Mao Zedong

"Mao Zedong" is Mao's name is the Latin alphabet. "Mao" is his family name - in China, family names are placed first.

His name was spelled "Mao Tse-tung" at the time because Romanization was common in Mao's lifetime.^[11]

 

Mao Zedong was born into a loving family on December 26, 1893, in the small village of Shaoshan in the Hunan province.

His family were poor farmers. This made Mao Zedong care about the problems of the peasants. He went to school and learned about new ideas.

After finishing school he worked as a librarian, where he first read Marxist literature. In 1921, he founded the Chinese Communist Party.

Main article: The Chinese Civil War

In 1927, members of the Kuomintang (KMT), the Chinese Nationalist Party, purged members of Mao's Communist Party in Shanghai. Both groups wanted control of China; Mao's CCP also wanted to make China into a communist country. The purge began the Chinese Civil War.

The CCP and the KMT fought until 1937. That year, Imperial Japan invaded China during World War II. At that point, Mao formed an alliance with the KMT, and they fought together against the Japanese.

This alliance lasted until Japan surrendered in 1945. After that, the CCP and the KMT began fighting with each other again. Finally, in 1949, the CCP won the Chinese Civil War.

Mao established the People's Republic of China (PRC). China was now unified as a single country under communist rule. Mao became the country's first president on 1 October 1949.

 

 

When Mao became the leader of the PRC in 1949, most people in China were farmers. Mao wanted China's technology to improve in just a short time. He wanted China's industry to catch up quickly with countries like the United Kingdom and United States.

Mao promoted a personality cult. This made it dangerous to disagree with him, and people were expected to follow him without question. His "Little Red Book" of quotes was widely used throughout the country. This cult of personality meant there was no accountability. As a result, Mao put many bad policies in place without being challenged.

In 1953, Mao started the First Five Year Plan. This was a plan to collectivize farms and industrialize China in a short period of time.

Main article: The Great Leap Forward

In 1958, Mao started the Second Five Year Plan, which included the Great Leap Forward. Its goal was to change China very quickly from a farming country into a modern socialist nation.

This was a disaster for the Chinese people. Many crops failed because of poor farming practices. Many cities could not make daily items like clothes and machines. Between 1959 and 1961, between 15 million and 55 million people starved to death in the Great Chinese Famine.^{[note 2]} Some people think this was the biggest famine in history.^[14][15]

Main Article: The Cultural Revolution

In 1966, after the Great Leap Forward, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. His goals were to keep communist ideas strong and to stay in power within the Chinese Communist Party.

This period caused a lot of chaos in China. The Cultural Revolution lasted for a decade, until Mao's death in 1976.

In 1968, Mao feared that Liu Shaoqi would overthrow him and take over the Chinese Communist Party. In 1968 he accused Liu of being a capitalist and put him in prison. Liu died there in 1969 from brutal treatment, hunger, and terrible conditions.

After Liu was imprisoned, defence minister Lin Biao became the second most powerful person in the CCP. He hoped to succeed Mao as Chairman. In 1971 he tried to assassinate Mao and seize power for himself. He failed, and was killed (along with his wife) in a plane crash while trying to flee China.

See also: The Sino-Soviet split

Mao formed a strong alliance with the Soviet Union (USSR) under Joseph Stalin. Mao liked Stalin and respected the way he led. In 1953, Stalin died and Georgy Malenkov became the leader of the Soviet Union. Malenkov continued Stalin's alliance with China.

However, in 1955, Nikita Khrushchev took power from Malenkov. He thought Stalin was a criminal and a dictator. The alliance between China and the USSR ended. After that China had just a few allies, like Albania, North Korea, Democratic Kampuchea, and Pakistan. This change of friends was called the Sino-Soviet split.

During the 1970s, Mao became friendlier with the United States. In 1972, American president Richard Nixon visited China and met Mao.

Mao died in September 1976, and the Cultural Revolution ended that same year. Deng Xiaoping became president, and Mao's supporters were imprisoned. Trying to transform China's economy, Deng Xiaoping made major changes to Mao's economic policies.

Mao had been in poor health for several years before his death in 1976. His health had declined visibly for at least six months before he died. Unconfirmed reports have suggested that he had ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease).

Mao last appeared in public on 27 May 1976,^[16] when he met Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto was on a one-day visit to Beijing at the time.

At around 5:00PM on 2 September 1976, Mao suffered a heart attack. This was his third heart attack, and it was far more severe than the first two. It affected a much larger area of his heart.

Mao survived in critical condition until 7 September. That day, he got worse very quickly. His organs failed, and he entered a coma shortly before noon. He was put on life support machines, but they were removed around 11:45pm. Mao was pronounced dead at 12:08 am on 9 September 1976, at the age of 82.

Mao's body lay in state at the Great Hall of the People, an important government building. During his memorial service, people honored him by keeping silent for three minutes.

Mao wanted to be cremated. In fact, he was one of the first high-ranking officials to sign the "Proposal that all Central Leaders be Cremated after Death" in November 1956.^[17] Nevertheless, his body was later placed into the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong, where it remains a site of interest and controversy to this day.

 

Many Chinese people still believe that Mao was a great leader, though they also know he did bad things. According to Deng Xiaoping, Mao was "seven parts right and three parts wrong ... [his] contributions are primary [most important] and his mistakes secondary [less important]".

However, Mao has many critics (including many historians). They say that his bad ideas and policies killed millions of people. They blame him for making China lose its most important ally, the Soviet Union, in the Sino-Soviet split.

Critics say that China's population grew too quickly because Mao did not support family planning and people had more children than they could care for. Reacting to this population growth, Chinese leaders after Mao began the one child policy. Over the long term, this made the Chinese population much smaller.

Mao made several changes to the Chinese language. For example, he switched from the Wade-Giles system of Romanisation to Pinyin. For this reason, Nanking is now called Nanjing on modern maps. (Taiwan still uses Wade-Giles, so its capital is called Taipei instead of the pinyin Taibei.)

Mao also simplified Chinese characters. He thought this would make them easier to read and write, so that more people would be literate.

Many of Mao's successors (except Xi Jinping) had less power than he did.

Mao created an ideology called Maoism. This ideology spread across China, and influenced many people around the world. Many communist parties around the world believe in Maoism.

• Communism
• Maoism
• History of China
• Great Leap Forward
• Cultural Revolution
• Great Chinese Famine

• "Foundations of Chinese Foreign Policy online documents in English from the Wilson Center in Washington
• Asia Source biography
• ChineseMao.com: Extensive resources about Mao Zedong Archived 6 September 2013 at the Wayback Machine
• CNN profile
• Collected Works of Mao at the Maoist Internationalist Movement
• Collected Works of Mao Tse-tung (1917–1949) Joint Publications Research Service
• Mao quotations
• Mao Zedong Reference Archive at marxists.org
• Oxford Companion to World Politics: Mao Zedong
• Bio of Mao at the official Communist Party of China web site
• Photo of Chairman Mao strolling outside his official residence, 1957