Mao Zedong

The thesis of Lenin’s was concretely proved with

the victory of the Chinese Revolution led by Mao
Zedong. Lenin’s correct revolutionary line first put
forward in the work, Two Tactics of Social
Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, about the
revolutionary potential of the peasantry, was also
proved concretely by Mao Zedong and the Chinese
Revolution.

The older social democrats, unlike Marx, had only

focused on the proletarian revolution that was to be
made in the European industrialized countries. Many,
like Trotsky, could not even understand the
revolutionary relationship of the proletariat in these
societies with the peasantry. The failure of the 1905
Russian Revolution must be attributed in great part to
this lack of understanding of the revolutionary
potential of the peasantry. Lenin’s theses on the
revolutionary potential of the peasantry and the
national movements in alliance with the proletariat
was of such critical importance because the great
majority of people in the third world were not only
involved with national movements but were non-
proletarians, mainly peasants.

Mao Zedong adapted Marxism-Leninism to the

concrete conditions of the Chinese Revolution. As
Lenin said, “the concrete analysis of concrete
conditions.” Mao took Marxism-Leninism “not as a
dogma, but a guide to action.” He thereby disproved
the social democrats who saw little revolutionary
potential in the peasant-dominated country of China,
but then even Marx had thought that the first fully
executed socialist revolution would be in Germany
and not “backward” Russia. But armed with the
teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin’s great
works on the national question, Mao developed
Marxism, by making a concrete analysis of Chinese
conditions. Understanding that China was a mainly
peasant country he could see that the main force of the
Chinese revolution must be the peasantry, contrary to
what reactionaries like Trotsky or other dogmatists
said. And although this massive peasant force was led
by its most advanced class, the small but
revolutionary class of Chinese workers, Mao Zedong
made new contributions to Marxism-Leninism with
this living application of the revolutionary science.

Mao also opposed the dogmatists who believed,

because of the Russian Revolution, that the revolution
must begin in the cities and then proceed out to the
countryside. Mao first captured the countryside by
means of a largely peasant, but worker-led army, and
then proceeded to capture the cities.

Because China was a semi-colonial country, where

feudal relations still predominated, the Chinese
struggle was seen by many dogmatists as merely a
bourgeois struggle and not genuine proletarian
revolution. It is obvious that such dogmatists had
actually not even fully digested the revolutionary
teachings of Comrade Lenin! But Mao had fully
absorbed Lenin and had even made fully scientific
innovations on Marxist theory. This is why frequently
we refer to Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought!

One such innovation, particularly applicable to the

oppressed nations and peoples of the third world, was
the development not only of the party of the working
class, which had been brought to perfection by Lenin
in the U.S.S.R., but the utilization by this party of two
weapons as its principal means of struggle in making
the Chinese Revolution: viz. the united front and
armed struggle. Mao understood that in a colonial
country oppressed by imperialism the greater part of
the nation, the majority of its classes, are oppressed to
some degree by imperialism, foreign domination. Mao
proposed that not only must a proletarian party be
developed but that the entire nation, the majority of its
classes, would struggle to some extent against foreign
domination. But led by the party of the proletariat
such a struggle against imperialism would not stop at
the stage of bourgeois democracy but would proceed
without stopping to socialism!

Mao made it clear that the national liberation

struggle of the Chinese people against foreign
domination must be led by the Chinese proletariat,
because they alone would carry the struggle all the
way to the end, not only driving out imperialism, but
then setting up a socialist society. A liberation
movement led by the petty bourgeoisie or bourgeoisie
of the oppressed nation would stop that movement
after foreign domination had been ended, but then a
capitalist society ruled by a domestic bourgeoisie
would be set up and the working people, the majority
of the country, would continue to be exploited, but
now in a more “advanced’’ way, as in the industrial
“democracies” of the West!

The United Front was absolutely necessary so that

the entire oppressed nation, all of its classes willing to
oppose imperialism, would help drive out foreign
domination. But the party of the proletariat and the
working masses finally must lead such a revolution,
so that it did not stop at bourgeois dictatorship.

Armed struggle was the main form of revolution in

China. And this is true with many of the liberation
struggles in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin
America. But in too many cases the national liberation
movements in the third world have not been
consistently led by the proletariat and the revolution
has not been carried out to the end, and in many cases,
we have seen foreign domination driven out, but now
we are confronted with a neocolonialism, in which a
domestic bourgeoisie still linked with the old colonial
powers continues to oppress the people!

