Great Leaders - Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong, the leader of China's twentieth century Revolution, was born 26 December 1893 and died 9 September 1976, and was formerly called Mao Tse Tung in English. Mao was the hugely powerful Chinese leader from 1945 to 1976, and many see him as a hero who advanced women's and peasant's rights, saved China from foreign rule, raised the standard of living and literacy while making China more equal and more industrial, and avoided the economic chaos and suffering of capitalist nations. Others see his legacy as millions of Chinese deaths under totalitarian rule and enforced industrialisation, as well as the crippling cruelty of the backwards Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

Mao was born in 1893 in Hunan providence, China, and grew up in a farming family. He became a revolutionary Communist while working at a library, and throughout the 1920's, his power increased in the Communist Party of China, and by 1933 he was its leader. The Communists sought to make the country a one-party state pursuing a socialist ideal and liberating workers and peasants from harsh exploitation and oppression. During the 1920's, a Chinese Civil War began between the Communists and the dominant autocrat Chiang Kai-shek's group, the Kuomintang or Nationalists.

Mao and his forces escaped defeat at the hand of the Nationalists by marching, with huge losses along the way, to a remote part of China called Yenan. This retreat was called The Long March and is one of history's most famous and possibly most successful military retreats. When Japan invaded China in 1937, Mao and Chiang ceased fighting. Later the United States entered the war in the Pacific and defeated Japan in 1945, causing the occupying Japanese armies to leave China and allowing the Chinese Civil War to continue. By 1949, Mao had expelled the Nationalists to an island called Taiwan, previously Formosa, which remained an independent state under Nationalist control. Mainland China was now a unified one-party state, The People's Republic of China, under the dictator Mao Zedong.

Uniting China, dividing opinion

Virtually anything said about Mao raises objections from either his supporters or detractors. In China, as in much of Sinology and academic historical studies, few are neutral about Mao. Asking around in the People's Republic today will still yield almost universally positive reviews of the man, his work and legacy. In the West, he is typically characterised as a dictator and mass murderer along the lines of Stalin, at least among those who know anything of him. This split in opinion may say more about attitudes towards China, Communism, social equality, or openly autocratic government systems than anything else, as probing further often reveals a general lack of knowledge both about the man and about the differing views of him.

So what did he accomplish in his days? Why is he still so revered and condemned? After heading the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Mao remained leader until his death in 1976. In this time he expended no small amount of effort to change the country in vast and irreversible ways, ways which for the most part he believed to be not only good for the country, but essential for its progress. Mao is, however, currently most remembered in the ex-imperial West not for his efforts as a moderniser or the "father of a nation," but for his brutal methods of gaining and retaining power throughout his time at the top. These methods were applied to his own countrymen, in contrast to the external populations which were brutalised, enslaved and robbed by European empires.

Great Leap Forward

From an early age Mao believed in realising the ideals of a more equitable society. His attempts to implement his interpretation of Karl Marx's prescriptions in taking China from an agrarian society, where well over 90% of the population were peasants enduring a bitter life of mere subsistence, to a powerful, modern industrialised nation produced some failures and disasters on a huge scale. While his goals of greater economic equality, as well as that between the sexes, had started to be realised quite early in his time in power, efforts to streamline production in both agriculture and industrial sectors proved misguided. One early example was the Great Leap Forward campaign, which began around 1958. Lasting roughly two years, it is often viewed as an unprecedented disaster for China. While the figures are still hotly debated, it is known that millions, and likely tens of millions, died of starvation and other causes as a result of bad policies enforced in the name of "leaping" directly from an undeveloped society of farmers directly to a more mechanised society of the type Marx had in mind when he wrote about the proletariat revolution. A similar programme of enforced "collectivisation" of agriculture in the Soviet Union in the 1930s had already dispossessed and displaced huge numbers of people without achieving the intended gains. The Soviet Union had, however, successfully achieved the production of refined industrial products from raw materials, as China would later, leading to better material living conditions, education and medical care for many.

Mao's knowledge of the dire consequences of the Great Leap Forward have also been debated. Policies enacted by Mao like melting all the pots and pans held by families in the country for the sake of vastly increasing the available supply or iron for purposes of industrial production turned out to be a great failure; while the resulting "big pot" communal mess halls created did serve their function, the iron did not. In most villages there was no one to be found who knew about working iron, and the vast majority the "dog iron" that came from the campaign was utterly useless. Thus the largest consequence of this policy was only to remove the ability to cook at home from the hands of millions of peasants. It is known, however, that when Mao toured villages to review progress, even in the wake of such disasters, local leaders would do all in their power to make sure he only saw that things were going splendidly. He would be shown areas where success had been staged by officials, who may have been seeking promotion or more likely were simply unwilling or scared to show their failures to the Great Leader himself. In his mind, then, these policies may have been great successes, at least in the beginning.

Yet his firm belief that he was ultimately correct and that authority was better wielded in his hands than others also led to events which built, and then cemented, his reputation outside his country as a man of great wickedness. Even if supporters would like to claim that at least initially he knew little or nothing of the hardship caused by his modernisation campaigns, there were other instances where his involvement and intentions are much clearer. One such instance is the Hundred Flowers Campaign of the early 1950s. After several years in power, Mao and the communists began to receive growing amounts of criticism for their handling of the new government and its shortcomings in addressing some of the major problems China faced. Rather than use brutal means to silence them Mao surprised his detractors by drawing on a famous ancient quotation that he would like to "let a hundred flowers bloom, let a thousand schools of thought contend." Mao stated it was his unwavering belief that criticism was good for the country, that it would spur on the Party, and that ultimately disagreement and debate would lead the way to the best path and make clear the benefits of his socialist programme of modernisation over all others. The response was rapid and gigantic, likely to an extent which he had not expected. While he may have been initially surprised at the volume and voracity of the criticisms heaped on his young government, he did not let it show. Rather, he waited, and in time responded by claiming it was all part of his plan to out the worst elements of society: in the ensuing crackdown, thousands of people who had criticised Mao and the government were killed, exiled to the west of the country, imprisoned, or simply disappeared. Far from being ignorant of their demise, he boasted that he had orchestrated this result himself; as such, it can hardly be surprising if Western intellectuals take issue with his methods as leader, seeing as he knowingly crushed many of their Chinese counterparts with the Hundred Flowers Campaign and the later Cultural Revolution.

The 70% Solution

Shortly after his death, the new leaders of the Chinese government, Mao's heirs, were faced with deconstructing his cult of personality and finding a way to establish themselves as the legitimate and logical extensions of his rule and ideology. This left them with the difficult task of casting Mao in a new light, not as simply the lone leader who had single-handedly brought China to where it was in 1976, but as part of the Party that they were members of. It also left them to determine how much of what he had done was seen to be in error and how much correct. To balance their use of Mao as a source of legitimacy for the next generation of government, while simultaneously changing the direction and policies of that government, including the disastrous ones, they settled on a ratio the same as that used by the Soviet government for Stalin: Mao was 70% good and correct, and 30% wrong. This reevaluation enabled them to move forward with reform while still claiming to possess the spirit of the Party and the man who had led China for the last three decades. The formula stuck, and even today is often quoted in the country when discussing the legacy of Mao.

Mao also left a significant linguistic legacy. He changed the Wade Giles system of Romanization of written Chinese to Pinyin, an easier system. Taiwan however still uses Wade Giles, so its capital city is written Taipei rather than the pinyin Taibei. Mao also simplified the writing of Chinese characters, making them easier to use so that more people would be able to read the new Simplified Chinese.