Mao Zedong

Rise to Power

Mao Zedong was born on 26 December 1893 in Shaoshan, Xiangtan county, Hunan province, the son of a prosperous peasant farmer. As a young man he studied at Hunan First Normal School in Changsha, where he was influenced by the New Culture Movement, and during the May Fourth Movement in 1919 he founded the journal Xiangjiang Review in Changsha. In July 1921 he attended the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party as a delegate, making him one of the Party's founding members. He then navigated a brutal intra-party struggle, during which his second wife, Yang Kaihui, was executed by the Nationalists in 1930; at the Zunyi Conference in January 1935, held during the Long March, he was elected to the Politburo Standing Committee, from which his leading position within the Party progressively grew, and at the 7th Party Congress in 1945 he was formally elected Chairman of the Central Committee. His strategy of building a rural revolutionary base — mobilising the peasantry rather than the urban proletariat — deviated sharply from Soviet orthodoxy and ultimately proved decisive. On 1 October 1949, at Tiananmen Square, Mao proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China.

The Early PRC and Radical Campaigns

The first decade of Mao's rule brought genuine achievements: land reform redistributed land to peasants, literacy rates rose sharply, and life expectancy improved — though the land reform campaign was also accompanied by public denunciation and mass execution of landlords. In October 1950, months after the outbreak of the Korean War, Mao — after fierce debate among top Party leaders — decided to send Chinese troops into Korea, forming the Chinese People's Volunteer Army; his eldest son, Mao Anying, served as a Russian interpreter at the Volunteer Army's headquarters and was killed in a US air raid on 25 November of that year, aged 28. In 1957, the Anti-Rightist Movement silenced hundreds of thousands of intellectuals after the Hundred Flowers Campaign briefly encouraged open criticism. The Great Leap Forward (1958–62), Mao's attempt to accelerate industrialisation by mobilising mass labour and collectivising agriculture, caused a catastrophic famine that killed an estimated 15–45 million people — the deadliest man-made famine in history. When colleagues including Liu Shaoqi and Peng Dehuai raised concerns, Mao purged them.

The Cultural Revolution

In 1966, fearing that China was drifting toward revisionism and that his rivals were entrenching themselves in the Party apparatus, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. He mobilised millions of young Red Guards to attack the "Four Olds" — old ideas, culture, customs, and habits — and to destroy the Party and state bureaucracy. Schools and universities closed. Temples, libraries, and cultural artefacts were destroyed. An estimated one to two million people were killed and millions more persecuted, imprisoned, or sent to re-education camps. On 13 September 1971, Lin Biao — written into the Party constitution as Mao's designated successor — died when a plane carrying him crashed in Mongolia while apparently attempting to flee to the Soviet Union, a blow that badly damaged both Mao's health and his political authority. The revolution effectively ended only with Mao's death on 9 September 1976.

Legacy

Mao's legacy remains deeply contested. The official CCP verdict, adopted in 1981, holds that he was "70% correct and 30% wrong" — crediting him with founding the PRC and unifying China while acknowledging the disasters of the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution. To his supporters he remains the liberator of China from foreign imperialism and feudal exploitation. To his critics he was a megalomaniac whose ideological experiments killed tens of millions. His portrait still hangs over Tiananmen Gate, and his embalmed body lies in a mausoleum in Tiananmen Square.