The need for the fundamental Marxist weapons of

class analysis and proletarian organization are critical
in the national liberation struggles raging all over the
third world as well as in the struggle of the African
American people here in the U.S. Too often the united
front structure that is one basic weapon of national
liberation is not led by the proletariat. Often this is
because the proletariat is very tiny in many third
world countries. This is particularly true in Africa and
the Caribbean and for that reason many of the
liberation movements have been petty bourgeois or at
least with petty bourgeois or bourgeois leadership. It
is therefore very significant that in the United States
and South Africa there are found two of the largest
classes of black workers in the world. This bodes
extremely well for the eventual domination of those
liberation movements in the USA and South Africa by
the black proletariat. In the United States, the Black
Liberation Movement is part of the whole struggle of
the people to make revolution, the great majority of
the black masses are workers and indeed most of the
lower strata of the U.S. multinational working class is
comprised of oppressed nationalities, Afro
Americans, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans. In
South Africa, because it is a white settler colony, a
national liberation struggle led by the black proletariat
could go uninterrupted into socialist revolution, so
that the means of production are finally in the hands
of the working class as well as its black majority. So
that it is no longer enough to say that political power
must be in black hands in Africa and the Caribbean,
such power must be in the hands of the working class
based on a revolutionary alliance of the workers and
peasants. It is far too late and there have been far too
many betrayals for the masses of black and third
world people to continue to fall for the shallow cries
of a domestic black or third world bourgeoisie and
petty bourgeoisie for national liberation which turns
out to mean Mobutu in “Zaire” or Arap Moi in Kenya
or “Blindaga” in Jamaica or Baby Doc in Haiti or the
various neocolonial reactionaries in Asia, Latin
America, the Middle East or the black world.

The struggles in the third world are still principally

against imperialism, because even where neocolonial
governments rule, it is essentially, as Amilcar Cabral
pointed out, “imperialism ruling through native
agents.” It is imperialism that props these neocolonial
governments up, and the fundamental strength of
imperialism is still in its ability to superexploit the
peoples of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the
Middle East, condemning its own workers in the
industrial metropoles to lower and lower standards of
living. In the industrialized West however, too often
the would-be revolutionary political parties have been
rendered sterile by opportunism. That is, by the so-
called revolutionaries settling for short-term gains at
the expense of long-range revolutionary goals. The
economic basis of this opportunism is the superprofits
imperialism has gouged out of the third world through
superexploitation which are used to bribe sections of
the working class and middle class.
 Lenin warned that the struggle against imperialism
could not go forward militantly unless it was
accompanied by an uncompromising struggle against
opportunism. (Chauvinism, Lenin pointed out, was
opportunism in its finished form – where the
bourgeoisie can use “its” workers against the workers
of another nation!) This is why today in the U.S. there
is no genuine Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party
and this is extremely dangerous at this time with the
strong right-wing trend led by Ronald Reagan,
especially as the two superpowers, the U.S. and
U.S.S.R., pursue the catastrophe of nuclear war.

The importance of spreading revolutionary theory

and organizing communist forces throughout the third
world and in the Black Liberation Movement in the
U.S. should be obvious. No amount of metaphysics or
cultural nationalism will free the oppressed and
superexploited masses of the third world and the
Afro-American nation. Only revolution, led by the
most revolutionary class in society, the working class,
can bring about the end of national oppression,
neocolonialism, racism, Zionism and all forms of
reaction, including the oppression of women. In the
U.S.A., the principal task of revolutionaries must be
party building, the building of a single, genuine
Marxist-Leninist revolutionary communist party to
smash white racist monopoly capitalism and build
socialism under the revolutionary dictatorship of the
proletariat. The Black Liberation Movement is one
key aspect in making such a revolution. Just as
democratic and ultimately proletarian revolution in
the third world will help spell the end of imperialism
forever.

Maoism, Chinese (Pinyin) Mao Zedong Sixiang or (Wade-Giles romanization) Mao

Tse-tung Ssu-hsiang (“Mao Zedong Thought”), doctrine composed of
the ideology and methodology for revolution developed by Mao Zedong and his
associates in the Chinese Communist Party from the 1920s until Mao’s death in 1976.
Maoism has clearly represented a revolutionary method based on a distinct
revolutionary outlook not necessarily dependent on a Chinese or Marxist-
Leninist context.

The first political attitudes of Mao Zedong took shape against a background of
profound crisis in China in the early 20th century. The country was weak and divided,
and the major national problems were the reunification of China and the expulsion of
foreign occupiers. The young Mao was a nationalist, and his sentiments had been
strongly anti-Western and anti-imperialist even before he became attracted
to Marxism-Leninism about 1919–20. Mao’s nationalism combined with a personal
trait of combativeness to make him admire the martial spirit, which became a
cornerstone of Maoism. Indeed, the army held an important position both in the
process of creating the Chinese revolutionary state and in the process of nation
building; Mao relied on army support in conflicts with his party in the 1950s and ’60s.

Mao’s political ideas crystallized slowly. He had a mentality that was opportunistic
and wary of ideological niceties. The Marxist-Leninist tradition regarded peasants as
incapable of revolutionary initiative and only marginally useful in backing urban
proletarian efforts. Yet Mao gradually decided to base his revolution on the dormant
power of China’s hundreds of millions of peasants, for he saw potential energy in
them by the very fact that they were “poor and blank”; strength and violence were, he
thought, inherent in their condition. Proceeding from this, he proposed to instill in
them a proletarian consciousness and make their force alone suffice for revolution.
There was no significant Chinese proletariat, but by the 1940s Mao had revolutionized
and “proletarianized” the peasantry.

