Mao Zedong - Chairman Mao Documentary
The man known to history as Mao Zedong or Chairman Mao, was born on the 26th of December
1893 in the village of Xiaoshan in the province of Hunan in southern China.
His father was Mao Yichang, who had been raised in a family of poverty-stricken peasants,
however after serving in the Xiang army for a few years in his youth, Yichang had returned
to his native region and begun working as a farmer, he soon acquired enough money to
become a lender in the district, and this, combined with his agricultural work, allowed
him to become one of the more prosperous farmers in the Xiaoshan area, eventually coming into
possession of about 20 acres of land.
Mao's mother was Wen Qimei, a devout Buddhist who had a troubled upbringing, her father
was a poor shoemaker who drank heavily and her mother had been his concubine.
Mao's childhood was less than ideal, his father was a strict disciplinarian, whose
method of parenting primarily involved beating Mao and his three siblings if they did not
do as they were told, their mother tried to temper his outbursts but with little effect,
Young Mao developed an interest in his mother's Buddhism when he was younger, though he soon
became disenchanted with religion, and when he was just eight years old, he was sent to
the local primary school in Xiaoshan, just as the twentieth century was dawning, his
education there was a mixture of traditional Chinese learning centred on Confucianism combined
with the centuries-old values of the Far East, along with a sprinkling of influences from
the encroaching Western world which could not be avoided in China by the 1900s.
Additionally, the young Mao developed an interest early on in history and politics, when he
was thirteen years old, his father arranged for him to be married to Liu Yixiu, the seventeen-year-old
daughter of another prosperous local farmer, but Mao demonstrated his rebellious streak
at a young age and refused to honour the arranged marriage, causing something of a controversy
in the Xiaoshan area, and as a result of this disagreement, the teenage Mao temporarily
left his father's farm, although he returned before very long.
Mao was growing up at a time when China was experiencing momentous change, like Korea
and Japan to the east, China had first come into contact with European traders and religious
missionaries in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and like them, the Chinese had
quickly become wary of the newcomers and had restricted their contacts with them to
one or two ports in the south-east of the country, where a tiny amount of trade was
conducted.
It continued like this for nearly two centuries, with China remaining largely closed to a world
which was modernizing without it, it remained highly conservative in its religious, social
and political values, changing little, and continuing to be ruled by an emperor and a
closed government of imperial rituals and administrators, as it had been for centuries,
but by the mid-nineteenth century, China again, like Japan and Korea, could no longer prevent
the Europeans, with their modern warships, guns and industrial power, from interfering
in their countries, with the Opium Wars of 1839 to 1842, and 1856 to 1860, Britain forced
China to end its self-imposed isolation, following which, China experienced a flood
of European contact, and with it came not just British opium, but ideas about different
types of government, new economic developments and all manner of technological innovation.
Perhaps the most striking and revolutionary of these new ideas, which arrived into China
from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, was the knowledge that the Europeans and the Americans
were not ruled by powerful monarchs and emperors anymore, many lived under republics governed
by the people, and even where some of these countries still had emperors or empresses
such as Queen Victoria in Britain, she was essentially a figurehead, and it was Parliament
that actually ruled the British Empire, moreover, these democracies were not all alike, some
were very conservative, some were more liberal and some had different degrees of economic
development, and there were also competing ideas about how they should be reformed and
developed, with some wanting the wealthy to hold a great amount of power, and others who
believed that power and wealth should be distributed equally throughout society, and there were
more extreme ideas again, one of these, developed in particular by the German political scientist
Karl Marx in the mid-nineteenth century, argued that all wealth and goods should be held in
communal ownership, he called this communism, in early twentieth century China, these ideas
would soon lead to great change, as many began questioning why they were still ruled by the
emperor of the nearly three hundred year old Qing dynasty.
As Mao entered his teenage years, he was already reading about these political ideas, he was
particularly interested in calls for a democracy to be established in China to replace the
imperial government, and also the republican writings of Sun Yat-sen, who had become a
figurehead for the republican movement within China, he would soon see these desires confirmed,
just as Mao was starting at a new school in Changsha, the country was entering into a
period of rapid change, regional famines had struck parts of China in the late 1900s and
early 1910s, and this, combined with numerous regional uprisings throughout the country,
and growing calls for a more representative government, led to an army revolt in October
1911, at first the imperial government of Emperor Pu Yi, who was just a six-year-old
child, tried to address the grievances of the dissenters, but it soon became apparent
that a more drastic shift would be necessary, after weeks of negotiations it was determined
in February 1912, that the emperor would abdicate and a new republic of China would be established,
with the imperial officer Yuan Shikai serving as its first president of a national government,
thus an empire which had been in existence for centuries had ended, it was however, very
unclear in the mid-1910s, exactly in what direction China's politics would now head.
