Mao Zedong

By October 1934 the Chinese Communist Party and the Red Army, facing the Kuomintang's fifth extermination campaign, had no choice but to break out of the Jiangxi Soviet. Mao Zedong was sidelined at the time, stripped of military command. But as the retreat turned into a disaster, the situation shifted.

In January 1935, at an enlarged Politburo meeting in Zunyi, Guizhou, Mao launched a frontal attack on the military line and seized real command. The Zunyi Conference became the pivot of CCP history. From that point Mao was the Long March's de facto leader.

For eight months the Red Army walked. They forded rivers, crossed snow-bound passes at fourteen thousand feet, navigated marshlands. Of the 86,000 who set out, fewer than seven thousand reached Shaanxi. But those seven thousand were not mere survivors. They were a cadre core, hardened into a strategic instrument.

The political meaning of the Long March first reached the wider world through Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China (1937). Mao told him: 'The Long March is a manifesto. To those who say the Communist Party is about to perish, we say: we have walked ten thousand li.'

The Long March transformed a military defeat into a political victory, a retreat into a founding myth. Its experience became the practical ground of Mao's strategy of surrounding the cities from the countryside, his theory of protracted people's war, and the mass line.

Mao Zedong's major theoretical contribution was to reconstruct the route of revolution from China's class structure and subordination to imperialism rather than mechanically copying the experience of European industrial societies. He treated the peasantry not as a merely auxiliary force but as a mass that could become an active revolutionary subject through organization and political education, and developed rural base areas and protracted armed struggle as a strategy suited to China's concrete conditions rather than as a simple substitute for an urban rising.

This strategy was joined to the organizational principle of the mass line. The Party was to investigate the demands and experiences of the people, synthesize them into policies and slogans, and return them to practice for testing through mass action. In his 1937 discussion of Kuomintang-Communist cooperation, Mao argued that the anti-Japanese united front should not remain a temporary agreement between two parties but should encompass workers, peasants, soldiers, intellectuals, businesspeople, and other patriots nationwide. The united front was therefore not a renunciation of class aims, but a tactic for linking the national task of resisting imperialism to mass mobilization and the expansion of revolutionary organization.

During the Yan'an period these experiences were systematized, together with the methods of seeking truth from facts, the mass line, and self-reliance, as Mao Zedong Thought. The theory was formally adopted as the Party's guiding ideology at the Seventh National Congress in 1945 and included New Democracy, people's war, Party building, policy and strategy, and ideological and cultural work. At the same time, this tradition cannot be reduced to Mao's individual originality: it condensed the collective practice of the Chinese Communist Party and the experience of many cadres. The Party's 1981 historical resolution made this distinction explicit while separating Mao's later errors from the achievements it regarded as theoretically valid.

Yet the language of the mass line did not always guarantee popular autonomy. When the Party and its leaders claimed a monopoly on interpreting the people's 'true demands,' mobilization could become an instrument of political obedience rather than a channel for criticism and correction. Mao's legacy is therefore best understood by holding together two facts: his revolutionary strategy for concretizing Marxism under colonial and semi-colonial conditions, and the tension between that strategy, the concentration of Party-state power, and the extreme political campaigns of his later years.

On 1 October 1949 Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China from Tiananmen. That September the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference adopted the Common Program, which served as the provisional constitution, and elected him chairman of the Central People's Government. The Common Program stipulated a united front government and a mixed economy of state-owned, cooperative, private and state-private enterprise, together with rural land reform under 'land to the tiller'; rural land reform was completed by 1953. On 20 September 1954 the first session of the 1st National People's Congress in Beijing adopted and enacted a constitution. The PRC's first constitution, formulated on the basis of the Common Program, established a unitary state with a unicameral National People's Congress and a Chairman of the PRC as head of state, replacing the Central People's Government with a new constitutional government; it was repealed on 17 January 1975.