For a time after the creation of the Chinese communist state in 1949, Mao Zedong
attempted to conform to the Stalinist model of “building socialism.” In the mid-1950s,
however, he and his advisers reacted against the results of this policy, which included
the growth of a rigid and bureaucratic Communist Party and the emergence of
managerial and technocratic elites—accepted in other countries, especially the Soviet
Union, as concomitants of industrial growth. In 1955 the Maoists speeded up the
process of agricultural collectivization. After this came the Great Leap Forward, a
refinement of the traditional five-year plans, and other efforts at mobilizing the masses
into producing small-scale industries (“backyard steel furnaces”) throughout China.
The experiment’s waste, confusion, and inefficient management combined with
natural calamities to produce a prolonged famine (1959–61) that killed 15 to 30
million people. In 1966 the party’s leaders, at Mao’s instigation, launched the Cultural
Revolution, designed again to quash emerging “bourgeois” elements—elites and
bureaucrats—and to harness anti-intellectualism to galvanize popular will. The party
leaders stressed egalitarianism and the value of the peasants’ lack of sophistication;
indeed, thousands of city workers were forced to receive “profound class education”
through agricultural labour with the peasants.

Thus, Maoism’s alternative to growth led by elites and bureaucracies was to be growth
brought about by revolutionary enthusiasm and mass struggle. Maoism undertook to
pit the collective will of human beings against the customary and rational dictates of
economics and industrial management. The extreme violence that accompanied Mao’s
many political campaigns and Maoism’s inability to achieve sustained economic
growth in China led, after the chairman’s death, to a new emphasis on education and
management professionalism there, and by the 1980s Maoism appeared to be
celebrated mainly as a relic of the late leader.
Outside China, however, a number of groups have identified themselves as Maoists.
Notable among these are rebels in Nepal, who won control of the government there in
2006 after a 10-year insurgency, and the Naxalite groups in India, who engaged
in guerrilla warfare for decades in large areas of that country.
Mao Zedong, Wade-Giles romanization Mao Tse-tung, (born December 26, 1893,
Shaoshan, Hunan province, China—died September 9, 1976, Beijing), principal
Chinese Marxist theorist, soldier, and statesman who led his country’s communist
revolution. Mao was the leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1935
until his death, and he was chairman (chief of state) of the People’s Republic of
China from 1949 to 1959 and chairman of the party also until his death. When China
emerged from a half century of revolution as the world’s most populous country and
launched itself on a path of economic development and social change, Mao Zedong
occupied a critical place in the story of the country’s resurgence. To be sure, he did
not play a dominant role throughout the whole struggle. In the early years of the CCP,
he was a secondary figure, though by no means a negligible one, and even after the
1940s (except perhaps during the Cultural Revolution) the crucial decisions were not
his alone. Nevertheless, looking at the whole period from the foundation of the CCP in
1921 to Mao’s death in 1976, one can fairly regard Mao Zedong as the principal
architect of the new China.
Early years

Mao was born in the village of Shaoshan in Hunan province, the son of a former
peasant who had become affluent as a farmer and grain dealer. He grew up in
an environment in which education was valued only as training for keeping records
and accounts. From the age of eight he attended his native village’s primary school,
where he acquired a basic knowledge of the Wujing (Confucian Classics). At 13 he
was forced to begin working full-time on his family’s farm. Rebelling against paternal
authority (which included an arranged marriage that was forced on him and that he
never acknowledged or consummated), Mao left his family to study at a higher
primary school in a neighbouring county and then at a secondary school in the
provincial capital, Changsha. There he came in contact with new ideas from the West,
as formulated by such political and cultural reformers as Liang Qichao and the
Nationalist revolutionary Sun Yat-sen. Scarcely had he begun studying revolutionary
ideas when a real revolution took place before his very eyes. On October 10, 1911,
fighting against the Qing dynasty broke out in Wuchang, and within two weeks the
revolt had spread to Changsha.

Enlisting in a unit of the revolutionary army in Hunan, Mao spent six months as a
soldier. While he probably had not yet clearly grasped the idea that, as he later put it,
“political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” his first brief military experience at
least confirmed his boyhood admiration of military leaders and exploits. In primary
school days, his heroes had included not only the great warrior-emperors of the
Chinese past but Napoleon I and George Washington as well.

The spring of 1912 marked the birth of the new Chinese republic and the end of Mao’s
military service. For a year he drifted from one thing to another, trying, in turn, a
police school, a law school, and a business school; he studied history in a secondary
school and then spent some months reading many of the classic works of the Western
liberal tradition in the provincial library. That period of groping, rather than indicating
any lack of decision in Mao’s character, was a reflection of China’s situation at the
time. The abolition of the official civil service examination system in 1905 and the
piecemeal introduction of Western learning in so-called modern schools had left
young people in a state of uncertainty as to what type of training, Chinese or Western,
could best prepare them for a career or for service to their country.

Mao eventually graduated from the First Provincial Normal School in Changsha in
1918. While officially an institution of secondary level rather than of higher
education, the normal school offered a high standard of instruction in Chinese history,
literature, and philosophy as well as in Western ideas. While at the school, Mao also
acquired his first experience in political activity by helping to establish several student
organizations. The most important of those was the New People’s Study Society,
founded in the winter of 1917–18, many of whose members were later to join the
Communist Party.

