Mao Zedong

Chinese Communist Party chairman (1935-1976) and preeminent Chinese leader (1949-1976)

• Born: December 26, 1893
• Birthplace: Shaoshan, Hunan Province, China
• Died: September 9, 1976
• Place of death: Beijing, China

Early Life

Mao Zedong was born on December 26, 1893, in the village of Shaoshan, located in Hunan Province in south-central China. His father was a prosperous peasant by the standards of the village, although only modestly successful by Chinese national standards. Mao’s father sent Mao to school hoping he would learn to read, write, and do arithmetic so he could help with the family’s business accounts, but Mao wanted a far broader education. When Mao’s father prohibited this, Mao threatened to commit suicide by drowning. Mao’s ploy forced his father to back down. Mao’s actions were a clear betrayal of his duty of filial piety according to Chinese Confucian principles.

Mao’s early success in outmaneuvering his father may have emboldened him to begin his long betrayal of nearly every person close to him. Mao also betrayed his father by rejecting his father’s arranged marriage—Mao’s first of four marriages. Mao also betrayed his second wife, Yang Kai-hui, the daughter of one of his Beijing University professors. After she bore him two children, he left her with her relatives in order to begin working in the Communist Party commune in the mountains of Hunan and Jiangxi Provinces. There, he began a relationship with an eighteen-year-old peasant girl, He Zizhen. During Mao’s absence, his second wife was killed by the troops of Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao’s children disappeared. After becoming Mao’s third wife. He endured commune life and accompanied Mao on the horrible three-thousand-mile trek in 1934 known as the Long March; she became a revolutionary war hero in her own right. She bore Mao six children, was wounded, and suffered other serious health problems. Under these circumstances, Mao deserted He for a younger woman, the modestly successful film actress Jiang Qing, who would later become his fourth wife.

Political Career

Mao rose to such a prominent position in the Communist Party that the party leaders felt obliged to allow him to divorce his third wife and marry Jiang Qing. The leadership made Mao promise that Jiang Qing would never be active in politics—a vow Mao also broke in the late 1960’s, but not before he had tired of Jiang Qing and begun a long string of trysts with young Chinese girls at weekly (and later biweekly) “dance” parties for high Communist Party officials.

Liu Shaoqi had labored for years as Mao’s confidant and revolutionary aide. However, when it served Mao’s political purposes to remove Liu from his position as Mao’s heir apparent in 1966, Mao launched the devastating Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in part to depose Liu. Liu—subsequently deprived of proper food, clothing, and medicine—died in a cold, damp prison cell in 1969. Long-term revolutionary military leader Lin Biao replaced Liu as heir apparent. Despite Mao having saluted Lin as his longtime comrade in arms and heir apparent, Mao also abandoned Lin in 1971. The official story was that Lin died in a plane crash while trying to escape as a traitor to the Soviet Union, but other accounts maintain that Mao had Lin assassinated.

In the public sphere, Mao clearly betrayed the great mass of the Chinese people—the peasants who made up about 90 percent of the total Chinese population—by systematically extracting the agricultural goods they produced in order to pay for the rapid industrial production that Mao felt was necessary to make China into a great industrial power. The peasants made up the vast majority of his rebel army, and it was in their name that revolution was enacted. However, Mao was willing to sacrifice their efforts to achieve what he perceived to be the greater goal of making China a world industrial power. This situation may have been compounded by Mao’s need to repay Stalinist Russia for Russian loans to China.

Nonetheless, Mao forced the Chinese peasants—more than any other Chinese group—to pay for China’s industrialization. Nowhere was this more evident than in Mao’s catastrophic Great Leap Forward campaign, which was designed to outstrip British industrial production in just a few years. This campaign encouraged peasants to abandon traditional farming practices in favor of building backyard iron-smeltingfurnaces. Following Mao’s exhortations, peasants tore up railroad tracks and threw away perfectly good steel rails (and even their own pots and pans) in order to make virtually useless pig iron. Scarce firewood and even household furnishings were thrown into fires to keep the furnaces at requisite high temperatures.

Abandoning traditional farming practices also resulted in the largest famine in recorded history: Approximately 20 to 60 million Chinese died between 1959 and 1961. Mao said the famine was caused by the weather, noting that flooding and droughts were to blame; however, the weather was not noticeably worse in China during those years than at times when no famine had occurred. Clearly Mao’s policies, however much influenced by the need to repay the Russians, were the real cause of the famine.

Mao died on September 9, 1976, in Beijing. Throughout his life, he had written political and military treatises as well as poetry. Following his death, a number of his books were reissued.

Impact

Mao Zedong fought a decades-long civil war in order to achieve a Communist revolution, which aimed at improving the economic circumstances of the Chinese and led to the promotion of a new socialist Chinese identity at the personal level: The Chinese were expected to be chaste and of the highest moral order. Mao betrayed the Communist revolution not only by failing to achieve its economic objectives but also by betraying the revolutionary ideals with his atrocious personal behavior. Indirectly, Mao’s oppressive Cultural Revolution in the new Communist China may well have been responsible for more deaths than any other regime of the twentieth century, with the possible exceptions of Germany under Adolf Hitler and the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.

