Mao Zedong was the preeminent leader of the People's Republic of China and first secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1943 until his death. A keen strategist, capable poet, and able politician, Mao sought to remake China into a modern and industrial power using unorthodox means.

Childhood

Mao Zedong was born Hunan Province in the rocky upland village of Shaoshan, Xiangtan Country, where 75 percent of the residents were surnamed Mao. His father, Mao Shunshen, was a hard and grasping man who managed to raise himself to moderate wealth. Mao had two brothers, Mao Zemin (1895-1943) and Mao Zetan (1905-1935), and a sister, Mao Zehong (d. 1930). Mao's mother died in the autumn of 1919; his father died within a few months, in January 1920.

Mao began attending the village school in Shaoshan when he was eight years old. After only five years of school, however, his father had him return to the farm to work in the fields by day and manage the account books at night. In 1909 Mao, who hated farming, fled the family farm for the next country. There his maternal uncle had obtained his entrance into the Tongshan Higher Primary School. Mao was six years older than the other students, and his ragged clothes and country manners were a source of great embarrassment to him. By early 1911, versed in the traditional classics and alert to the crisis of his country, the seventeen-year-old Mao was ready for larger things. He took a steamer to Changsha, where he was admitted to middle school and began reading newspaper. He rapidly became one of the most avid readers in his age group and later stated that his entire education had been through newspapers.

During the summer and early autumn of 1911 political fever grew in Changsha, fueled in part by a rice shortage in the city and in part by news of the unsuccessful uprising in Canton (Guangzhou) led by another Hunanese, Huang Xing, when news came of the Wuchang Uprising of 11 October, Mao and a friend were quick to join the army. He spent six months as a common soldier, reading voraciously. During this period he first encountered socialism in several pamphlets by Jiang Kanghu (1883-c. 1945). Demobilized, the nineteen-year-old Mao applied to various schools before withdrawing to spend six month reading on his own in the provincial library. Eventually, in the spring of 1913, Mao resolved to become a teacher.

Schooling

During the next five years Mao attended the First Provincial Normal School, where he acquired a great portion of his education and served a part of his apprenticeship as a politician. He learned to write classical Chinese poetry and became a disciple of Yang Changji, a nationally known advocate of combining Western science with Chinese culture. Mao's first significant published article, "A Study of Physical Culture" (1917), stressed patriotism: "If our bodies are not strong, we will be afraid as soon as we see enemy soldiers. How then can we reach our goals and make ourselves respected?" Patriotism was Mao's driving motive for many years, gradually becoming mixed with a quest for personal power. As a student he and his friends founded a night school for workers, based on the idea that an ignorant nation was a weak nation. Upon graduation in 1918, they founded the Xinmin Xuehui (Mew Citizens Study Society) in an effort to continue the intellectual excitement of school as they scattered around the world. In the fall of 1918 Mao followed Yang Changji to Beijing, where his teacher helped him to obtained a minor library job working for the Marxist thinker Li Dazhao. He returned to Changsha shortly after the outbreak of the May fourth Movement in 1919 and established the Xiang River Review as the local voice of that movement. He quickly earned a reputation as an effective spokesman against warlordism and imperialism. After publishing four issues, the journal was closed down and Mao became editor of Yale-in-China's Xin Hunan New Hunan. When this journal was also suppressed by the local warlord, Mao continued to write for a newspaper until the failure of a student strike in December 1919 forced him to flee the province.

Mao returned to Changsha in the summer 1920. He won a job as a principal of the primary school associated with his alma mater, and with it the material basis to marry yang Kaihui, Yang Changji's second daughter, the following winter. He became a leader in several local organizations and began demonstrating his ability to participate fully in emotional meetings, while at the end giving a dispassionate, reliable verbal summary of the proceedings.

In his autobiography, related to Edgar Snow in 1936, Mao declared that by the summer of 1920 he "had become in theory and to some extent in action a Marxist." In August he founded a Marxist study group. However, patriotism in Changsha was still as likely to become associated with anarchism as with Marxism. The Culture Bookstore, founded my Mao and his friends (in a building owned by Yale-in-china) in the autumn of 1920, stocked anarchist books more heavily than Marxist tracts. Anarchism also heavily peppered Mao's involvement with a short-lived, highly emotional movement to establish an independent nation of Hunan in the say year.

Rise through the Party

Mao followed news from the developing communist movements in Beijing and Shanghai closely, and in January 1921 he announced to his colleagues that he had become a communist. In July 1921 Mao, now twenty-seven, led the Hunanese delegation to the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai; he returned as secretary of the Hunan branch of the CCP.

In Changsha in 1920 and 1921 anarchists led a burgeoning labor movement in which Mao was not involved until late 1921. In January 1922 Mao sent a representative of the Hunan party to the coal mines at Anyuan to begin organizing. Within nine months Anyuan miners had become one of the most successful unions in all China, and Mao had sent other members of the Party to organize railroad workers, carpenters, barbers, lead miners, and many others. the labor movement took on a life of its own, over-reached itself, and was cut short by a warlord crackdown in early 1923.