From the normal school in Changsha, Mao went to Peking University in Beijing,
China’s leading intellectual centre. The half year he spent there working as a
librarian’s assistant was of disproportionate importance in shaping his future career,
for it was then that he came under the influence of the two men who were to be the
principal figures in the foundation of the CCP: Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu. Moreover,
he found himself at Peking University precisely during the months leading up to
the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which was to a considerable extent the
fountainhead of all of the changes that were to take place in China in the ensuing half
century. In a limited sense, May Fourth Movement is the name given to the student
demonstrations protesting against the decision at the Paris Peace Conference to hand
over former German concessions in Shandong province to Japan instead of returning
them to China. But the term also evokes a period of rapid political and cultural
change, beginning in 1915, that resulted in the Chinese radicals’ abandonment of
Western liberalism for Marxism and Leninism as the answer to China’s problems and
the subsequent founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. The shift from the
difficult and esoteric classical written language to a far more-accessible vehicle of
literary expression patterned on colloquial speech also took place during that period.
At the same time, a new and very young generation moved to the centre of the
political stage. To be sure, the demonstration on May 4, 1919, was launched by Chen
Duxiu, but the students soon realized that they themselves were the main actors. In an
editorial published in July 1919, Mao wrote: The world is ours, the nation is ours,
society is ours. If we do not speak, who will speak? If we do not act, who will act?
From then onward his generation never ceased to regard itself as responsible for the
country’s fate, and, indeed, its members remained in power, both in Beijing and
in Taipei (Taiwan), until the 1970s.

During the summer of 1919 Mao Zedong helped to establish in Changsha a variety of
organizations that brought the students together with the merchants and the workers—
but not yet with the peasants—in demonstrations aimed at forcing the government to
oppose Japan. His writings at the time are filled with references to the “army of the
red flag” throughout the world and to the victory of the Russian Revolution of 1917,
but it was not until January 1921 that he was finally committed to Marxism as the
philosophical basis of the revolution in China.
Mao and the Chinese Communist Party

In September 1920 Mao became principal of the Lin Changsha primary school, and in
October he organized a branch of the Socialist Youth League there. That winter he
married Yang Kaihui, the daughter of his former ethics teacher. In July 1921 he
attended the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, together with
representatives from the other communist groups in China and two delegates from the
Moscow-based Comintern (Communist International). In 1923, when the young party
entered into an alliance with Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Party (Kuomintang [Pinyin:
Guomindang]), Mao was one of the first communists to join the Nationalist Party and
to work within it. During the first half of 1924, he lived mostly with his wife and two
infant sons in Shanghai, where he was a leading member of the Nationalists’
Executive Bureau.

In the winter of 1924–25, Mao returned to his native village of Shaoshan for a rest.
There, after witnessing demonstrations by peasants stirred into
political consciousness by the shooting of several dozen Chinese by foreign police in
Shanghai (May and June 1925), Mao suddenly became aware of the revolutionary
potential inherent in the peasantry. Although born in a peasant household, he had, in
the course of his student years, adopted the Chinese intellectual’s traditional view of
the workers and peasants as ignorant and dirty. His conversion to Marxism had forced
him to revise his estimate of the urban proletariat, but he continued to share Marx’s
own contempt for the backward and amorphous peasantry. Now he turned back to the
rural world of his youth as the source of China’s regeneration. Following the example
of other communists working within the Nationalist Party who had already begun to
organize the peasants, Mao sought to channel the spontaneous protests of the
Hunanese peasants into a network of peasant associations.
The communists and the Nationalists

Pursued by the military governor of Hunan, Mao was soon forced to flee his native
province once more, and he returned for another year to an urban environment—
Guangzhou (Canton), the main power base of the Nationalists. However, though he
lived in Guangzhou, Mao still focused his attention on the countryside. He became the
acting head of the propaganda department of the Nationalist Party—in which capacity
he edited its leading organ, the Political Weekly, and attended the Second Kuomintang
Congress in January 1926—but he also served at the Peasant Movement Training
Institute, set up in Guangzhou under the auspices of the Nationalists, as principal of
the sixth training session. Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) had become the leader of the
Nationalists after the death of Sun Yat-sen in March 1925, and, although Chiang still
declared his allegiance to the “world revolution” and wished to avail himself of aid
from the Soviet Union, he was determined to remain master in his own house. He
therefore expelled most communists from responsible posts in the Nationalist Party in
May 1926. Mao, however, stayed on at the institute until October of that year. Most of
the young peasant activists Mao trained were shortly at work strengthening the
position of the communists.

In July 1926 Chiang Kai-shek set out on what became known as the Northern
Expedition, aiming to unify the country under his own leadership and to overthrow
the conservative government in Beijing as well as other warlords. In November Mao
once more returned to Hunan; there, in January and February 1927, he investigated the
peasant movement and concluded that in a very short time several hundred million
peasants in China would “rise like a tornado or tempest—a force so extraordinarily
swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to suppress it.” Strictly
speaking, that prediction proved to be false. Revolution in the shape of spontaneous
action by hundreds of millions of peasants did not sweep across China “in a very short
time,” or indeed at all. Chiang Kai-shek, who was bent on an alliance with the
propertied classes in the cities and in the countryside, turned against the worker and
peasant revolution, and in April he massacred the very Shanghai workers who had
delivered the city to him. The strategy of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin for carrying out
revolution in alliance with the Nationalists collapsed, and the CCP was
virtually annihilated in the cities and decimated in the countryside. In a broader and
less literal sense, however, Mao’s prophecy was justified. In October 1927 Mao led a
few hundred peasants who had survived the autumn harvest uprising in Hunan to a
base in the Jinggang Mountains, on the border between Jiangxi and Hunan provinces,
and embarked on a new type of revolutionary warfare in the countryside in which
the Red Army (military arm of the CCP), rather than the unarmed masses, would play
the central role. But it was only because a large proportion of China’s hundreds of
millions of peasants sympathized with and supported that effort that Mao Zedong was
able in the course of the protracted civil war to encircle the cities from the countryside
and thus eventually defeat Chiang Kai-shek and gain control of the country.
The road to power of Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong’s 22 years in the wilderness can be divided into four phases. The first of
those is the initial three years when Mao and Zhu De, the commander in chief of the
army, successfully developed the tactics of guerrilla warfare from base areas in the
countryside. Those activities, however, were regarded even by their protagonists, and
still more by the Central Committee in Shanghai (and by the Comintern in Moscow),
as a holding operation until the next upsurge of revolution in the urban centres. In the
summer of 1930 the Red Army was ordered by the Central Committee to occupy
several major cities in south-central China in the hope of sparking a revolution by the
workers. When it became evident that persistence in that attempt could only lead to
further costly losses, Mao disobeyed orders and abandoned the battle to return to the
base in southern Jiangxi. During that year Mao’s wife was executed by
the Nationalists, and he married He Zizhen, with whom he had been living since 1928.