These were striking developments, and ones which Mao had not been entirely removed from,
when the conflict erupted late in 1911, he had enlisted in the rebel army as an 18-year-old
recruit, now in the spring of 1912, he simply returned to school, and it was around this
time that he first started reading about the idea of socialism and communism as more radical
forms of government, if he remained unconvinced that this was the best approach for China
at that time, meanwhile, his education continued, he determined at some point around 1913, that
he would become a teacher, and so he enrolled in the First Normal School of Hunan, widely
regarded at the time as the best in the province, here he became a popular and accomplished
student, reading widely, being elected secretary of the student society and eventually finishing
as one of the highest-ranked students in the school, more pivotally, in terms of his later
activities, Mao was increasingly exposed to the socialist ideas he had first encountered
a few years earlier, and over time, he began to find that he agreed more with what he read,
particularly so, as the environment of the First Normal School was one of radical political
thought, especially during China's first forays into representative government.
In 1917, Mao moved to Peking, now Beijing, where one of his main influences at this time,
Yang Changji, had taken a job at the Peking University, here Mao also took a job, as a
library assistant, but he was increasingly moving in circles of individuals who favoured
socialism and communism or Marxism as a solution to China's political woes, even with the
establishment of the Republic in 1912, the country had continued to experience turbulence
as conservative and liberal forces fought amongst each other and regional warlords and
power groups exercised quasi-regional independence throughout the country, Marxism appealed to
many at this time, because the Bolsheviks, a branch of Russian communism, had secured
control of the Russian government in the autumn of 1917, just months after the fall of the
autocratic Tsarist government there, perhaps, many thought, communism was also suitable
for China, which had just done away with its own fossilised autocratic imperial government,
Mao was increasingly leaning towards that viewpoint himself in 1918 and 1919, an outlook
which was compounded when he experienced the bourgeois hostility of the Beijing upper and
middle class towards a country boy like himself.
It was in Beijing that Mao's awakening as a political radical fully occurred, China
was drifting ever further into political anarchy in the late 1910s, as a buoyant nationalist
movement led by Sun Yat-sen sought to rejuvenate the Republic in its infancy, which the nationalists
perceived as being governed by a weak, conservative regime, with too many links to the old imperial
past, in parts of the country the government could exercise its authority, but in others
it was little more than a government in name only, this instability was augmented when
the Chinese government failed to secure the former German concession of Shandong at the
Versailles peace negotiations in Paris, following the end of the First World War, the nationalists
considered it an affront to national pride, when this piece of mainland China was instead
granted to Japan, a nation which had been exercising its strength across East Asia
since the late 19th century, when it had modernised in a far more successful manner than China,
and the Shandong controversy was a direct cause of a major student protest which occurred
in Beijing on the 4th of May 1919, this was driven by a younger generation of political
activists like Mao, who were tired of China's seeming impotence on the world stage and disordered
internal politics, the movement would continue afterwards and lead indirectly to the Chinese
civil war many years later.
The May 4th movement, the awakening of China's younger generations to radical politics, is
generally seen as the origins of the Communist Party of China, the events of 1919 led many
young Chinese people who were interested in politics to increasingly turn their backs
on the Western liberals of Britain, France and America, who had betrayed them on Shandong,
and increasingly to turn towards the Marxism and Leninism that was gradually winning the
Russian civil war and cementing its control over Russia, as we have seen, Mao was already
interested in communism by 1919, but it was only in the months following the May 4th protests
that he began to fully commit himself to it, and that summer he organised several student
organisations into an umbrella body to protest against the Japanese presence in Shandong,
this is the first clear sign of his abilities as an organiser, and his writings around this
time and into 1920 began to speak of the Army of the Red Flag and of the victories won by
the Communists in Russia, by the time that the Communist Party of China was formally
established in the summer of 1921, Mao had proclaimed himself to be a communist, believing
that the ideology would be the basis for the coming revolution in China.