Mao did not attend the Second Congress of the CCP in June 1922,but at the Third Party Congress, a year later, he was elected to the Central Committee. Living now in Shanghai, he threw himself into the task of advancing the alliance between the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) of Sun Yat-sen. Representatives of the Com-intern had ordered the Chinese Communists to make this alliance with the national bourgeoisie, but the coalition was fraught with conflict from the beginning. After nearly eighteen months as a high official of the CCP and a member of the Shanghai Bureau of the Guomindang, facing attacks from both the right and the left, Mao became ill. He and his wife returned to Shaoshan in February 1925 to recuperate.

The international communist movement already had founded a Peasant International (Krestintern) in October 1923. But Chen Duxiu, secretary of the Party's Central Committee, considered the peasantry an unreliable element, prone to "feudal" habits. In the poor upland area around Shaoshan, several of Mao's acquaintances from Changsha were establishing night schools for peasants; Yang Kaihui began teaching in one of them. In May and June 1925 the group organized antiforeign National Shame societies, and by July had begun helping peasants organize to prevent landlords form selling grain outside the locality. In late August soldiers form the provincial army arrived to quell the threat to property. Mao fled to Canton.

Uprisings

By October 1925 Mao had become acting head of the Nationalist Party's propaganda department. Never bashful, he now claimed to be more expert on the countryside than anyone of his political rank. The need for increased work among the peasants was the theme of his address to the Second Congress of the Guomindang. He was again elected to be the alternate member of the Guomindang Central Executive Committee and in December 1925 became a member of the Peasant Movement Committee. When Chiang Kai-shek took advantage of the Zhongshan Incident of March 1926 to reduce the role of Communists in the Canton government, Mao was removed from his most important posts. At almost exactly the same time he became head of the two-year-old Peasant Moving Training Institute, charged with teaching students to mobilize the rural masses for national revolution.

When classes ended in the fall, the Northern expedition was already under way. Mao traveled to Shanghai, made a brief tour of rural areas in Zhejiang and Jiangsu, and in December gave the keynote address to the First Hunan Peasant's Association Congress in Changsha. He spent January 1926 investigating the situation in five rural counties near Changsha. The resulting "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan" (March 1927) has been called "unique within the Chinese Communist movement" because it looks to the peasants as the major revolutionary force. It is also a graphic example of how Mao related to the peasantry en masse; he wrote not from his roots as a peasant's son, but form his role as agent of revolution. The report is also a pro-Comintern document in the hotly charged debate between the Com-intern and Chen Duxiu, the CCP chairman who rejected the importance of the peasantry in the revolution.

The Communist-National Alliance collapsed completely in June 1927, leaving the CCP in disarray, its members hunted criminals. Many of the Party's leaders took part in the Nanchang Uprising of 1 August, now celebrated as the date of the establishment of the Red Army. Other leaders, including Mao, attended an "emergency conference" on 7 August. Chen Duxiu was deposed as leader of the Party and a series of rural uprisings were planned for Hubei, Jiangxi, and Hunan.

The goal of these Autumn Harvest Uprisings was to surround and capture the major cities of the Yangtse region. Mao was sent to Hunan to lead the rising there. But the peasant movement of which he had written glowingly six months earlier had faded. The masses did not rise and the ragtag, inexperienced forces of this uprising were defeated within ten days. Narrowly escaping capture, Mao gathered the remnants-about one thousand men-and retreated to a traditional bandit lair on Jinggang Shan, 130 miles southeast of Chiangsha.

Mao used his redoubtable powers of friendship and persuasion to ally with two traditional bandit leaders. He organized peasant uprisings against landlords, and for a year fought defensive wars both against warlord soldiers and against the leadership of the Communist Party Center, which strongly urged unrealistic policies to make his little army the central force in a nationwide, spontaneous uprising. In May 1928 he was joined by Zhu Des force of ten thousand poorly equipped men. Zhu became commander of the Fourth Red Army, while Mao became political commissar.

In November the Zhu-Mao Fourth Red Army was again reinforced by the arrival of a ragged band of one thousand soldiers under Peng Dehuai, who had rebelled against the Guomindang. Zhu and Mao evolved the famous slogan, " The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats we pursue." But by the winter of 1928 to 1929 the Fourth Red Army was beset by fierce attacks from warlord armies allied with Chiang Kai-shek. On 14 January 1929 Mao and Zhu left Jinggang Shan, crossed Jiangxi Province, and-after a terrible battle in which they lost half their forces-established the Chinese Soviet Republic in a new base near Ruijin.

Mao Zedong, now thirty-seven years old, gradually began to build the strongest center of Communist power in China, based firmly on his experience of what was effective in raising the enthusiasm of the peasants. He undertook a series of social surveys to provide background to land reform and agrarian revolution, further developing his strong sense of the deep ethical ideals of the common people. He formulated independent theories regarding organization, leadership, political training, military discipline, territorial bases, and other matters in essays such as "On the Rectification of Incorrect Ideas the Party" (December 1929) and " A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire" (January 1930).