The second phase (the Ziangxi period) centres on the founding in

November 1931 of the Jiangxi Soviet (Chinese Soviet Republic) in a
portion of Jiangxi province, with Mao as chairman. Since there was
little support for the revolution in the cities, the promise of ultimate
victory now seemed to reside in the gradual strengthening and
expansion of the base areas. The Soviet regime soon came to control a
population of several million. The Red Army, grown to a strength of
some 200,000, easily defeated large forces of inferior troops sent
against it by Chiang Kai-shek in the first four of the so-called
encirclement and annihilation campaigns. But it was unable to stand
up against Chiang’s own elite units, and in October 1934 the major
part of the Red Army, Mao, and his pregnant wife abandoned the base
in Jiangxi and set out for the northwest of China, on what is known as
the Long March.

There is wide disagreement among specialists as to the extent of Mao’s real power,
especially in the years 1932–34, and as to which military strategies were his or other
party leaders’. The majority view is that, in the last years of the Jiangxi Soviet, Mao
functioned to a considerable extent as a figurehead with little control over policy,
especially in military matters. In any case, he achieved de facto leadership over the
party (though not the formal title of chairman) only at the Zunyi Conference of
January 1935 during the Long March.

When some 8,000 troops who had survived the perils of the Long March arrived
in Shaanxi province in northwestern China in the autumn of 1935, events were already
moving toward the third phase in Mao’s rural odyssey, which was to be characterized
by a renewed united front with the Nationalists against Japan and by the rise of Mao to
unchallenged supremacy in the party. That phase is often called the Yan’an period (for
the town in Shaanxi where the communists were based), although Mao did not move
to Yan’an until December 1936. In August 1935 the Comintern at its
Seventh Congress in Moscow proclaimed the principle of an antifascist united front,
and in May 1936 the Chinese communists for the first time accepted the prospect that
such a united front might include Chiang Kai-shek himself, and not merely dissident
elements in the Nationalist camp. The so-called Xi’an Incident of December 1936, in
which Chiang was kidnapped by military leaders from northeastern China who wanted
to fight Japan and recover their homelands rather than participate in civil war against
the communists, accelerated the evolution toward unity. By the time
the Japanese began their attempt to subjugate all of China in July 1937, the terms of a
new united front between the communists and the Nationalists had been virtually
settled, and the formal agreement was announced in September 1937.

In the course of the anti-Japanese war, the communists broke up a

substantial portion of their army into small units and sent them behind
the enemy lines to serve as nuclei for guerrilla forces that effectively
controlled vast areas of the countryside, stretching between the cities
and communication lines occupied by the invader. As a result, they
not only expanded their military forces to somewhere between a half-
million and a million at the time of the Japanese surrender but also
established effective grassroots political control over a population that
may have totaled as many as 90 million. It has been argued that the
support of the rural population was won purely by appeals to their
nationalist feeling in opposition to the Japanese. That certainly was
fundamental, but communist agrarian policies likewise played a part
in securing broad support among the peasantry. During the years
1936–40, Mao had, for the first time since the 1920s, the leisure to
devote himself to reflection and writing. It was then that he first read
in translation a certain number of Soviet writings on philosophy and
produced his own account of dialectical materialism, of which the
best-known portions are those entitled “On Practice” and “On
Contradiction.” More important, Mao produced the major works that
synthesized his own experience of revolutionary struggle and his
vision of how the revolution should be carried forward in
the context of the united front. On military matters there was
first Strategic Problems of China’s Revolutionary War, written in
December 1936 to sum up the lessons of the Jiangxi period (and also
to justify the correctness of his own military line at the time), and
then On Protracted War and other writings of 1938 on the tactics of
the anti-Japanese war. As to his overall view of the events of those
years, Mao adopted an extremely conciliatory attitude toward the
Nationalists in his report entitled On the New Stage (October 1938), in
which he attributed to it the leading role both in the war against Japan
and in the ensuing phase of national reconstruction. By the winter of
1939–40, however, the situation had changed sufficiently so that he
could adopt a much firmer line, claiming leadership for the
communists. Internationally, Mao argued, the Chinese revolution was
a part of the world proletarian revolution directed
against imperialism (whether it be British, German, or Japanese);
internally, the country should be ruled by a “joint dictatorship of
several parties” belonging to the anti-Japanese united front. For the
time being, Mao felt, the aims of the CCP coincided with the aims of
the Nationalists, and therefore communists should not try to rush
ahead to socialism and thus disrupt the united front. But neither
should they have any doubts about the ultimate need to take power
into their own hands in order to move forward to socialism. During
that period, in 1939, Mao divorced He Zizhen and married a well-
known film actress, Lan Ping (who by that time had changed her
name to Jiang Qing).

