The man known to history as Mao Zedong or
Chairman Mao was born on the 26th of December 1893 in the village of Shaoshan in the province
of Hunan in southern China. His father was Mao Yichang who had been raised
in a family of poverty-stricken peasants. However, after serving in the Xiang Army for
a few years in his youth, Yichang had returned to his native region and begun working as
a farmer. He soon acquired enough money to become a
lender in the district and this, combined with his agricultural work, allowed him to
become one of the more prosperous farmers in the Shaoshan area, eventually coming into
possession of about twenty acres of land. Mao’s mother was Wen Qimei, a devout Buddhist,
who had a troubled upbringing. Her father was a poor shoemaker who drank
heavily and her mother had been his concubine. Mao’s childhood was less than ideal. His father was a strict disciplinarian whose
method of parenting primarily involved beating Mao and his three siblings if they did not
do as they were told. Their mother tried to temper his outbursts,
but with little effect. Young Mao developed an interest in his mother’s
Buddhism when he was younger, though he soon became disenchanted with religion, and when
he was just eight years old, he was sent to the local primary school in Shaoshan, just
as the twentieth century was dawning. His education there was a mixture of traditional
Chinese learning centred on Confucianism combined with the centuries old values of the Far East,
along with a sprinkling of influences from the encroaching western world which could
not be avoided in China by the 1900s. Additionally, the young Mao developed an interest
early on in history and politics. When he was thirteen years old his father
arranged for him to be married to Luo Yixiu, the seventeen year old daughter of another
prosperous local farmer, but Mao demonstrated his rebellious streak at a young age and refused
to honour the arranged marriage, causing something of a controversy in the Shaoshan area. And as a result of this disagreement the teenage
Mao temporarily left his father’s farm, although he returned before very long. Mao was growing up at a time when China was
experiencing momentous change. Like Korea and Japan to the east, China had
first come into contact with European traders and religious missionaries in the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries. And like them the Chinese had quickly become
wary of the newcomers and had restricted their contacts with them to one or two ports in
the south-east of the country where a tiny amount of trade was conducted. It continued like this for nearly two centuries
with China remaining largely closed to a world which was modernising without it. It remained highly conservative in its religious,
social and political values, changing little, and continuing to be ruled by an Emperor and
a closed government of imperial rituals and administrators as it had been for centuries. But by the mid-nineteenth century China, again
like Japan and Korea, could no longer prevent the Europeans, with their modern warships,
guns and industrial power from interfering in their countries. With the Opium Wars of 1839 to 1842 and 1856
to 1860, Britain forced China to end its self-imposed isolation. Following which, China experienced a flood
of European contact and with it came not just British opium but ideas about different types
of government, new economic developments and all manner of technological innovation. Perhaps the most striking and revolutionary
of these new ideas which arrived into China from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, was
the knowledge that the Europeans and the Americans were not ruled by powerful monarchs and emperors
any more. Many lived under republics, government by
the people, and even where some of these countries still had emperors or empresses, such as Queen
Victoria in Britain, she was essentially a figurehead and it was parliament that actually
ruled the British Empire. Moreover, these democracies were not all alike. Some were very conservative, some were more
liberal and some had different degrees of economic development. And there were also competing ideas about
how they should be reformed and developed, with some wanting the wealthy to hold a great
amount of power, and others who believed that power and wealth should be distributed equally
throughout society. And there were more extreme ideas again. One of these, developed in particular by the
German political scientist, Karl Marx, in the mid-nineteenth century, argued that all
wealth and goods should be held in communal ownership. He called this Communism. In early twentieth century China these ideas
would soon lead to great change, as many began questioning why they were still ruled by the
emperor of the nearly 300 year old Qing Dynasty. As Mao entered his teenage years he was already
reading about these political ideas. He was particularly interested in calls for
a democracy to be established in China to replace the imperial government, and also
the republican writings of Sun Yat-Sen, who had become a figurehead for the republican
movement within China. He would soon see these desires confirmed. Just as Mao was starting at a new school in
Changsha, the country was entering into a period of rapid change. Regional famines had struck parts of China
in the late 1900s and early 1910s and this, combined with numerous regional uprisings
throughout the country and growing calls for a more representative government, led to an
army revolt in October 1911. At first the imperial government of Emperor
Puyi, who was just a six year old child, tried to address the grievances of the dissenters
but it soon became apparent that a more drastic shift would be necessary. After weeks of negotiations it was determined
in February 1912 that the emperor would abdicate and a new Republic of China would be established
with the imperial officer, Yuan Shikai, serving as its first president of a national government. Thus, an empire, which had been in existence
for centuries, had ended. It was, however, very unclear in the mid-1910s
exactly in what direction China’s politics would now head. These were striking developments, and ones
which Mao had not been entirely removed from. When the conflict erupted late in 1911 he
had enlisted in the rebel army as an 18 year old recruit. Now in the spring of 1912 he simply returned
to school. And it was around this time that he first
started reading about the idea of socialism and communism as more radical forms of government. Yet he remained unconvinced that this was
the best approach for China at that time. Meanwhile his education continued. He determined at some point around 1913 that
he would become a teacher and so he enrolled in the First Normal School of Hunan, widely
regarded at that time as the best in the province. Here he became a popular and accomplished
student, reading widely, being elected secretary of the student society and eventually finishing
as one of the highest ranked students in the school. More pivotally, in terms of his later activities,
Mao was increasingly exposed to the socialist ideas he had first encountered a few years
earlier, and over time he began to find that he agreed more with what he read, particularly
so as the environment at the First Normal School was one of radical political thought,
especially during China’s first forays into representative government.