Author Works

Nonfiction:

Shi jia lun, 1927 (speech; Concerning Practice, 1951)

Red China; Being the Report on the Progress and Achievements of the Chinese Soviet Republic, 1934 (speech)

Mao dun lun, 1937 (speech; 1952, book; On Contradiction, 1952)

China: The March Toward Unity, 1937 (with others)

Mao ze dong zi zhuan, 1937 (The Autobiography of Mao Tsẽ-tung, 1949)

New Stage, ca. 1938 (speech)

Xin min zhu zhu yi lun, 1940 (serial); 1952 (book) (China’s New Democracy, 1944)

Lun lian he zheng fu, 1945 (On Coalition Government, 1945)

The Fight for a New China, 1945 (speech)

Zai Yan'an wen yi zuo tan hui shang de jiang hua, 1945 (Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature, 1956)

Zhongguo ge ming he Zhongguo gong chan dang, 1949 (Chinese Revolution and the Communist Party of China, 1950

Lun ren min min zhu zhuan zheng, 1949 (People's Democratic Dictatorship, 1950; also called On People's Democratic Rule)

Problems of Art and Literature, 1950

The Significance of Agrarian Reforms in China, 1950

Lessons of the Chinese Revolution, 1950 (with Liu Shao-chi)

On Practice: On the Relation between Knowledge and Practice—Between Knowing and Doing, 1951

Strategic Problems of China's Revolutionary War, 1951

Kang Ri you ji zhan zheng de zhan lue wen ti, 1952 (Aspects of China's Anti-Japanese Struggle, 1948; Strategic Problems in the Anti-Japanese Guerrilla War, 1954)

Why Can China's Red Political Power Exist?, 1953

Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan, 1953

Gong chan dang ren fa kan zi, 1953 (Introductory Remarks to The Communist, 1953)

On the Protracted War, 1954

Selected Works, 1954-1962 (5 volumes)

Guan you zheng que qu li ren min nei bu mao dun di wen ti, 1957 (On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, 1957)

Lun wen xue yu yi shu, 1958 (On Art and Literature, 1960)

You ji zhan, 1961 (On Guerrilla Warfare, 1961)

Chinese Communist Revolutionary Strategy, 1945-1949, 1961

Mao Tse-tung: An Anthology of His Writings, 1962 (Anne Fremantle, editor)

Selected Military Writings of Mao Tse-tung, 1963

Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, 1963 (Stuart R. Schram, editor)

Zai Zhongguo gong chan tang quan guo xuan quan gong zuo hui yi shang di jiang hua, 1964 (Speech at the Chinese Communist Party’s National Conference on Propaganda Work, March 12, 1957, 1966)

Ren di zheng que si xiang shi cong na li lai di, 1964 (Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?, 1966)

Basic Tactics, 1966

Four Essays on Philosophy, 1966

Mao Tŝe-tung's Quotations; The Red Guard's Handbook, 1967

Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tse-tung., 1967

Five Articles by Chairman Mao Tse-tung, 1968

On Revolution and War, 1969 (M. Rejai, editor)

What Peking Keeps Silent About, 1972

Six Essays on Military Affairs, 1972

Chairman Mao Talks to the People: Talks and Letters: 1956-1971, 1974 (Stuart Schram, editor)

Mao Tse-tung Unrehearsed: Talks and Letters, 1956-71, 1974 (Stuart Schram, editor)

A Critique of Soviet Economics, 1977

Maoism As It Really Is: Pronouncements of Mao Zedong, Some Already Known to the Public and Others Hitherto Not Published in the Chinese Press—A Collection, 1981 (O. E. Vladimirov, editor)

The Writings of Mao Zedong, 1949-1976, 1986-1992 (2 volumes)

The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao: From the Hundred Flowers to the Great Leap Forward, 1989 (Roderick MacFarquhar, editor)

Mao Zedong on Dialectical Materialism: Writings on Philosophy, 1937, 1990 (Nick Knight, editor)

Report from Xunwu , 1990 (trans. of Xunwu diao cha)

Mao's Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912-1949, 1992 (Stuart Schram, editor)

Poetry:

Nineteen Poems, 1958

Ten More Poems of Mao Tse-tung., 1967

Poems of Mao Tse-tung, 1972 (Hua-ling Nieh Engle and Paul Engle, editors)

Ten Poems and Lyrics, 1975

Reverberations: A New Translation of Complete Poems of Mao Tse-tung, 1980

Bibliography

Li Zhisui. The Private Life of Chairman Mao. New York: Random House, 1997. From 1954 until Mao’s death in 1976, Li was his personal physician. His memoir provides fascinating information about Mao’s physical condition and his personal life. No other person has provided such an intimate portrait of the man. Li reviews many details of Mao’s voracious sexual appetite, as well as the medical conclusion that Mao was sterile and could not have been the father of the daughter born to Mao’s last long-term mistress.

MacFarquhar, Roderick, editor. The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng. 2d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Describing Chinese politics from 1949 to 1993, the book details Mao’s critical role in those events. Frederick Teiwes, Kenneth Lieberthal, Harry Harding, and Roderick MacFarquhar each provide profoundly important chapters in this seminal scholarly work.

Pye, Lucian W. Mao Tse-Tung: The Man in the Leader. New York: Basic Books, 1976. This biography has become a classic and is especially useful for identifying the psychological characteristics of Mao from his childhood through his death.

Spence, Jonathan. Mao Zedong. New York: Viking Penguin, 1999. This insightful account by one of the greatest living China scholars provides a concise, readable biography.

Terrell, Ross. Mao: A Biography. New York: Harper and Row, 1980. One of the most readable, if somewhat dated, accounts of Mao’s life, written by a well-known observer of China.