The issues of Nationalist-communist rivalry for the leadership of the united front are
related to the continuing struggle for supremacy within the CCP, for Mao’s two chief
rivals—Wang Ming, who had just returned from a long stay in Moscow, and Zhang
Guotao, who had at first refused to accept Mao’s political and military leadership—
were both accused of excessive slavishness toward the Nationalists. But perhaps even
more central in Mao’s ultimate emergence as the acknowledged leader of the party
was the question of what he had called in October 1938 the “Sinification” of
Marxism—its adaptation not only to Chinese conditions but to the mentality and
cultural traditions of the Chinese people.

Mao could not claim the firsthand knowledge possessed by many other leading
members of the CCP of how communism worked within the Soviet Union nor the
ability to read Karl Marx or Vladimir Ilich Lenin in the original, which some of them
enjoyed. He could and did claim, however, to know and understand China. The
differences between him and the Soviet-oriented faction in the party came to a head at
the time of the so-called Rectification Campaign of 1942–43. That program aimed at
giving a basic grounding in Marxist theory and Leninist principles of party
organization to the many thousands of new members who had been drawn into the
party in the course of the expansion since 1937. But a second and equally important
aspect of the movement was the elimination of what Mao called “foreign
dogmatism”—in other words, blind imitation of Soviet experience and obedience to
Soviet directives.

In March 1943 Mao achieved for the first time formal supremacy over the party,
becoming chairman of the Secretariat and of the Political Bureau (Politburo). Shortly
thereafter the Rectification Campaign took, for a time, the form of a harsh purge of
elements not sufficiently loyal to Mao. The campaign was run by Kang Sheng, who
was later to be one of Mao’s key supporters in the Cultural Revolution. Exaggerating
considerably that dimension of events, Soviet spokesmen have bitterly denounced the
Rectification Campaign as an attempt to purge the CCP of all those elements
genuinely imbued with “proletarian internationalism” (i.e., devotion to Moscow). It is
therefore not surprising that, as Mao’s campaign in the countryside moved into its
fourth and last phase—that of civil war with the Nationalists—Stalin’s lack of
enthusiasm for a Chinese communist victory should have become increasingly
evident. Looking back at that period in 1962, when the Sino-Soviet conflict had come
to a head, Mao declared:

That account of Stalin’s attitude is substantiated by a whole series of

public gestures at the time, culminating in the fact that, when
the People’s Liberation Army (successor to the Red Army) took the
Nationalist capital of Nanjing in April 1949, the Soviet ambassador
was the only foreign diplomat to accompany the retreating Nationalist
government to Guangzhou. Stalin’s motives were obviously those
described by Mao in the above passage; he did not believe in the
capacity of the Chinese communists to achieve a clear-cut victory, and
he thought they would be a nuisance if they did.

Formation of the People’s Republic of China of Mao Zedong

Nevertheless, when the communists did take power in China, both Mao and Stalin had
to make the best of the situation. In December 1949 Mao, now chairman of the
People’s Republic of China—which he had proclaimed on October 1—traveled
to Moscow, where, after two months of arduous negotiations, he succeeded in
persuading Stalin to sign a treaty of mutual assistance accompanied by limited
economic aid. Before the Chinese had time to profit from the resources made available
for economic development, however, they found themselves dragged into the Korean
War in support of the Moscow-oriented regime in North Korea. Only after that
baptism of fire did Stalin, according to Mao, begin to have confidence in him and
believe he was not first and foremost a Chinese nationalist.

Despite those tensions with Moscow, the policies of the People’s Republic of China in
its early years were in very many respects based, as Mao later said, on “copying from
the Soviets.” While Mao and his comrades had experience in guerrilla warfare, in
mobilization of the peasants in the countryside, and in political administration at the
grass roots, they had no firsthand knowledge of running a state or of large-scale
economic development. In such circumstances the Soviet Union provided the only
available model. A five-year plan was therefore drawn up under Soviet guidance; it
was put into effect in 1953 and included Soviet technical assistance and a number of
complete industrial plants. Yet, within two years, Mao had taken steps that were to
lead to the breakdown of the political and ideological alliance with Moscow.
The emergence of Mao’s road to socialism

In the spring of 1949, Mao proclaimed that, while in the past the
Chinese revolution had followed the unorthodox path of “encircling the cities from the
countryside,” it would in the future take the orthodox road of the cities leading and
guiding the countryside. In harmony with that view, he had agreed in 1950 with Liu
Shaoqi that collectivization would be possible only when China’s heavy industry had
provided the necessary equipment for mechanization. In a report of July 1955, he
reversed that position, arguing that in China the social transformation could run ahead
of the technical transformation. Deeply impressed by the achievements of certain
cooperatives that claimed to have radically improved their material conditions without
any outside assistance, he came to believe in the limitless capacity of the Chinese
people, especially of the rural masses, to transform at will both nature and their own
social relations when mobilized for revolutionary goals. Those in the leadership who
did not share that vision he denounced as “old women with bound feet.” He made
those criticisms before an ad hoc gathering of provincial and local party secretaries,
thus creating a groundswell of enthusiasm for rapid collectivization such that all those
in the leadership who had expressed doubts about Mao’s ideas were soon presented
with a fait accompli. The tendency thus manifested to pursue his own ends outside
the collective decision-making processes of the party was to continue and to be
accentuated.