In 1917 Mao moved to Peking, now Beijing, where one of his main influences at this time,
Yang Changji, had taken a job at the Peking University. Here Mao also took a job, as a library assistant,
but he was increasingly moving in circles of individuals who favoured socialism and
communism or marxism as a solution to China’s political woes. Even with the establishment of the republic
in 1912 the country had continued to experience turbulence as conservative and liberal forces
fought amongst each other, and regional warlords and power groups exercised quasi regional
independence throughout the country. Marxism appealed to many at this time because
the Bolsheviks, a branch of Russian communism, had secured control of the Russian government
in the autumn of 1917, just months after the fall of the autocratic Tsarist government
there. Perhaps, many thought, communism was also
suitable for China, which had just done away with its own fossilised autocratic imperial
government? And Mao was increasingly leaning towards that
viewpoint himself in 1918 and 1919, an outlook which was compounded when he experienced the
‘bourgeois’ hostility of the Beijing upper and middle class towards a country boy like
himself. It was in Beijing that Mao’s awakening as
a political radical fully occurred. China was drifting ever further into political
anarchy in the late 1910s as a buoyant Nationalist movement led by Sun Yat-Sen sought to rejuvenate
the republic in its infancy, which the Nationalists perceived as being governed by a weak, conservative
regime with too many links to the old imperial past. In parts of the country the government could
exercise its authority, but in others it was little more than a government in name only. This instability was augmented when the Chinese
government failed to secure the former German concession of Shandong at the Versaille peace
negotiations in Paris, following the end of the First World War. The Nationalists considered it an affront
to national pride when this piece of mainland China was instead granted to Japan, a nation
which had been exercising its strength across East Asia since the late nineteenth century
when it had modernised in a far more successful manner than China. And the Shandong controversy was a direct
cause of a major student protest which occurred in Beijing on the 4th of May 1919. This was driven by a younger generation of
political activists like Mao who were tired of China’s seeming impotence on the world
stage and disordered internal politics. The May Fourth Movement would continue afterwards
and lead indirectly to the Chinese Civil War many years later. The May Fourth Movement, the awakening of
China’s younger generations to radical politics, is generally seen as the origins of the Communist
Party of China. The events of 1919 led many young Chinese
people who were interested in politics to increasingly turn their backs on the western
liberals of Britain, France and America, who had betrayed them on Shandong and increasingly
to turn towards the Marxism and Leninism that was gradually winning the Russian Civil War
and cementing its control over Russia. As we have seen, Mao was already interested
in communism by 1919, but it was only in the months following the May Fourth Protests that
he began to fully commit himself to it. And that summer he organised several student
organisations into an umbrella body to protest against the Japanese presence in Shandong. This is the first clear sign of his abilities
as an organiser. And his writings around this time and into
1920 begin to speak of the “army of the red flag” and to the victories won by the
Communists in Russia. By the time that the Communist Party of China
was formally established in the summer of 1921, Mao had proclaimed himself to be a communist
believing that the ideology would be the basis for the coming revolution in China.
It would be a slow ascent towards that revolution, however. In the meantime Mao married again in 1920
to Yang Kaihui, the daughter of one of his former teachers. Then in July 1921 he attended the First Congress
of the Communist Party of China. A decision was taken early on by the new party
to accept aid from Russia, but also to establish an alliance with Sun Yat-Sen’s Nationalist
Party, the Kuomintang, which would soon be led by a younger nationalist by the name of
Chiang Kai-Shek. Mao was one of the first of the Chinese communists
to also join the Nationalist Party in the belief that the conservative Chinese political
establishment would only be overthrown if the Nationalists and the Communists worked
in league with each other. As such he spent much of the 1920s living
in the Nationalist stronghold of Guangzhou province and working as an organiser and propagandist
for both the Communists and the Nationalists simultaneously. And throughout this period Mao was gaining
a greater appreciation of the struggles of the Chinese peasantry throughout the country
and the strength in sheer numbers which they had, if they were won over to the Communist
cause. As such the early and mid-1920s were formative
if somewhat unremarkable years in Mao’s career. This all began to change in 1926. With the death of Sun Yat-Sen in 1925, Chiang
Kai-Shek had taken over the leadership of the Nationalists. By this time his party, the Kuomintang, had
control over large parts of southern China, but the country was still highly fragmented,
with the conservative government of the republic holding Beijing and much of the north and
quasi-independent Chinese warlords, who were vestiges of the imperial past, holding other
parts of the country. In 1926 Chiang determined to force the issue
and launched a Nationalist military campaign to seize Beijing. The Northern Expedition, as it has become
known, was a major success and during the course of 1926 and 1927 the Nationalists seized
power in many of the major cities. But the very success of the Northern Expedition
also led to civil war. Now the loose alliance which the Chinese Communists
and the Nationalists had been in since 1921 was effectively ended by Chiang Kai-Shek who
had grown wary of the expanding power of the Communists and the role Russia wished to play
in China once the conservative regime in Beijing was done away with. The result was a split itself within the Nationalist
Party in 1927, between Chiang’s right-leaning Nationalists and a left-leaning faction which
wished to accommodate the Communists. These events are typically seen as the beginning
of the Chinese Civil War which would last for over twenty years. In the summer of 1927 Chiang Kai-Shek’s
newly ascendant Kuomintang began a crackdown on Communists throughout China. Thousands were killed and the party was suppressed
in many places. Mao’s reaction to this major setback and
the inception of civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists was to retreat with several
hundred followers into the wilderness around the Jinggang Mountains on the border of Hunan
province. It was the beginning of a long period of guerrilla
warfare during which the Communist Party, with tacit aid from Russia, sought to disrupt
the rule of the Nationalists in anticipation of mass urban revolts by workers throughout
the country against the new government. These were often tough years for Mao. His wife and sister were beheaded by the Nationalists
in 1930, though in his new life as a guerrilla fighter in rural China he had formed a relationship
with He Zhizhen, whom he married soon after Yang Kaihui was killed. It was also around this time that he determined
on a new course. Instead of waiting for a revolt of the Chinese
urban proletariat, he would attempt the same strategy as had brought the Chinese Nationalists
to power, building up a territory which he would control, and expand outwards.
