Mao Zedong was raised in the small southeastern Chinese
province of Hunan. He was the fourth child and the youngest
son. Although his parents were considered peasants, his
father owned several acres. This was more than the majority
of the other peasants in the area owned, making his family
more distinguished. Most of Mao's early years were spent
helping around his parents' farm once he was old enough
to take on easy tasks. Despite their higher status based on
their large property, they were not immune to the problems
that arose in agrarian regions. In 1910, a famine plagued
Hunan. During this time, Mao Zedong and his family would have
felt the same poverty and pains as the other local
peasants.
In an act of rebellion against the familial expectations
of him, Mao left home and moved to Changsha, the capital of
the province of Hunan, around 1910. As the nation began to be
re-shaped, Mao became a librarian and then a school
principal. During this time, he was a prolific reader,
focusing on books about power, government, and history. His
reading included many works on Chinese literature and
history, as well as The Communist Manifesto
On October 10, 1911, an anti-monarchical Wuchang Uprising against the Qing
dynasty began. Wuchang is the capital of Hubei Province. Many
soldiers from the Eighth Engineer Battalion of the New Army
there were members of the revolutionary Progressive Society,
which were closely linked to the Revolutionary Alliance led
by Sun Yat-Sen. They quickly gained control of the entire
city and sparked a wave of anti-Manchu uprisings in
neighboring cities. Within just two weeks, the rebellion had
spread to Changsha. When November ended, fifteen out of
China's eighteen provinces had defected from Qing
authority. News of these transformative events galvanized
Mao's evolution from a patriotic supporter of the Chinese
monarchy to an anti-monarchical revolutionary. Even before he
received news of the Wuchang
Uprising, he had decided to cut off the long pigtail that
all Chinese men were required to wear as a sign of submission
and loyalty to the Manchus. As the conflict between the
revolutionaries and Qing monarchy escalated, Mao decided to
join the revolutionary Hunan army as it made plans to invade
the north.
Mao did not experience significant military action during
the six months he spent as a soldier. He nevertheless
obtained a first-hand experience of military life. The
educator that Mao held in the highest regard was Yang
Changji. In August 1919, Mao embarked on his first train ride
to Beijing (from the neighboring city of Wuhan) with
twenty-five of his comrades. There, Yang Changji agreed to
accommodate Mao and three of his comrades in his home. Mao
had met his teacher's daughter Yang Kaihui before, as a
young girl. She was now a young woman, and Mao was awestruck
by her beauty. Kaihui had heard her father proclaim Mao's
intelligence and accomplishments before and was similarly
smitten.
Mao's return to Changsha coincided with the
anti-imperialist May Fourth
Movement in Beijing. On May 4th, 1919, vigorous student
protests began after the Chinese government failed to defend
its national interests in light of the terms drawn by the
Treaty of Versailles. Germany had surrendered the port of
Qingdao and the surrounding Jiaozhou Bay after the Siege of Tsingtao, and Japan was
determined to gain control of the former German colony.
England, Italy, and France had benefited from an allying with
Japan during World War I and were relying on Japan to
cooperate in an emerging war against Soviet Russia and thus
supported Japan's bid for control over these areas
On October 10, 1921, Mao was elected as the secretary as
the Hunan committee of the CCP. When the Special Xiang
District Committee formed under the dictate of the CCP's
Central Bureau in May 1922, Mao was elected as secretary. He
was also the head of the Socialist Youth League of
Changsha's Executive Committee. He had already been
serving as the general manager of the Self-Study University
he founded in Changsha (after resigning from his headmaster
position at the primary school he was working at) by August
that year. He was beginning to monopolize the power of this
underground Bolshevik movement and would exert an
unparalleled influence over the newly recruited communists
and socialists within the region.
As the CCP was in dire straits, it was Mao who concluded
the communists would only secure power in China if it could
brandish its own military force. His famed quote endures:
"We must know that political power is obtained from the
barrel of the gun." He recommended a strategic retreat
to buy enough time to train an army of paupers, peasants,
workers, and the landless. After Chen Duxiu sunk into
depression when the KMT executed his eldest son, Qu Qiubai
replaced him as the leader of the CCP. He agreed with
Mao's suggestion that the CCP retreat into the mountains.
