Mao Zedong
Overview
Mao Zedong (毛澤東, December 26, 1893 – September 9, 1976) was a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party and the first head of state of the People's Republic of China, reigning as the supreme power on the Chinese mainland from the founding of the state in 1949 until his death. Through an independent revolutionary line that made peasants the subject of revolution, he drove the Nationalist government from the mainland and established a socialist state, and his thought remains central within the Chinese Communist Party's official ideological system to this day. At the same time, as the person responsible for large-scale policy experiments such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, he is a historical figure whose evaluation is sharply divided.
Main Content
Early Life and Revolutionary Activities
Mao Zedong was born into a wealthy peasant family in Xiangtan, Hunan Province, and received both traditional private-school education and modern schooling. While attending Changsha First Normal School, he was influenced by the New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Movement and moved toward Marxism, and in 1921 he participated in the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. After the KMT–CCP split in 1927, he advocated a line of armed struggle based on the countryside and organized the Red Army in Jinggangshan and the Jiangxi Soviet area. The Zunyi Conference, held during the Long March of 1934–1935, was the decisive turning point that raised him to the party's de facto military and political leader.
As Leader of the Chinese Communist Party
During the Yan'an period, Mao Zedong consolidated his position as the party's supreme leader and established theoretical authority through philosophical works such as On Practice and On Contradiction and through military strategy. After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, he maintained a people's war line centered on guerrilla warfare within the KMT–CCP united front, and at the 7th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1945, Mao Zedong Thought was codified as the party's guiding ideology. After victory in the Second Chinese Civil War, he proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China at Tiananmen on October 1, 1949.
Rule After the Founding of the State
Immediately after the founding of the state, he built the foundations of industrialization through land reform, socialist transformation, and the First Five-Year Plan, and in 1950 he dispatched the People's Volunteer Army to the Korean War. After the Hundred Flowers Movement in 1957, repression of intellectuals expanded through the Anti-Rightist Struggle, and the Great Leap Forward, promoted from 1958, is assessed as having caused a large-scale famine through agricultural collectivization and unrealistic production targets. The Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, was a period of political upheaval accompanied by the mobilization of the Red Guards, purges within the party, and the destruction of traditional culture. In diplomacy, he led the restoration of the UN Security Council permanent seat in 1971 and President Nixon's visit to China in 1972, opening the way for a turning point in US–China relations.
Thought and Theory
Mao Zedong Thought is a theoretical system that applied Marxism–Leninism to China's rural reality, characterized by a peasant-centered theory of new-democratic revolution, the mass line, and the theory of the universality and particularity of contradiction. On Practice, On Contradiction, and On the People's Democratic Dictatorship are counted among his representative works, and it is still defined as one of the guiding ideologies in the Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party.
Evaluation and Legacy
The 1981 historical resolution of the Chinese Communist Party established the official position of evaluating Mao Zedong as 70 percent achievements and 30 percent mistakes. In the international community, contradictory assessments coexist: he is both a symbol of decolonizing revolution and a person responsible for large-scale human rights abuses. Meanwhile, Mao's poetry and calligraphy are also subjects of study in literary and art history.
Recent Developments
Starting with the 130th anniversary of Mao Zedong's birth in December 2023, China held large-scale official commemorative events and exhibitions, and in 2024–2025 as tourism to major memorial halls and historic sites has become more active, a phenomenon is observed in which consumption of Mao-related books and documentaries is increasing among young people. In academia, disclosure of materials related to the Cultural Revolution and oral history research are expanding in some areas, while within China a trend continues that emphasizes a narrative connecting the Mao era and the reform and opening-up period. In international academia, studies estimating the scale of famine during the Great Leap Forward and reexaminations in the context of Cold War history are being published steadily.
Related Topics
- [[Chinese Communist Party]]
- [[Cultural Revolution]]
- [[Great Leap Forward]]
- [[Mao Zedong Thought]]
- [[People's Republic of China]]
- [[Deng Xiaoping]]