In February 1930 Mao, who by now was one of the senior commanders of the Chinese communist
movement, established the Southwest Jiangxi Provincial Soviet Government in Jiangxi province. Although the Nationalists controlled most
of the country, for a few years here in the early 1930s Mao established a Chinese Soviet
State in Jiangxi, with him serving as the Chairman. The Red Army had also expanded and was now
under the overall control of Zhou Enlai, with the wider Chinese Communist Party focusing
its attentions on Jiangxi as a safe base for them in the early 1930s. Indeed Mao, Enlai and the Red Army saw off
several efforts by Chiang Kai-Shek to wrest control of the province back from them in
the early 1930s by encircling Jiangxi. However, this military response was limited
by the Nationalists, in part because it had found itself embroiled in a conflict on the
other side of China in the early 1930s as the Empire of Japan invaded the north-eastern
Chinese provinces of Manchuria and established a puppet state called Manchukuo there. It was just the beginning of heightened Japanese
involvement in China in the 1930s. But once the initial furore concerning Manchuria
died down, Chiang set his sights on finally reclaiming Jiangxi province from Mao and the
Communists in the mid-1930s. In September 1933 the Chinese Nationalists
began the Fifth Encirclement of Mao and the Communists in Jiangxi province. This effectively involved an enormous siege
by the Nationalists, and one which would prove too large for the Red Army to repulse. By the summer of 1934 it was clear that Mao
and his followers would either have to surrender or break out of the besieged area. They chose the latter and the resulting events
have become part of Communist Party lore. In October 1934, Communist forces, consisting
of 86,000 troops, 15,000 personnel, and 35 women, broke through Nationalist enemy lines
and began an epic retreat from their encircled headquarters in southwest China. The “Long March” as it became known lasted
368 days and covered 6,000 miles. They crossed 24 rivers and 18 mountain ranges. Weapons and supplies were borne on the backs
of fighters, or in horse-drawn carts, and at times the line of marchers stretched for
50 miles. Only 4,000 troops completed the journey. Enduring starvation, aerial bombardment, and
almost daily skirmishes with Nationalist forces, Mao eventually halted his columns at the foot
of the Great Wall of China. The ‘Long March’ is regarded as the longest
continuous march in the history of warfare and marked the emergence of Mao Zedong as
the undisputed leader of the Chinese Communists. The months after the Long March saw a curious
drift in Chinese politics towards a rapprochement between the Communists and the Nationalists. For years the Nationalist government of Chiang
Kai-Shek had been dealing with problems on multiple fronts. As well as the Communists there was the perhaps
greater problem posed by the Empire of Japan and its ambitions to dominate the Far East
politically and militarily. This had already resulted in the invasion
of Manchuria and the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo in the early 1930s,
but as the years went by it was clear that the Emperor’s government in Tokyo had ambitions
for an even greater land grab in China. Accordingly many within the Nationalist movement
believed it would be best to put aside their differences with the Communists for the foreseeable
future and form a coherent opposition to the impending Japanese attack. And for their part Mao and his followers were
encouraged to do the same by Moscow. Thus, during the course of 1935 and 1936 Mao’s
Communists and Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists were once again drifting towards an alliance
of convenience. The drive towards doing so was accelerated
in July 1937 when the Japanese again invaded China and proceeded to militarily occupy many
of the major cities along its eastern coast, massacring tens of thousands of Chinese civilians
in cities such as Nanjing in the process. The Chinese Civil War now morphed into the
Second Sino-Japanese War and in turn that would become a constituent part of the Second
World War in later years. By the end of 1937 the Communists and the
Nationalists were formally allied with each other again after Chiang Kai-Shek caved in
to pressure to do so from within his own ranks. And Mao also married again around this time,
to Jiang Qing, an actress who would become his fourth and final wife. As an example of his growing ruthlessness,
his former wife, He Zizhen, was packed off to the Soviet Union where she was placed in
a mental asylum. Meanwhile, the nature of the struggle against
Japan which would play out for the next several years was beginning to become clear. The Nationalists moved inland towards central
China as the Japanese occupied the rich cities and farmland of the coastal regions of eastern
China. Here in the inland provinces the Nationalists
and the Communists would wage a war of attrition with the Japanese to the east for the next
few years. And these were significant years in terms
of the support Mao and the Communists enjoyed. In the course of the late 1930s and early
1940s Mao’s Red Army ballooned in size from approximately 50,000 to nearly half a million
fighters. Thus, the war with Japan was finally creating
the kind of countrywide support for the Communist Party which Mao and the other leaders had
failed to acquire in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Already by 1940 there were signs of Mao’s
Communists being able to win considerable victories against the Japanese occupation
forces. During a campaign which became known as the
Hundred Regiments Campaign in August 1940, the 400,000 strong Red Army moved against
the Japanese in simultaneous attacks against five of the coastal provinces, attacks which
resulted in the deaths of upwards of 20,000 Japanese troops as well as a severe disruption
to Japanese supply routes. Late 1941 and early 1942 brought setbacks,
although, the Japanese made a series of sweeping conquests across the western Pacific, notably
seizing Singapore and Burma from the British and the Philippines from the United States
following the declaration of war on the US in December with the surprise attack on the
American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii. While these conquests initially put the Japanese
in the ascendancy in eastern Asia, the entry of Japan into the wider Second World War also
ensured that the Nationalists and the Communists now had allies in the shape of the British
and Americans. With increased military, financial and logistical
support being received, they were able to ensure that the Japanese occupation of eastern
China was never comfortable during the Second World War. As the war was grinding onwards throughout
the first half of the 1940s the Chinese Communist Party continued to grow in power and so did
Mao as its leader. The nature of the war of resistance against
the Japanese favoured the Communists over the Nationalists. For starters the Communists were more attuned
to how to wage guerrilla war, having done so for many years against the Nationalist
government in the late 1920s and early 1930s. As a consequence they were better prepared
for doing so against the Japanese and as they won a series of victories against the Japanese,
the Red Army became the more attractive option for Chinese people seeking to oppose the foreign
occupation. Moreover, Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang seemed
to many to simply be the Chinese manifestation of the right-wing movements which had brought
Japan into China to begin with. And as the Chinese Communist Party or CPC
expanded in size, Mao also consolidated his control. In 1943 he acquired the chairmanship of both
