Mao was the leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1935 until his death, and he was chairman (chief of state) of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to 1959 and chairman of the party also until his death.

Early Years:

Mao was born in the village of Shaoshan in Hunan province, 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 Wujing (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 October 10, 1911, fighting against the Qing dynasty broke out in Wuchang, and within two weeks the revolt had spread to Changsha.

The spring of 1912 marked the birth of the new Chinese republic and the end of Mao’s military service. 

The abolition of the official civil service examination system in 1905 and the piecemeal introduction of Western learning in so-called modern schools had left young people in a state of uncertainty as to what type of training, Chinese or Western, could best prepare them for a career or for service to their country.

From normal school in Changsha, Mao went to Peking University in Beijing, China’s leading intellectual centre.

In an editorial published in July 1919, Mao wrote:

'The world is ours, the nation is ours, society is ours. If we do not speak, who will speak? If we do not act, who will act?'

From then onward his generation never ceased to regard itself as responsible for the country’s fate, and, indeed, its members remained in power, both in Beijing and in Taipei (Taiwan), until the 1970s.

Mao And The Chinese Communist Party:

In September 1920 Mao became principal of the Lin Changsha primary school, and in October he organized a branch of the Socialist Youth League there.

That winter he married Yang Kaihui, the daughter of his former ethics teacher. In July 1921 he attended the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, together with representatives from the other communist groups in China and two delegates from the Moscow-based Comintern (Communist International).

In the winter of 1924–25, Mao returned to his native village of Shaoshan for a rest.

There, after witnessing demonstrations by peasants stirred into political consciousness by the shooting of several dozen Chinese by foreign police in Shanghai (May and June 1925), Mao suddenly became aware of the revolutionary potential inherent in the peasantry.

His conversion to Marxism had forced him to revise his estimate of the urban proletariat, but he continued to share Marx’s own contempt for the backward and amorphous peasantry.

Now he turned back to the rural world of his youth as the source of China’s regeneration.

Following the example of other communists working within the Nationalist Party who had already begun to organize the peasants, Mao sought to channel the spontaneous protests of the Hunanese peasants into a network of peasant associations

In July 1926 Chiang Kai-shek set out on what became known as the Northern Expedition, aiming to unify the country under his own leadership and to overthrow the conservative government in Beijing as well as other warlords.

In November Mao once more returned to Hunan; there, in January and February 1927, he investigated the peasant movement and concluded that in a very short time several hundred million peasants in China would “rise like a tornado or tempest—a force so extraordinarily swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to suppress it.” 

Strictly speaking, that prediction proved to be false.

Revolution in the shape of spontaneous action by hundreds of millions of peasants did not sweep across China “in a very short time,” or indeed at all. 

The Road To Power:

Mao Zedong’s 22 years in the wilderness can be divided into four phases.

The first of those is the initial three years when Mao and Zhu De, the commander in chief of the army, successfully developed the tactics of guerrilla warfare from base areas in the countryside.

The second phase (the Ziangxi period) centres on the founding in November 1931 of the Jiangxi Soviet (Chinese Soviet Republic) in a portion of Jiangxi province, with Mao as chairman. 

The Red Army, grown to a strength of some 200,000, easily defeated large forces of inferior troops sent against it by Chiang Kai-shek in the first four of the so-called encirclement and annihilation campaigns.

But it was unable to stand up against Chiang’s own elite units, and in October 1934 the major part of the Red Army, Mao, and his pregnant wife abandoned the base in Jiangxi and set out for the northwest of China, on what is known as 'The Long March'.

When some 8,000 troops who had survived the perils of the Long March arrived in Shaanxi province in northwestern China in the autumn of 1935, events were already moving toward the third phase in Mao’s rural odyssey, which was to be characterized by a renewed united front with the Nationalists against Japan and by the rise of Mao to unchallenged supremacy in the party. 

By the time the Japanese began their attempt to subjugate all of China in July 1937, the terms of a new united front between the communists and the Nationalists had been virtually settled, and the formal agreement was announced in September 1937.

In the course of the anti-Japanese war, the communists broke up a substantial portion of their army into small units and sent them behind the enemy lines to serve as nuclei for guerrilla forces that effectively controlled vast areas of the countryside,

During the years 1936–40, Mao had, for the first time since the 1920s, the leisure to devote himself to reflection and writing.

It was then that he first read in translation a certain number of Soviet writings on philosophy and produced his own account of dialectical materialism, of which the best-known portions are those entitled “On Practice” and “On Contradiction.”