Abroad, Mao went to Moscow in the winter of 1949–50 to hold talks on political and economic revolution, foreign policy, railways, naval bases and Soviet economic and technical aid; the resulting treaty reflected Stalin's dominance and his willingness to help Mao. In October 1950 the People's Volunteer Army was sent into the Korean War to reinforce the retreating Korean People's Army; at least 180,000 Chinese troops died, and the United States imposed a trade embargo.

Mao pushed the Party to organise campaigns to reform society and extend control. In land reform, large numbers of people accused of being landlords or rich peasants were beaten to death at mass meetings as their land was taken and given to poorer peasants. The Campaign to Suppress Counter-revolutionaries targeted officials and the bureaucratic bourgeoisie. Accounts of the scale of this repression differ. In 1976 the U.S. State Department estimated that as many as a million people were killed in land reform and 800,000 in the counter-revolutionary campaign, while Mao himself claimed that 700,000 counter-revolutionaries were killed in 1950–1952. Because of the policy of selecting at least one landlord in virtually every village for public execution, death estimates range between 2 and 5 million. At least 1.5 million people, perhaps 4 to 6 million, were sent to reform-through-labour camps, where many perished. Mao defended these killings as necessary for securing power.

The Three-anti and Five-anti campaigns of 1951 purged government, industrial and party officials and then capitalist elements more broadly. Workers denounced bosses, spouses turned on spouses and children informed on parents. Victims were humiliated at struggle sessions, and the campaigns took several hundred thousand more lives, the vast majority by suicide. Mao insisted that minor offenders be criticised and reformed or sent to labour camps 'while the worst among them should be shot.' The 1950s eradication of opium consumption and production is credited to this period: ten million addicts were forced into compulsory treatment, dealers were executed, and opium-growing regions were replanted.

Mao then launched the First Five-Year Plan (1953–1957), centred on rapid industrial development that prioritised iron and steel, electric power, coal, heavy engineering, building materials and basic chemicals, with many plants built with Soviet assistance. Of 694 large and medium industrial projects, 156 were Soviet-aided and about 595 were completed. Gross industrial output value in 1957 was up 128.6 per cent from 1952, and by 1956 about 67.5 per cent of modern industrial enterprises were state owned and 32.5 per cent joint public-private, with no privately owned firms remaining. Agriculture, industry and trade were organised as worker cooperatives, and the period is credited as the beginning of China's rapid industrialisation and as an enormous success.

The phase closes with the Hundred Flowers–Anti-Rightist reversal. The Hungarian crisis of 1956 influenced Mao to soften his stance toward the intelligentsia and to allow expressions of social dissatisfaction and criticism of government errors, partly to prevent a similar uprising in China. But after people began criticising CCP policies and Mao's leadership, Mao cracked down. He compared the movement to the counter-revolutionary Hungarian Revolution and persecuted those who had criticised the Party, and those merely alleged to be critical, in the Anti-Rightist Movement, which led to the persecution of at least 550,000 people, mostly intellectuals and dissidents.

When Khrushchev delivered his secret speech denouncing Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in February 1956, alarm bells rang for Mao Zedong. Convinced that Khrushchev had not only discarded 'the sword of Stalin' but was also laying down 'the sword of Lenin,' Mao saw his own Stalinist model of socialist construction and leadership style being fundamentally repudiated. The People's Daily editorial 'On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat' (April 1956) reaffirmed Stalin's achievements and began labeling Soviet de-Stalinization as 'revisionism.'

The conflict soon spilled beyond ideology into a clash of national interests. When Khrushchev proposed a joint Sino-Soviet fleet and long-wave radio station in 1958, Mao furiously rejected them as infringements on Chinese sovereignty. That same year, Mao triggered the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis by shelling Jinmen and Mazu, mocked the United States as a 'paper tiger,' and openly derided the Soviet line of peaceful coexistence. Khrushchev's 1959 visit to the United States and the USSR's neutrality in the Sino-Indian border dispute produced a decisive rupture.