the party secretariat and the politburo of the party for the first time. It was also during these war years that he
began affirming that Chinese Communism would have a distinctly different shape than that
which had developed in Russia. Beijing would be no puppet of Moscow in future
years. The nature of the war against the Japanese
changed from 1943 onwards as Japan suffered a series of severe setbacks in its struggle
against the United States, while its European allies, Germany and Italy, were also fighting
an increasingly doomed war against Russia, Britain and the US. Once the Allies were victorious there, all
their resources would be employed against the Empire of Japan. Consequently, in the final years of the war,
thoughts once again turned to China’s politics and who would hold power once the country
had been freed from the Japanese. As early as 1940 there were serious cracks
in the alliance between Mao’s Communists and Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists and by
1942 open fighting between the two had broken out yet again as the Chinese Civil War resumed. It would fully erupt again following the end
of the Pacific War. On the 6th and 9th of August 1945 the United
States dropped two atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Simultaneously the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria,
which Japan had occupied all the way back in 1931. As a result, within weeks, the Empire of Japan
had formally surrendered to the Allies. The Second World War was over, and the Chinese
Civil War once more commenced between the Nationalists and Mao’s Communists. Mao was in a far more advantageous position
in 1945 than he had been ten years earlier after the Long March. If the Long March had kept the Chinese Communist
movement alive, then the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and the eight years of war
with Japan allowed the Communists to strengthen their position immensely. In a curious twist of history, the Japanese
invasion of China indirectly led to the Communists seizing power in the country. Early in 1946 Mao was handed an extra advantage
when Stalin handed over Manchuria to the Chinese Communist Party. Yet it would take three years of further intense
fighting between the Communists and the Nationalists before a breakthrough was made. In September 1948 the Communists secured full
control of east central China in the region south of Beijing with the capture of Shandong
province in the Hauihai Campaign. Then in the winter of 1948 Mao launched the
Pingjin Campaign against Chiang Kai-Shek’s forces in northern China. Over a two-month campaign over half a million
Nationalist troops were killed, captured or wounded and the north of the country was left
in Communist hands. With northern China largely secured by early
1949, Mao and the Red Army commanders took the decision that spring, to drive south of
the Yangtze River into the heartland of Nationalist held territory. This was done despite the efforts of the Soviet
leader, Joseph Stalin, to encourage Mao to form a coalition government with the Nationalists. Stalin did not want a rival for power amongst
the Communist leaders, but he would soon have one. On the 23rd of April 1949 the Red Army seized
the Nationalists’ capital of Nanjing. A series of further striking gains saw Chiang
Kai-Shek retreat south with his remaining supporters to Guangzhou by the autumn of 1949. Just weeks later he and the remaining Nationalists
decided to make a strategic retreat from the Chinese mainland to the island of Formosa,
more commonly known today as Taiwan. Here the Nationalists formed a government
which they proclaimed as the continuation of the Republic of China which had been established
back in 1911. Meanwhile, back on the mainland Mao had proclaimed
the founding of the People’s Republic of China on the 1st of October 1949. The Chinese Civil War between the Communists
and the Nationalists was at an end, after more than twenty years of conflict.
Mao now entered office as the first Chairman of the Central People’s Government. The first measure to be taken was to tidy
up the loose ends of the war. In the spring of 1950 the Red Army launched
a campaign against the island of Hainan off the south-east coast of China. Within weeks the 100,000 strong Nationalist
forces there were forced to surrender. The international community now expected that
Mao would proceed with an invasion of Taiwan and indeed even the American government, a
long-time supporter of Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang had decided not to recognise
his new regime in Taiwan in the belief that it would soon be defeated by Mao and the Communists. But no invasion came and despite numerous
crises between the two sides, Taiwan remains self-governing to this day. And this period immediately after the conclusion
of the Civil War also saw Mao head to Moscow in the winter of 1949 to 1950. Here he secured large injections of Russian
financial support for China as well as technological advisors, although the agreement came with
a tacit admission by Mao of Stalin’s primacy within the Communist world. Mao would have to wait several years before
he could attempt to go his own way. The post-war years in China saw the initiation
of wide-ranging political, social and economic reforms. Firstly, a massive land reform campaign was
initiated to transfer agricultural land out of the hands of large-scale farmers and landlords
and into the hands of poorer peasants. While this reduced economic inequality, it
was not without violence and there were many, many instances of the former landlords being
attacked or even murdered across China in the early 1950s. In tandem a huge drive was initiated to crackdown
on opium production and consumption across the country, a habit which was partly a legacy
of British meddling into the Chinese economy in the nineteenth century. In the 1950s millions of opium addicts and
habitual users were press ganged into labour reform camps. They were joined in these by the hundreds
of thousands of individuals who Mao’s regime branded as counter revolutionaries, many of
them being former members of the Kuomintang. And Mao also launched the new People’s Republic
onto the world stage by entering into the Korean War which broke out in the summer of
1950 between a communist North and an American-backed South. Massive Chinese aid ensured that the war ended
in a stalemate three years later. It also led to a split of relations between
Mao’s new regime and the United States, one which involved a trade embargo which lasted
for over twenty years. In the 1950s Mao had formed a clear idea of
how he believed Communism should develop in China. It would be incorrect to assume that Mao Zedong
was simply a power-monger who used Communist ideology to secure authority in China. Certainly he was a brutal autocrat, a fact
which would become strikingly clear as his long Chairmanship continued on into the 1960s
and 1970s, but he had also read widely on Marxist-Leninist thought and had a vision
for how Communism would develop in China. In the early 1950s that vision involved the
industrial capacity of China’s burgeoning cities of the east coast and its great rivers,
leading the country away from its reliance on agriculture. As Mao described it, the Communists had come
to power by the Red Army encircling the cities occupied by the Nationalists and the Japanese,
and then absorbing the cities when they were strong enough. Now the direct opposite was needed. China’s cities would need to expand outward
and bring the country closer to achieving Communism as Marx had intended it. To that end in 1953 the First Five Year Plan
was initiated in China in imitation of the Five Year Plans which the Soviet Union had
begun employing in Russia in the 1920s.