The Central Committee in Shanghai, dominated by Li Lisan and living underground in the wreckage of the failures of 1927, preferred to emphasize the urban proletariat's role in the struggle rather than rural revolution. Mao strongly opposed Li's strategic orders in February 1929 to disperse and fight orders in mid-1930 to assault the major cities of central China with his newly expanded forces. Peng Dehuai occupied Changsha for ten days in the summer of 1930, but Mao and Zhu De were driven back from Nanchang. By the end of autumn the Communist forces had been forced to retire into the marches once again, In Hunan the vengeful warlord government executed both Yang Kaihui, Mao's former wife living in retirement, and his sister Mao Zehong.

Persecution

Busy with matters in other parts of the country, Chiang Kai-shek had not considered the Communists to be a principal threat to his power until these attacks. Now his police intensified the search for Communists in the cities. In the South China countryside his armies undertook five successive Encirclement Campaigns to annihilate the Communists. Even when confronted with the Japanese conquest of the Northeast (Manchuria) beginning in September 1931, Chiang continued to allocate most of his military resources to fighting the Communists. Numerically inferior, the Communists survived for three years by combining carefully calculated withdrawals and slashing surprise attacks. However between 1931 and 1934, the leadership was sharply divided between Moscow-supported elements who wanted the revolution to return to the cities quickly, and those (led by Mao) who were intent on adapting Communist theory to local conditions, patiently cultivating rural revolution. This division was at the root of the Communist leadership's inability to decide whether to support an anti-Chiang rebellion in Fujian Province in November 193, and led to Mao's replacement as political commissar by Zhou Enlai in the same year.

Always a competent political infighter, the embattled Mao secured reelection as chairman of the Central Soviet government when the Second All-China Congress of Soviets met at Ruijin in January 1934. This position would have allowed him to continue his economic work had the Jiangxi Soviet remained viable. But as Chiang Kai-shek's circle of blockhouses, connected by modern motor roads drew ever tighter around the base area later that year, the question of survival became uppermost. The Central Soviet government at Ruijin dissolved in October and set out on the Long March.

Long March

The Long March is an epic of human endurance that lasted 370 days and covered 6,000 rugged miles, with fighting almost every day. The Communists broke out of the encirclement thinking they were marching westward, possibly to establish a new soviet area with He Long in northwestern Hunan. Their attempt to cross the Xiang River in northern Guangxi, however, cost nearly two-thirds of the 100,000 troops who had begun the march. At Mao's urging, the Hunan plan was abandoned and the First Front Red Army moved further west-ward into Guizhou.

In January 1935 the badly battered force took the city of Zunyi in northern Guizhou Province and convened a conference of all major leaders. Mao seized the opportunity to voice severe criticisms of the military line being pushed by the Soviet-backed Party leadership. He argued forcefully that they had fought in too conventional a manner instead of resorting to the guerrilla tactics for which Mao was later to become famous. Zhou Enlai, previously an ally of the Moscow-oriented Party Center, offered a self-criticism and proposed that Mao take over military leadership. Henceforth, Zhou became one of Mao's most trusted subordinates. A goal for the march was decided upon to go north to fight the Japanese. Mao was not to receive formal leadership over the party until 1943, but the Zunyi Conference had set the stage for his becoming the undisputed leader of the new China. From the leading core of the march participants, Mao built a cohesive military and Party leadership that survived largely intact for thirty years.

In Yan'an from 1936 to 1947, Mao Zedong led his movement in wars against foreign and domestic enemies. Generals such as Zhu De, Ping Dehuai, Lin Biao, Chen Yi, He Long, Lin Bozheng, and others did the front-line fighting. Zhou Enlai took care of the daily problems of relations with the Nationalists. Mao set himself to a serious study of Marxism-Leninism and wrote prolifically. He articulated a coherent set of ideas for remaking China, and he secured for himself unquestioned supremacy within the Chinese Communist Party.

Mao came to be the supreme dictator of an unorthodox revolutionary type war, utilizing the crisis of the Japanese invasion and the weakness of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government. Mao's pragmatic military doctrine grew naturally from his experience in Jinggang Shan and Jiangxi, and from his knowledge of traditional Chinese strategic thinking. Tactically, this meant guerrilla mobile warfare, avoiding positional battle unless certain of victory. Strategically, it meant occupying uncontested areas and building an infrastructure for use in the future, while at the same time pursuing a united front with the Nationalists.

Mao began urging a second united front with the Nationalists even before the Long March had ended. In "On Tactics Against Japanese Imperialism," given at a meeting of the Political Bureau in December 1935, Mao outlined his fundamental strategy: "the task of the Party is to form a revolutionary united front by combining the activities of the Red Army with all the activities of the workers, the peasants, the students, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie throughout the country." The task of the Japanese imperialists is "to turn China into a colony while out task is to turn China into a free and independent country with full territorial integrity." Exactly a year later two dissident generals kidnapped Chang Kai-shek in the Xi'an Incident, and both Nationalists and Communist sides became more willing to join in a united front against Japan.

Part Two:

Occupied China - Party Building - Founding of PRC - Korean War
Great Leap Forward - Cultural Revolution - Conclusion