It would be a slow ascent towards that revolution, however, in the meantime, Mao married again
in 1920 to Yang Kaihui, the daughter of one of his former teachers, then in July 1921,
he attended the first Congress of the Communist Party of China, a decision was taken early
on by the new party, to accept aid from Russia, but also to establish an alliance with Sun
Yat-sen's nationalist party, the Kuomintang, which would soon be led by a younger nationalist
by the name of Chiang Kai-shek, Mao was one of the first of the Chinese Communists to
also join the Nationalist Party, in the belief that the conservative Chinese political establishment
would only be overthrown if the nationalists and the communists worked in league with each
other, as such, he spent much of the 1920s living in the nationalist stronghold of Guangzhou
province and working as an organiser and propagandist for both the communists and the nationalists
simultaneously, and throughout this period, Mao was gaining a greater appreciation of
the struggles of the Chinese peasantry throughout the country and the strength in sheer numbers
which they had, if they were won over to the communist cause, as such, the early and mid-1920s
were formative, if somewhat unremarkable years in Mao's career.
This all began to change in 1926, with the death of Sun Yat-sen in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek
had taken over the leadership of the nationalists, by this time, his party, the Kuomintang, had
control over large parts of southern China, but the country was still highly fragmented,
with the conservative government of the republic holding Beijing and much of the north, and
quasi-independent Chinese warlords, who were vestiges of the imperial past, holding other
parts of the country. In 1926, Chiang determined to force the issue and launched a nationalist
military campaign to seize Beijing. The Northern Expedition, as it has become known, was a
major success, and during the course of 1926 and 1927, the nationalists seized power in
many of the major cities, but the very success of the Northern Expedition also led to civil
war. Now, the loose alliance which the Chinese communists and the nationalists had been in
since 1921, was effectively ended by Chiang Kai-shek, who had grown wary of the expanding
power of the communists and the role Russia wished to play in China. Once the conservative
regime in Beijing was done away with, the result was a split itself within the Nationalist
Party in 1927, between Chiang's right-leaning nationalists and a left-leaning faction which
wished to accommodate the communists. These events are typically seen as the beginning
of the Chinese Civil War, which would last for over 20 years. In the summer of 1927,
Chiang Kai-shek's newly ascendant Kuomintang began a crackdown on communists throughout
China. Thousands were killed, and the party was suppressed in many places. Mao's reaction
to this major setback, and the inception of civil war between the nationalists and the
communists, was to retreat with several hundred followers into the wilderness around the Jingang
Mountains on the border of Hunan province. It was the beginning of a long period of guerrilla
warfare during which the Communist Party, with tacit aid from Russia, sought to disrupt
the rule of the nationalists in anticipation of mass urban revolts by workers throughout
the country against the new government. These were often tough years for Mao. His wife and
sister were beheaded by the nationalists in 1930, though in his new life as a guerrilla
fighter in rural China, he had formed a relationship with He Zijun, whom he married soon after
Yang Kai-hui was killed. It was also around this time that he determined on a new course.
Instead of waiting for a revolt of the Chinese urban proletariat, he would attempt the same
strategy as had brought the Chinese nationalists to power, building up a territory which he
would control and expand outwards. In February 1930, Mao, who by now was one of the senior
commanders of the Chinese Communist movement, established the Southwest Jiangxi Provincial
Soviet Government in Jiangxi province, although the nationalists controlled most of the country.
For a few years here, in the early 1930s, Mao established a Chinese-Soviet state in
Jiangxi with him serving as the chairman. The Red Army had also expanded and was now
under the overall control of Zhou Enlai, with the wider Chinese Communist Party focusing
attentions on Jiangxi as a safe base for them in the early 1930s. Indeed, Mao, Enlai and
the Red Army saw off several efforts by Chiang Kai-shek to wrest control of the province
back from them in the early 1930s by encircling Jiangxi. However, this military response was
limited by the nationalists, in part because it had found itself embroiled in a conflict
on the other side of China in the early 1930s, as the Empire of Japan invaded the northeastern
Chinese provinces of Manchuria and established a puppet state called Manchukuo there. It
was just the beginning of heightened Japanese involvement in China in the 1930s, but once
the initial furore concerning Manchuria died down, Chiang set his sights on finally reclaiming
Jiangxi province from Mao and the Communists in the mid-1930s.