The First Five Year Plan of 1953 to 1957 was geared primarily towards reducing the reliance
of the Chinese economy on agricultural output and moving towards becoming a global power
through the creation of an industrial economy. With Soviet financial support and expertise
provided through Russian advisors, new factories were built across the country during the Plan. Farms were collectivised across China and
placed under state management. And approximately billions of yuan was spent
in total on completing 595 large and medium sized infrastructural and economic projects
including railways, major roads and new dams, often linking parts of China with each other
in ways which had never been possible before. As a result, Chinese industrial productivity
increased by 128% and steel production alone jumped from 1.35 million tons in 1953 to over
5 million in 1957. Coal extraction doubled during the five years,
while in agriculture yields of grain and cotton rose by over 30% during the same time period. Overall the First Five Year Plan under Mao
was a tremendous success in pure economic terms, but in its success were sown the seeds
of destruction, for a hubris now entered into Mao and his colleagues thinking, a hubris
which would be injected with catastrophic consequences into the Second Five Year Plan
or as it is more commonly known, the Great Leap Forward. On the 22nd of May 1957 the Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev, who had succeeded Stalin on his death in 1953, delivered a speech at
a regional meeting of Soviet representatives in the course of which he proclaimed that
it was his goal that the Soviet Union should “Catch up and overtake America” in economic
output by 1980. A few months later in November 1957 at a gathering
in Moscow of international Communist leaders to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the October
Revolution which had brought the Soviets to power in 1917 he repeated his claim, only
now he was even more ambitious. The Soviets would now eclipse the Americans
within 15 years. Mao, who wished for China to rival the Soviet
Union, and whose relationship with Khrushchev was more antagonistic than it had been with
Stalin, began pondering this goal in the aftermath of the Soviet leader’s speech. Not to be outdone, he quickly determined to
make similar claims and made it known that it was China’s goal to catch up with Britain’s
economy within fifteen years and exceed their production of steel and other core industrial
outputs. With this goal in mind in 1958 the Chinese
Communist Party initiated the Second Five Year Plan or what was soon referred to as
‘The Great Leap Forward’ for the country’s economy. It would result in the most catastrophic famine
the world has ever seen. Mao believed that the key indicators of how
China’s economy was progressing would be seen in grain and steel production. If these could be increased rapidly it would
show the Soviets in Moscow and the world in general that China was asserting itself on
the world stage. Accordingly, all of the instruments of the
state were deployed in 1958 to begin increasing the rate of grain and steel production by
establishing new smelting factories and turning ever greater amounts of agricultural land
over to grain production. Massive amounts of farm land were collectivised
into giant state farms towards this end and millions of workers were redeployed to different
parts of the economy than they were trained for. Huge amounts of state funding were also given
out to aid in the effort and party officials were sent out into the countryside and the
towns charged with maximising production. However, many of these initiatives were potentially
hazardous to begin with as the state was employing experimental farming methods in some instances
and in others was turning over land to grain production which was more suited to other
crops. In other instances, workers were being sent
into steel factories with little or no training in what they were doing. It was an inauspicious beginning in 1958,
but one which would get much worse over time. Despite these structural issues there were
some initial signs of progress. Steel and iron production did increase in
the initial stages of the Great Leap Forward, perhaps by as much as 30-40% in 1958. But the mechanism whereby it was being increased
would prove catastrophic in some instances. In their eagerness to show good results local
party cadres throughout the country were often resorting to unimaginably short-sighted and
brutal tactics. The more cruel methods involved overworking
their labourers in the factories to try to have larger amounts of steel produced. But within a few months, party officials throughout
the country were also setting up what became known as ‘backyard furnaces’, the use
of which Mao had actually encouraged. These were essentially makeshift steel furnaces
which were often set up in the yards of peoples’ homes. Scrap metal was used to produce pig iron which
was almost totally useless, but the worst thing was that farming tools and other instruments
which were needed for producing food throughout the country were often being thrown into these
‘backyard furnaces’ and melted down so that local party officials could record higher
outputs of alleged ‘steel’ production in their areas. The result was a lack of basic tools for farming
as the months went by. The effect of all this between 1958 and 1961
was catastrophic. With millions of farmers being press-ganged
into working in factories in the cities and towns there was not enough people available
to produce food throughout China in a country which was often on a subsistence food level
anyway. Added to this, was the practice of party officials
destroying basic farming equipment to inflate the amount of steel they were producing in
their areas. Furthermore, the party had begun trying to
use experimental irrigation methods which had rendered large amounts of farmland temporarily
unusable in some areas. Given all this, it is unsurprising that even
by the autumn of 1958 just months after the Great Leap Forward had started there were
major food shortages in some parts of the country. And this was further compounded by the fact
that the government continued to export grain and other agricultural products in order to
increase its revenue and also keep up the appearance that productivity was increasing. By late 1958 people in certain parts of the
country were beginning to start foraging for wild foods in the countryside and others were
starving to death. This was just the beginning though, and by
1959 grain production had fallen by roughly 15-20% in total across the country. There is considerable debate as to how much
Mao knew about what was unfolding across China as a result of the Great Leap Forward. It is quite possible that in late 1958 and
early 1959 he was unaware of the famine conditions, but evidence has been uncovered which suggests
that he knew by at least the late spring of 1959 and yet did not do enough to change course. By 1960 when he delegated control of certain
parts of the Great Leap Forward programme to others, the central party members were
actively trying to prevent the worst, but by then it was too late. The forces which were unleashed in 1958 and
1959 reverberated into 1960 and 1961 and famine struck China over each of these years with
varying degrees of severity. There have been many different estimates of
the number of people who died in recent years as the opening of certain archives in China
has allowed for more accurate assessments, but scholars are generally agreed that at
least 25 million people died in a country the population of which was approximately
660 million in 1958. Frank Dikotter, who studied the period in
detail and who saw the Great Leap Forward as Mao’s Great Famine in the title of his