Even before Stalin’s successor, Nikita S. Khrushchev, had given his secret
speech (February 1956) denouncing his predecessor’s crimes, Mao Zedong and his
colleagues had been discussing measures for improving the morale of
the intellectuals in order to secure their willing participation in building a new China.
At the end of April, Mao proclaimed the policy of “letting a hundred
flowers bloom”—that is, the freedom to express many diverse ideas—designed to
prevent the development in China of a repressive political climate analogous to that in
the Soviet Union under Stalin. In the face of the disorders called forth by de-
Stalinization in Poland and Hungary, Mao did not retreat but rather pressed boldly
forward with that policy, against the advice of many of his senior colleagues, in the
belief that the contradictions that still existed in Chinese society were mainly
nonantagonistic. When the resulting “great blooming and contending” got out of hand
and called into question the axiom of party rule, Mao savagely turned against the
educated elite, which he felt had betrayed his confidence. Henceforth he would rely
primarily on the creativity of the rank and file as the agent of modernization. As for
the specialists, if they were not yet sufficiently “red,” he would remold them by
sending them to work in the countryside.

It was against that background that Mao, during the winter of 1957–58, worked out
the policies that were to characterize the Great Leap Forward, formally launched in
May 1958. While his economic strategy was by no means so one-sided and simplistic
as was commonly believed in the 1960s and ’70s and although he still proclaimed
industrialization and a “technical revolution” as his goals, Mao displayed continuing
anxiety regarding the corrupting influence of the fruits of technical progress and
an acute nostalgia for the perceived purity and egalitarianism that had marked
the moral and political world of the Jinggang Mountains and Yan’an eras.

Thus it was logical that he should endorse and promote the

establishment of “people’s communes” as part of the Great Leap
strategy. As a result, the peasants, who had been organized into
cooperatives in 1955–56 and then into fully socialist collectives in
1956–57, found their world turned upside down once again in 1958.
Neither the resources nor the administrative experience necessary to
operate such enormous new social units of several thousand
households were in fact available, and, not surprisingly, the
consequences of those changes were chaos and economic disaster.

By the winter of 1958–59, Mao himself had come to recognize that some adjustments
were necessary, including decentralization of ownership to the constituent elements of
the communes and a scaling down of the unrealistically high production targets in
both industry and agriculture. He insisted, however, that in broad outline his new
Chinese road to socialism, including the concept of the communes and the belief that
China, though “poor and blank,” could leap ahead of other countries, was basically
sound. At the Lushan meeting of the Central Committee in July–August 1959, Peng
Dehuai, the minister of defense, denounced the excesses of the Great Leap and the
economic losses they had caused. He was immediately removed from all party and
state posts and placed in detention until his death during the Cultural Revolution.
From that time, Mao regarded any criticism of his policies as nothing less than a crime
of lèse-majesté, meriting exemplary punishment.
Retreat and counterattack

Though few spoke up at Lushan in support of Peng, a considerable number of the top
leaders sympathized with him in private. Almost immediately, in 1960, Mao began
building an alternative power base in the People’s Liberation Army, which the new
defense minister, Lin Biao, had set out to turn into a “great school of Mao Zedong
Thought.” At about the same time, Mao began to denounce the emergence, not only in
the Soviet Union but also in China itself, of “new bourgeois elements” among the
privileged strata of the state and party bureaucracy and the technical and artistic elite.
Under those conditions, he concluded, a “protracted, complex, and sometimes even
violent class struggle” would continue during the whole socialist stage.

The open split with the Soviet Union, which had become public and
irreparable by 1963—though it can be traced to Mao’s resentment
at Khrushchev’s failure to consult him before launching de-
Stalinization—resulted, above all, from the Soviet reaction to the
Great Leap policies. Khrushchev regarded Mao’s claims for the
communes as ideologically presumptuous, and he heaped ridicule on
them; he underlined his displeasure by withdrawing Soviet technical
assistance in 1960, leaving many large industrial plants unfinished.
Khrushchev also tried to put pressure on China in its dealings
with Taiwan and India and in other foreign policy issues. Mao forgot
neither the affront to his and China’s dignity nor the economic
damage.

As for class struggle in China itself, Mao’s fear that revisionism might appear there
was heightened by the policies pursued in the early 1960s to deal with the economic
consequences of the Great Leap Forward. The disorganization and waste created by
the Great Leap, compounded by natural disasters and by the termination of Soviet
economic aid, led to widespread famine in which, according to much later official
Chinese accounts, millions of people died. The response to that situation by Liu
Shaoqi (who had succeeded Mao as chairman of the People’s Republic in 1959), Deng
Xiaoping, and the economic planners was to make use of material incentives and to
strengthen the role of individual households in agricultural production. At first Mao
agreed reluctantly that such steps were necessary, but during the first half of 1962 he
came increasingly to perceive the methods used to promote recovery as implying the
repudiation of the whole thrust of the Great Leap strategy. It was as a direct response
to that challenge that at the 10th Plenary Session of the Central Committee in
September 1962 he issued the call, “Never forget the class struggle!”