More important, Mao produced the major works that synthesized his own experience of revolutionary struggle and his vision of how the revolution should be carried forward in the context of the united front. 

Mao could not claim the firsthand knowledge possessed by many other leading members of the CCP of how communism worked within the Soviet Union nor the ability to read Karl Marx or Vladimir Ilich Lenin in the original, which some of them enjoyed.

He could and did claim, however, to know and understand China. 

In March 1943 Mao achieved for the first time formal supremacy over the party, becoming chairman of the Secretariat and of the Political Bureau (Politburo).

It is therefore not surprising that, as Mao’s campaign in the countryside moved into its fourth and last phase—that of civil war with the Nationalists—Stalin’s lack of enthusiasm for a Chinese communist victory should have become increasingly evident.

Looking back at that period in 1962, when the Sino-Soviet conflict had come to a head, Mao declared:

'In 1945, Stalin wanted to prevent China from making revolution, saying that we should not have a civil war and should cooperate with Chiang Kai-shek, otherwise the Chinese nation would perish'.

'But we did not do what he said. The revolution was victorious. After the victory of the revolution he [Stalin] next suspected China of being a Yugoslavia, and that I would become a second Tito'.

That account of Stalin’s attitude is substantiated by a whole series of public gestures at the time, culminating in the fact that, when the People’s Liberation Army (successor to the Red Army) took the Nationalist capital of Nanjing in April 1949, the Soviet ambassador was the only foreign diplomat to accompany the retreating Nationalist government to Guangzhou. 

Formation Of The People’s Republic Of China:

Nevertheless, when the communists did take power in China, both Mao and Stalin had to make the best of the situation.

In December 1949 Mao, now chairman of the People’s Republic of China—which he had proclaimed on October 1—traveled to Moscow, where, after two months of arduous negotiations, he succeeded in persuading Stalin to sign a treaty of mutual assistance accompanied by limited economic aid. 

Despite those tensions with Moscow, the policies of the People’s Republic of China in its early years were in very many respects based, as Mao later said, on “copying from the Soviets.”

While Mao and his comrades had experience in guerrilla warfare, in mobilization of the peasants in the countryside, and in political administration at the grass roots had no first hand knowledge of running a state or of large-scale economic development.

In such circumstances the Soviet Union provided the only available model.

A five-year plan was therefore drawn up under Soviet guidance; it was put into effect in 1953 and included Soviet technical assistance and a number of complete industrial plants.

Yet, within two years, Mao had taken steps that were to lead to the breakdown of the political and ideological alliance with Moscow.

Even before Stalin’s successor, Nikita S. Khrushchev, had given his secret speech (February 1956) denouncing his predecessor’s crimes, Mao Zedong and his colleagues had been discussing measures for improving the morale of the intellectuals in order to secure their willing participation in building a new China.

When the resulting “great blooming and contending” got out of hand and called into question the axiom of party rule, Mao savagely turned against the educated elite, which he felt had betrayed his confidence.

The Great Leap Forward:

It was against that background that Mao, during the winter of 1957–58, worked out the policies that were to characterize the 'Great Leap Forward', formally launched in May 1958.

Mao displayed continuing anxiety regarding the corrupting influence of the fruits of technical progress and an acute nostalgia for the perceived purity and egalitarianism that had marked the moral and political world of the Jinggang Mountains and Yan’an eras.

At about the same time, Mao began to denounce 'The emergence', not only in the Soviet Union but also in China itself, of 'New bourgeois elements' among the privileged strata of the state and party bureaucracy and the technical and artistic elite.

Under those conditions, he concluded, a 'Protracted, complex, and sometimes even violent class struggle' would continue during the whole socialist stage

The Cultural Revolution:

The movement that became known as the 'Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution' represented an attempt by Mao to go beyond the party rectification campaigns—of which there had been many since 1942—and to devise a new and more radical method for dealing with what he saw as the bureaucratic degeneration of the party.

Legacy - 'We have stood up':

Few would deny Mao Zedong the major share of credit for devising the pattern of struggle based on guerrilla warfare in the countryside that ultimately led to victory in the civil war and thereby to the overthrow of the Nationalists, the distribution of land to the peasants, and the restoration of China’s independence and sovereignty.

Those achievements must be given a weight commensurate with the degree of injustice prevailing in Chinese society before the revolution and with the humiliation felt by the Chinese people as a result of the dismemberment of their country by the foreign powers during the 'Century of humiliation'.

“We have stood up,” Mao said in September 1949. Those words will not be forgotten.