study of these events, suggested the death toll was as many as 55 million people. Others would suggest somewhere between 30
and 45 million, making this the most catastrophic famine in human history in terms of sheer
numbers of deaths. The Second Five Year Plan, advertised as the
Great Leap Forward, came to an end in 1962. Curiously it was relatively under-reported
internationally as much of the information concerning it was transmitted through the
Republic of China’s government in Taiwan or the British enclave of Hong Kong, and many
foreign services believed they were exaggerating the extent of the suffering caused, for political
purposes. Internally, however, it had badly compromised
Mao’s leadership. On the 27th of April 1959 Mao’s term as
Chairman of the People’s Republic of China came to an end, although he retained his position
as Chairman of the Communist Party and of military affairs. He was succeeded by Liu Shaoqi and by January
1962 the Great Leap Forward was being wound down. At this time Liu made a speech at what has
become known as the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in which he denounced the Great
Leap Forward. It was a very thinly veiled public rebuke
of Mao, the likes of which would have been unimaginable five years earlier. Nevertheless, while Mao had lost some of his
authority for now, he was still very much in charge. He would however have to govern in a more
collective fashion with figures such as Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who had done much to recover
the economic situation in the wake of the disastrous policies of the late 1950s. The 1960s also saw China increasingly isolated
on the world stage. Tensions had been brewing between Mao and
the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, ever since the latter succeeded Stalin in the mid-1950s. Mao was particularly perturbed by Khrushchev’s
denunciation of Stalin’s brutal authoritarianism and more moderate stance towards the western
powers. He also found himself increasingly at loggerheads
with Moscow about the two regimes’ interpretation of Orthodox Marxism. Relations were bad by the late 1950s, but
they became particularly acute in the early 1960s, especially once the Cuban Missile Crisis
inspired Khrushchev to begin working more closely with the US government of John F.
Kennedy to defuse the Cold War in ways which Mao opposed. A sign of the split was seen in 1961 when
Mao denounced the Soviet regime as “revisionist traitors.” For his part Khrushchev was increasingly wary
of Mao’s attitude towards the possibility of a nuclear war with the west. Mao once worryingly suggested that if 300
million Chinese people died in a nuclear war the other half would still be alive to secure
victory. And so the Russian leader must have been concerned
in 1964 when the Chinese successfully tested their first nuclear bomb, but by then the
Sino-Soviet split was complete. While much is known about the political life
of the man who oversaw this split with Russia and the catastrophes of the Great Leap Forward,
the more private Mao remains something of an enigma. His fourth marriage, that to Jiang Qing in
1938, lasted for the remainder of his life, though Mao engaged in a string of extra-marital
affairs, including most controversially in his later life with a private secretary, Zhang
Yufeng, who was in her early twenties when she first entered Mao’s employ. He had at least ten children, several of whom
had been born in the 1920s and with whom he had very little relationship as he had had
to leave them with others during the long civil war years. He spent much of his private time writing
and was a prolific composer of political writings and poems, while his reading habits tended
to favour traditional Chinese literature. By temperament he could become aggressive
when challenged, but his demeanour was certainly not genuinely unhinged like Stalin had been
in Russia during the 1930s and 1940s. For Mao state violence was engaged in for
political rather than personal purposes, but a great deal about his other personal motivations
and inclinations are shrouded behind a public image which was closely managed during his
lifetime.
The Sino-Soviet split and the catastrophic consequences of the Great Leap Forward were
the background against which Mao initiated what has today become known as simply the
Cultural Revolution, but the full name of which was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Launched in 1966 the Cultural Revolution was
designed to be a political and social movement which aimed to purify Chinese society and
Chinese Communism by removing any of the vestiges of Chinese traditionalism which remained and
the capitalist and bourgeois elements within it. Mao claimed that a bourgeois bureaucracy had
developed within the Chinese Communist Party that was leading China in the wrong direction
and this, along with Communist revisionists such as those who were now in power in Russia,
needed to be stopped and a renewed dedication to the Communist cause developed. In particular Mao called on the younger generations
of China, those which had been born after the Second World War and who had never known
life in China before Communist rule to “bombard the headquarters” to purify Chinese society
of these bourgeois, capitalist elements and to reinvigorate the Communist movement. There has been a widespread debate as to what
Mao’s motivations for launching the Cultural Revolution were. Some historians have argued that he genuinely
believed that the Chinese Communist Party and the huge administration which operated
under it throughout China had been compromised by nearly twenty years in power and that a
cultural reawakening was necessary to stop the bureaucratic degeneration of the country. However, while this might have been a motivating
factor for Mao, there is no doubt that the Cultural Revolution was primarily conceived
as a way for the Chairman to resuscitate his control over the Communist Party and the country
as a whole. By its very nature the movement allowed Mao
to use the party’s apparatus and the wider organs of the state to purge the government
of his opponents and competing factions. These had multiplied in number in the early
1960s as the catastrophic impact of the Great Leap Forward was felt across the country. Now, Mao would eliminate those who had dared
to cross him in the most brutal purges seen within the Chinese Communist Party. The result would be years of unrest which
turned ordinary Chinese people against each other and created an environment of fear and
suspicion. The Cultural Revolution was initiated in May
1966 with Mao urging the people, and students in particular, to act to purify the party
ranks. Within weeks gangs of students were attacking
their teachers, intellectuals, government officials and even people who were deemed
to be wearing “bourgeois” clothing. These attacks could range from being mild
to moderately violent, such as when teachers were attacked by gangs of students and had
their heads shaved, to truly bloody acts, such as when government officials were actually
murdered or driven to commit suicide. As the frenzy built up into the summer of
1966, official Party newspapers stoked the flames by calling on the masses to “clear
away the evil habits of the old society” and attack the “monsters and demons”. By now students in classrooms and on college
campuses across China were organising themselves into bands of so-called Red Guards committed
to preserving the Communist revolution and rooting out what were termed the “four olds”:
old ideas, old customs, old habits and old culture. By the early autumn, gangs of teenagers wearing
red armbands roamed the streets of cities such as Beijing and Shanghai and the unrest
was so visceral that August became known as Red August.