On July 15 1927, there would be little choice: all communists
were expelled from the KMT. The communists attempted to
battle the KMT soldiers with the Workers' and
Peasants' Red Army of China (the "Red Army"),
but they were forced to accept defeat by September 15. They
headed east, to the Jinggang Mountains in Jiangxi. He would
never see his wife Kaihui again. She was pressured by a KMT
commander to renounce her husband publicly. When she refused,
she was sentenced to death on November 14, 1930.
He had married a local interpreter, He Zizhen, only four
months after leaving his wife and three sons. Like Kaihui,
who had heard of Mao's remarriage two years before her
execution, Zizhen (who was only eighteen when she first met
Mao) would eventually learn her husband was incapable of
fidelity.
In May 1928, the number of communist fighters in Jinggang
had grown to eighteen thousand. Mao took to the task of
organizing them into disciplined soldiers. To obtain the
resources needed to supply them with clothing, food,
medicine, and weapons, he decided to implement a radical land
redistribution scheme. He confiscated all the lands that
belonged to landlords and peasants and Jinggang and then
redistributed it to the rural villagers who supported the
communist regime. Those who received the land were compelled
to work on it. The Red Army soldiers gained more military
experience as they took down the local landlords and gentry
that opposed the policy.
Chiang deemed the communists to be a greater threat than
the encroaching Japanese. In the years between 1930 and 1934,
he would rally no less than five different military
encirclement campaigns with the aim of eradicating the pesky
communists once and for all. In his fifth encirclement
campaign, he managed to deliver a devastating blow to the
communist forces by personally mobilizing 700,000 of his men
and forming a series of fortifications (in the form of cement
blockhouses) around communist positions.
The communists were forced to flee for their lives in
October. At the beginning of the march, 86,000 male and
female communists in Jiangxi (soldiers and administrative
personnel) broke through the weakest points of the KMT
encirclement and headed towards the west. Zizhen accompanied
Mao, but they had to leave their newborn son Anhong with
Zizhen's sister He Yi. They would never see him
again.
The CCP was happy to capitalize on the compelling heroism
that was attributed to the Long
March. News of the communists' epic struggle to
resist the KMT inspired many young Chinese men and women to
travel to Shaanxi to enlist in Mao's Red Army. When the
Japanese withdrew from China after their defeat in World War
II (1939-45) to the United States, the CCP confronted the KMT
once again. In 1949, the KMT was decisively defeated. Mao
heralded the founding of the People's Republic of China
on October 1, 1949.
His early years at the helm of the country were a great
success. During this time, the CCP steered the country
towards economic growth and greater political strength. After
years of military rule under the warlords, the KMT army, and
the Red Army, the people of China could finally live under
civilian rule. Mao's effective leadership of the CCP
during the early years was critical in establishing
widespread confidence in its ability to govern the
nation.
In October 1950, the People's Liberation Army
troops participated in the Korean
War against the forces of the UN. The "Resist
America, aid Korea" campaign was effective in stirring
patriotism across the nation, besides restoring confidence in
the nation's military capacities after decades of
military humiliation by the foreign imperialists. Troops were
also dispatched to Tibet during this time after the Tibetans
rebelled against the consolidation of Chinese rule.
Meanwhile, the CCP consolidated their power within the
country by authorizing police action against political
adversaries, anti-communists, bandits, and groups of people
who opposed the CCP's political dominance.
The early years of the People's Republic of China were
nevertheless not free from conflict and strife. The
Suppression of Counter-revolutionaries campaign inflicted
violence on the former KMT leaders, the heads of secret
societies, religious, and religious authorities. The Three-Antis Campaign decimated the
communists who had been perceived as fraternizing too closely
with the nation's capitalists. The capitalists themselves
were subjected to The Five-Antis
Campaign, which compelled obedience to the CCP via
charges of tax evasion, bribery, theft of state property and
dishonesty when entering into contractual obligations with
the government contracts.
In 1953, Mao launched his First Five-Year Plan to promote
the nation's rapid industrialization. This plan was based
on the Soviet experience; the CCP benefited from financial
assistance and technical expertise on how to plan and execute
ambitious goals while remaining true to Stalinist economic
priorities.
When Mao introduced the Hundred Flowers Campaign in
1956 ("Let a hundred flowers blossom, a hundred schools
of thought contend," the objective was help convert the
nation's intellectuals to communism. Instead, they began
to critique the principles of communism, the CCP, and the
Chinese government. They would pay dearly for openly voicing
their dissent when Mao retaliated with a vicious Anti-rightist Campaign.
