Parkinson's Disease, Mao's ability to rule in new and innovative ways to meet the demands of China's modernization grew increasingly enfeebled. To what degree his radical actions in his later years were due to his illness and age is a matter of debate among historians. His final years were marked by bitter maneuvering among his clique to succeed him upon his death. One of his final major acts was to reopen contact with the United States. In September of 1976, Mao died.
In childhood Mao became a Buddhist as his mother, but abandoned this faith in his mid-teenage years.
Politics
Zedong was dedicated to a relentless struggle against inequality and injustice. He lived through reform and revolution in the early years of China's awakening nationalism, accepting at first the philosophies behind both movements. In 1921 he became a member of the Chinese Communist Party. Mao rose to power of the Communist Party and after this he enacted sweeping land reform, by using violence and terror to overthrow the feudal landlords before seizing their large estates and dividing the land into people's communes.
His theories, military strategies and political policies are collectively known as Maoism or Marxism–Leninism–Maoism.
Personality
Having grown up in Hunan, Mao spoke Mandarin with a marked Hunanese accent. He chose to learn English in 1950s, which was very unusual as the main foreign language first taught in Chinese schools at that time was Russian.
Physical Characteristics:
Mao Zedong died of a heart attack.
Quotes from others about the person
Former Party official Su Shachi, has opined that "he was a great historical criminal, but he was also a great force for good."
Alexander Pantsov and Steven I. Levine claimed that Mao was a "man of complex moods," who "tried his best to bring about prosperity and gain international respect" for China, being "neither a saint nor a demon." They noted that in early life, he strived to be "a strong, wilful, and purposeful hero, not bound by any moral chains," and that he "passionately desired fame and power."
Journalist Liu Binyan has described Mao as "both monster and a genius."
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels
Politicians
Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin
Connections
Mao Zedong had four wives - Luo Yixiu, Yang Kaihui, He Zizhen and Jiang Qing. There were 10 children of those marriages. Mao's first and second daughters were left to local villagers because it was too dangerous to raise them while fighting the Kuomintang and later the Japanese. His youngest daughter (born in early 1938 in Moscow after Mao separated) and one other child (born 1933) died in infancy. Through his ten children, Mao became a grandfather to twelve grandchildren, many of whom he never knew.
Father:
Mao Yichang
Mother:
Wen Qimei
Spouse:
Jiang Qing
late spouse:
Luo Yixiu
late spouse:
Yang Kaihui
ex-spouse:
He Zizhen
younger brother:
Mao Zemin
younger brother:
Mao Zetan
eldest son:
Mao Anying
Son:
Mao Anqing
Son:
Mao Anlong
Daughter:
Li Min
Daughter:
Li Na
adopted sister:
Mao Zejian
References
Mao Zedong: A Life
Jonathan Spence captures Mao in all his paradoxical grandeur and sheds light on the radical transformation he unleashed that still reverberates in China today.
1999
Mao Zedong: A Political and Intellectual Portrait
Revolutionary and ruler, Marxist and nationalist, liberator and despot, Mao Zedong takes a place among the iconic leaders of the twentieth century. In this book, Maurice Meisner offers a balanced portrait of the man who defined modern China.
2006
The Private Life of Chairman Mao
From 1954 until Mao Zedong's death 22 years later, Dr. Li Zhisui was the Chinese ruler's personal physician. For most of these years, Mao was in excellent health; thus he and the doctor had time to discuss political and personal matters. Dr. Li recorded many of these conversations in his diaries, as well as in his memory. In this book, Dr. Li vividly reconstructs his extraordinary time with Chairman Mao.
1994
Mao: The Unknown Story
The most authoritative life of the Chinese leader ever written, Mao: The Unknown Story is based on a decade of research and on interviews with many of Mao's close circle in China who have never talked before - and with virtually everyone outside China who had significant dealings with him.