Soon the initial student-led violence spread to other groups and factory workers and labourers
on collectivised farms began joining what was termed the “Red Terror”. Meanwhile Mao was directing these groups,
as best they could be directed, against his enemies within the government and the wider
party apparatus. But as a means of purging the party of his
opponents this was a very unstable method. By 1967 radical elements were threatening
to move beyond Mao’s ability to control them, but the Cultural Revolution nevertheless
continued. In 1968 Mao initiated the “Down to the Countryside”,
whereby the children of supposed middle class bourgeois urban families were forced into
what were effectively re-education camps in the countryside. Meanwhile the Chairman was building up an
ever greater cult of personality around himself, in part led by the publication of his Little
Red Book, a collection of his sayings and writings which became central to the concept
of Maoism in China around this time. The violence continued unabated through the
late 1960s, but by 1971 even Mao was aware of the need to scale things back and though
the Cultural Revolution is deemed by some to have only ended with Mao’s death in 1976,
the worst of the unrest subsided in the early 1970s. As with the enormous famine created by the
Great Leap Forward ten years earlier, historians have found it difficult to precisely identify
how many people died as a result of the Cultural Revolution. Estimates tend to vary between 500,000 and
two million people having lost their lives as a result of the violence which swept through
China between 1966 and 1971. Many of these were killed by the Red Guards
and other groups triggered into fanaticism by Mao’s injunctions, however probably the
greater proportion of these lost their lives in instances where the army was called in
to quell the unrest or by the army and the Communist Party being directed to purge certain
groups by Mao himself. Just as damaging was the psychological pain
inflicted on a society where people were effectively turned against each other by the state. Perhaps the most glaring example of this occurred
in Guangxi province in the south of the country where between 100,000 and 150,000 lives were
lost during the Cultural Revolution. People here even resorted to burying the persecuted
alive or boiling or disembowelling them and there was systematic cannibalism engaged in
Guangxi as the frenzied masses sought to literally devour their enemies in their fervour. Ultimately the Cultural Revolution scarred
Chinese society in ways which are hard to quantify. The early 1970s witnessed a major event in
China’s relations on the international stage which has had important implications down
to the present day. Chinese involvement in the Korean War had
seen diplomatic ties between the People’s Republic and the United States government
effectively shut-down with trade sanctions imposed on China by Washington. However, with the passage of twenty years
both sides were cautiously investigating the possibility of re-establishing diplomatic
ties. During the course of the 1968 US Presidential
election the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, had proposed making overtures to China
to that effect and after he entered office, negotiations commenced. In 1971 Nixon’s National Security Advisor,
Henry Kissinger, went on a secret diplomatic mission to Beijing and this was followed in
February 1972 by an official state visit to China by Nixon during the course of which
he met Mao, the first meeting between a Chinese and American head of state since the Second
World War. It cannot have been fully grasped at the time,
but Nixon and Mao were establishing the beginnings of a bi-lateral diplomacy between the US and
China which has grown ever greater in importance since, and which is now regarded by many as
the most significant international relationship between two states in the world.
Despite the veneer of normality which was leant to US-Chinese relations by the official
state visit of Nixon in 1972, at home the Chinese government continued to operate in
an extreme fashion. By the time Nixon visited, Mao was nearly
eighty years of age, and owing to years of chain smoking he was suffering from numerous
physical ailments. It was due to this and the cult of personality
which he had built up around himself that he allowed a number of senior Communist Party
members to become immensely influential in China in his final years. These were known as the Gang of Four, which
consisted of Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing; Zhang Chunqiao an ultra-Maoist writer who had come
to prominence during the 1960s for his denunciation of bourgeois elements within Chinese society,
a close ally of Chunqiao’s, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen, a younger political figure
who had risen from within the Shanghai branch of the Chinese Communist Party to become one
of its highest ranking figures during the Cultural Revolution. The Gang of Four had done much to promote
the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1971, but even after the
most extreme period of the purges ended in the late 1960s their influence over Mao’s
government continued. The last years of Mao’s life and his primacy
in the politics of China are hard to characterise, as competing forces were at work in the halls
of power in Beijing. Certainly, Mao remained wedded to the idea
of clinging to power until the very end. As a result he continued to allow the Gang
of Four and their supporters to hold considerable influence in the country. However, separately there was a growing clique
of individuals who coalesced around other older stalwarts of the party such as the former
head of the Red Army and premier, Zhou Enlai, and the former General Secretary of the Party,
Deng Xiaoping, who wished to break from some of the more traditional, ideological values
of the Party espoused by Mao and introduce a greater degree of professionalism into the
running of the government and the economy. There was also much bitterness within the
Party establishment at the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution as individuals
who had fought the Japanese and the Nationalists in the 1930s and 1940s had often been purged
from the party in the late 1960s, only to be gradually rehabilitated in the 1970s. Acrimony between all these groups characterised
the politics of China in the final years of Mao’s life and it was he himself who was
largely responsible for creating this situation. The political uncertainty of the post-Cultural
Revolution period was still unresolved as Mao entered the final stages of his life. His health had further deteriorated in the
mid-1970s and he was suffering from several heart and lung ailments, the latter aggravated
considerably by his chain smoking, while there were unconfirmed rumours of a considerable
reliance on sleeping pills which had developed over the years. On the 27th of May 1976 he met the Prime Minister
of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, on a state visit at which the last known photo of Mao
was taken, but by then he had already suffered the first of several heart attacks that occurred
between the spring and autumn of 1976 and which left him increasingly incapacitated. The final one on the 5th of September left
him largely unable to move and he died four days later. A state funeral lasting a week followed between
the 11th and the 18th of September 1976, during which one million Chinese people filed past
his body. Today the enormous Mausoleum of Mao Zedong
housing his embalmed body stands in the middle of Tiananmen Square in central Beijing on
the site where the Gate of China, the southern gate of the old Imperial City between the
fourteenth and the twentieth centuries, used to stand before its destruction in 1954. It is perhaps fitting as a statement of where
Ancient China ended and modern China began.