During the next three years Mao waged such a struggle, primarily through
the Socialist Education Movement in the countryside, and it was over the guidelines
for that campaign that the major political battles were fought within the Chinese
leadership. At the end of 1964, when Liu Shaoqi refused to accept Mao’s demand to
direct the main thrust of class struggle against “capitalist roaders” in the party, Mao
decided that “Liu had to go.”
The Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong

The movement that became known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
represented an attempt by Mao to go beyond the party rectification campaigns—of
which there had been many since 1942—and to devise a new and more radical method
for dealing with what he saw as the bureaucratic degeneration of the party. It also
represented, beyond any doubt or question, however, a deliberate effort to eliminate
those in the leadership who, over the years, had dared to cross him. The victims, from
throughout the party hierarchy, suffered more than mere political disgrace. All were
publicly humiliated and detained for varying periods, sometimes under very harsh
conditions; many were beaten and tortured, and not a few were killed or driven to
suicide. Among the casualties was Liu, who died because he was denied proper
medical attention.

The justification for those sacrifices was defined in a key slogan of the
time: “Fight selfishness, criticize revisionism.” When the young
Chinese known as the Red Guards, who constituted the first shock
troops of Mao’s enterprise, burst onto the scene in the summer of
1966 with their battle cry “To rebel is justified!” it seemed for a time
that not only the power of the party cadres but also authority in all its
forms was being questioned. It soon became evident that Mao, who in
1956 had justified decentralization as a means to building a “strong
socialist state,” still believed in the need for state power. When
the Shanghai leftists Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan—who were
later to make up half the Gang of Four—came to see him in February
1967, immediately after setting up the Shanghai Commune,
Mao asserted that the demand for the abolition of “heads” (leaders),
which had been heard in their city, was “extreme anarchism” and
“most reactionary”; in fact, he stated, there would “always be heads.”
Communes, he added, were “too weak when it came to suppressing
counterrevolution” and in any case required party leadership. He
therefore ordered them to dissolve theirs and to replace it with a
“revolutionary committee.”

Those committees, based on an alliance of former party cadres, young

activists, and representatives of the People’s Liberation Army, were to
remain in place until two years after Mao’s death. At first they were
largely controlled by the army. The Ninth Congress of 1969 initiated
the process of rebuilding the party; and the death of Lin Biao in 1971
diminished, though it by no means eliminated, the army’s role.
Thereafter it seemed briefly, in 1971–72, that a compromise, of
which Zhou Enlai was the architect, might produce some kind of
synthesis between the values of the Cultural Revolution and the pre-
1966 political and economic order.
Even before Zhou’s death in January 1976, however, that compromise had been
overturned. All recognition by Mao of the importance of professional skills was
swallowed up in an orgy of political rhetoric, and all things foreign were regarded as
counterrevolutionary. Mao’s last decade, which had opened with manifestos in favour
of the Paris Commune model of mass democracy, closed with paeans of praise to that
most implacable of centralizing despots, Shihuangdi, the first emperor of the
ancient Qin dynasty.
Legacy

While the Cultural Revolution was an entirely logical culmination of Mao’s last two
decades, it was by no means the only possible outcome of his approach to revolution,
nor need a judgment of his work as a whole be based primarily on that last phase.

Few would deny Mao Zedong the major share of credit for devising the pattern of
struggle based on guerrilla warfare in the countryside that ultimately led to victory in
the civil war and thereby to the overthrow of the Nationalists, the distribution of land
to the peasants, and the restoration of China’s independence and sovereignty. Those
achievements must be given a weight commensurate with the degree of injustice
prevailing in Chinese society before the revolution and with the humiliation felt by the
Chinese people as a result of the dismemberment of their country by the foreign
powers. “We have stood up,” Mao said in September 1949. Those words will not be
forgotten.

Mao’s record after 1949 is more ambiguous. The official Chinese view, defined in
June 1981, is that his leadership was basically correct until the summer of 1957, but
from then on it was mixed at best and frequently wrong. It cannot be disputed that
Mao’s two major innovations of his later years, the Great Leap and the Cultural
Revolution, were ill-conceived and led to disastrous consequences. His goals of
combating bureaucracy, encouraging popular participation, and stressing China’s self-
reliance were generally laudable—and the industrialization that began during Mao’s
reign did indeed lay a foundation for China’s remarkable economic development since
the late 20th century—but the methods he used to pursue them were often violent and
self-defeating.

There is no single accepted measure of Mao and his long career. How does one weigh,
for example, the good fortune of peasants acquiring land against millions of
executions and deaths? How does one balance the real economic achievements after
1949 against the starvation that came in the wake of the Great Leap Forward or the
bloody shambles of the Cultural Revolution? It is, perhaps, possible to accept the
official verdict that, despite the “errors of his later years,” Mao’s merits outweighed
his faults, while underscoring the fact that the account is very finely balanced.