Mao Tse-tung biography

Synopsis

(born Dec. 26, 1893, Shaoshan, Hunan province, China—died Sept. 9, 1976, Beijing) principal Chinese Marxist theorist, soldier, and statesman who led his nation's communist revolution. Leader of the Chinese Communist Party from 1935, he was chairman (chief of state) of the People's Republic of China from 1949 to 1959 and chairman of the party until his death.

Early years

When China emerged from a half century of revolution as the world's most populous nation 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 Chinese Communist Party, 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 Chinese Communist Party in 1921 to Mao's death in 1976, one can fairly regard Mao Zedong as the principal architect of the new China.

Born in the village of Shaoshan in Hunan province, Mao was 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 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 Oct. 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 and George Washington as well.

The spring of 1912 saw 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