Mao’s death occurred at a time when the older leadership of the entire Chinese Communist
Party, the generation who had come to political consciousness during the May Fourth Movement
all the way back in 1919, was fading from Chinese life. The old leader of the Red Army and a possible
successor to Mao, Zhou Enlai, had predeceased Mao by just a few months. Consequently Mao had appointed the Minister
for Public Security, Hua Guofeng, as his successor shortly before his death. He succeeded as Chairman of the Chinese Communist
Party in 1976, but he would not last long. Guofeng was outmanoeuvred in the years that
followed by Deng Xiaoping, who became the de facto leader of China in 1978, though Guofeng’s
brief period as leader was significant in arresting and charging the Gang of Four as
being responsible for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. In all but one instance they subsequently
were sentenced to life in prison under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership. Elsewhere, despite his impeccable Communist
credentials, Deng Xiaoping quickly moved China away from its planned economy and the more
authoritarian aspects of Mao’s reign, setting term limits on the holding of office. It was during Deng’s tenure as Mao’s successor
that the roots of China’s economic miracle can really be found as he opened the country
up to foreign investment and expertise. Thus, in the end, Mao proved to be the impediment
to China’s growth, rather than the deliverer of it. Mao Zedong is one of the most contentious
individuals in Chinese history and indeed the history of the modern world. To some he was a brutal tyrant and mass murderer,
under whose rule between 1949 and 1976 over fifty million people and perhaps as many as
eighty million died prematurely, whether as a result of the catastrophic failures of the
Great Leap Forward, the waves of violence unleashed during the Cultural Revolution,
or government-orchestrated disasters such as the Banqiao Dam Failure of 1975, which
by some estimates resulted in the deaths of over 200,000 people. However, to many others he is one of the great
heroes of modern-day China, the man who ensured that the cause of Chinese Communism survived
during the Long March of the 1930s, the commander who led Chinese resistance to the Japanese
occupation during the Second World War, and the individual who thereafter led the Red
Army to victory over the Nationalists. Many who focus on his achievements will also
point towards the fact that life expectancy rates and living standards in China increased
dramatically between the 1940s and the 1970s and argue that Mao laid the basis for China’s
economic miracle which began in the late twentieth century. It is indeed striking that one individual
can provoke such widely diverging opinions. There is no doubting Mao’s critical role
in ensuring the ascent to power of the Communist Party in China. Without Mao the movement might not have survived
the 1930s and his leadership was also critical in the post-war period. But once he secured power this individual,
who was clearly possessed of a considerable intellect and ability, became obsessed with
retaining and expanding his control of China at the expense of lives and social stability. It was his desire to not play second fiddle
to Khrushchev and the Russians which drove China into the disastrous Great Leap Forward
and his unwillingness to accept how badly things had gone wrong which saw the famine
which the Second Five Year Plan created drag on for years and kill somewhere between 30
and 50 million Chinese people. It was Mao’s pathological desire to reinforce
his position as head of the Chinese state in the mid-1960s which led to the violence
and instability of the Cultural Revolution. The Mao of the 1950s and 1960s was a different
one to the individual who first joined the party in 1921 and initiated the Long March
in 1934. Those who knew him over the course of his
life often confirmed that he changed considerably over the years. But while there were many, many nefarious
aspects to Mao’s reign in the 1950s and 1960s some historians have stopped short of
condemning him in the same vein as one would some of the other brutal dictators of the
twentieth century, individuals such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot. While Mao was probably responsible for the
deaths of far more of his own people than any of these other dictators, some historians
have stressed that one has to consider what the actual aim of these individuals was. Hitler purposefully set out to engage in the
genocide of Europe’s Jews when the Final Solution was decided upon in 1941, whereas,
as catastrophic as the Great Leap Forward was, there was not a deliberate intention
to kill millions of Chinese people through the Second Five Year Plan. On the contrary, the goal was to drastically
improve the country’s economy. Consequently, perhaps Mao’s time as ruler
of the People’s Republic of China is a testament to the catastrophes which can result when
ideologically-bound governments attempt to impose utopian ideas on a society which is
ill-prepared to respond to such designs. It was Mao’s efforts to impose Communist
ideology on China in ways which simply could not work which created some of the greatest
suffering of the twentieth century. What do you think of Mao Zedong? Do you think he was actually committed to
the idea of Communism or was he just someone who over time understood that the root to
great power lay through this ideology? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