At the Bucharest Conference in June 1960, the two parties clashed openly, and in July Khrushchev abruptly withdrew all Soviet experts and technicians from China. The Great Leap Forward, stripped of technical support, hurtled further into catastrophe. By 1963 the polemics reached their peak: the CPSU's open letter was met by nine Chinese commentaries (the 'Nine Polemics') that systematized the charge of Soviet revisionism. For Mao, this was more than a diplomatic quarrel. It was a war over who was the true heir to Marxism-Leninism, and simultaneously the international extension of his domestic struggle against 'capitalist-roaders' within the Party. The conflict reached its military zenith with the 1969 Zhenbao (Damansky) Island clashes, and ultimately produced the ironic reversal of Mao inviting Nixon to Beijing in 1972. The world communist movement was split, permanently, between two centers, Moscow and Beijing.

On 16 May 1966, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party issued an internal communiqué (the 'May 16 Circular') calling for the purge of 'bourgeois authorities' in culture, education, and the media. Mao Zedong had concluded that the post-famine recovery policies pushed by pragmatists Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, allowing household farming and market mechanisms, were leading toward 'capitalist restoration.' For Mao, the Cultural Revolution was never just a cultural cleanup. It was a political campaign to unseat the 'capitalist-roaders' who had infiltrated the Party and to recapture state power through continuous revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

When university students in Beijing began attacking faculty through big-character posters (dazibao) in June 1966, Liu Shaoqi dispatched over 7,000 work-team cadres to bring the movement under control. But on 5 August, Mao published his own big-character poster calling on the masses to 'Bombard the Headquarters!' The work teams were withdrawn, and student organizations calling themselves Red Guards spread across the country. During 'Red August' of 1966, according to later official figures, over a thousand people died at the hands of Red Guards in Beijing alone. Armed with a 'blood-line theory' that elevated children of revolutionary cadres above others, the Red Guards ransacked the homes of 'class enemies' and destroyed temples, churches, ancient books, and anything classified as 'feudal culture.'

Mao's first objective was eliminating rivals inside the Party. By 1968 Liu Shaoqi had been condemned as 'the greatest enemy of the workers, peasants, and soldiers,' expelled permanently from the Party, and died the following year in detention without medical care. Deng Xiaoping was purged and sent to work in a tractor factory. But the mass uprising Mao had ignited soon escaped Party control, spiraling into armed factional civil war across the provinces. Mao deployed the People's Liberation Army to restore order, and from 1967 'revolutionary committees' were installed across the country. Yet the violence continued.

Schools were shuttered, university entrance exams abolished. Over 17 million urban youth were forcibly relocated to the countryside under the 'Up to the Mountains, Down to the Villages' campaign. Mao's personality cult reached its zenith as the Quotations from Chairman Mao, the 'Little Red Book', became compulsory reading for every citizen. Lin Biao was enshrined in the constitution as Mao's designated successor, only to die in a plane crash over Mongolia in 1971 while allegedly fleeing after a failed coup attempt.

Mao declared the Cultural Revolution over at the Ninth Party Congress in 1969, but its effective end came only after his death in 1976, when the 'Gang of Four' (Jiang Qing, Yao Wenyuan, Zhang Chunqiao, and Wang Hongwen) were arrested. In 1981 the CCP officially declared the Cultural Revolution responsible for 'the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the people, the country, and the Party since the founding of the PRC.' Death-toll estimates vary: Western scholars such as Maurice Meisner place the minimum at roughly 400,000 direct violent deaths, with some studies finding up to 1.5 million killed and roughly 36 million persecuted in rural China alone.

The Cultural Revolution did not, as Mao had envisioned, smash bureaucracy and reignite revolution. Instead it brought the state to the brink of collapse and laid bare the violent potential of the Party-state. The scars of that decade (a lost generation of education, shredded social trust) remain officially unexamined in full in China to this day.