In September 1933, the Chinese nationalists began the fifth encirclement of Mao and the
Communists in Jiangxi province. This effectively involved an enormous siege by the nationalists
and one which would prove too large for the Red Army to repulse. By the summer of 1934,
it was clear that Mao and his followers would either have to surrender or break out of the
besieged area. They chose the latter and the resulting events have become part of Communist
Party law. In October 1934, Communist forces consisting of 86,000 troops, 15,000 personnel
and 35 women broke through nationalist enemy lines and began an epic retreat from their
encircled headquarters in southwest China. The Long March, as it became known, lasted
368 days and covered 6,000 miles. They crossed 24 rivers and 18 mountain ranges. Weapons
and supplies were borne on the backs of fighters or in horse-drawn carts, and at times the
line of marches stretched for 50 miles. Only 4,000 troops completed the journey. Enduring
starvation, aerial bombardment and almost daily skirmishes with nationalist forces,
Mao eventually halted his columns at the foot of the Great Wall of China. The Long March
is regarded as the longest continuous march in the history of warfare and marked the emergence
of Mao Zedong as the undisputed leader of the Chinese Communists.
The months after the Long March saw a curious drift in Chinese politics towards the rapprochement
between the Communists and the Nationalists. For years, the Nationalist government of Chiang
Kai-shek had been dealing with problems on multiple fronts. As well as the Communists,
there was the perhaps greater problem posed by the Empire of Japan and its ambitions to
dominate the Far East politically and militarily. This had already resulted in the invasion
of Manchuria and the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo in the early 1930s,
but as the years went by, it was clear that the Emperor's government in Tokyo had ambitions
for an even greater land grab in China. Accordingly, many within the Nationalist movement believed
it would be best to put aside their differences with the Communists for the foreseeable future
and form a coherent opposition to the impending Japanese attack, and for their part, Mao and
his followers were encouraged to do the same by Moscow. Thus, during the course of 1935
and 1936, Mao's Communists and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists were once again drifting towards
an alliance of convenience. The drive towards doing so was accelerated in July 1937, when
the Japanese again invaded China and proceeded to militarily occupy many of the major cities
along its eastern coast, massacring tens of thousands of Chinese civilians in cities such
as Nanjing in the process. The Chinese Civil War now morphed into the Second Sino-Japanese
War and in turn, that would become a constituent part of the Second World War in later years.
By the end of 1937, the Communists and the Nationalists were formally allied with each
other again after Chiang Kai-shek caved in to pressure to do so from within his own ranks,
and Mao also married again around this time to Zhang Qing, an actress who would become
his fourth and final wife. As an example of his growing ruthlessness, his former wife
He Tze-chun was packed off to the Soviet Union, where she was placed in a mental asylum.
Meanwhile, the nature of the struggle against Japan, which would play out for the next several
years, was beginning to become clear. The Nationalists moved inland towards central
China as the Japanese occupied the rich cities and farmland of the coastal regions of eastern
China. Here, in the inland provinces, the Nationalists and the Communists would wage
a war of attrition with the Japanese to the east for the next few years, and these were
significant years in terms of the support Mao and the Communists enjoyed. In the course
of the late 1930s and early 1940s, Mao's Red Army ballooned in size from approximately
50,000 to nearly half a million fighters. Thus, the war with Japan was finally creating
the kind of countrywide support for the Communist Party, which Mao and the other leaders had
failed to acquire in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Already by 1940, there were signs of Mao's Communists being able to win considerable
victories against the Japanese occupation forces. During a campaign which became known
as the Hundred Regiments Campaign, in August 1940, the 400,000-strong Red Army moved against
the Japanese in simultaneous attacks against five of the coastal provinces, attacks which
resulted in the deaths of upwards of 20,000 Japanese troops, as well as a severe disruption
to Japanese supply routes. Late 1941 and early 1942 brought setbacks,
although the Japanese made a series of sweeping conquests across the western Pacific, notably
seizing Singapore and Burma from the British and the Philippines from the United States,
following the declaration of war on the US in December, with the surprise attack on the
American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. While these conquests initially put
the Japanese in the ascendancy in Eastern Asia, the entry of Japan into the wider Second
World War also ensured that the Nationalists and the Communists now had allies in the shape
of the British and Americans. With increased military, financial and logistical support
being received, they were able to ensure that the Japanese occupation of Eastern China was
never comfortable during the Second World War.
As the war was grinding onwards throughout the first half of the 1940s, the Chinese Communist
Party continued to grow in power and so did Mao as its leader. The nature of the war of
resistance against the Japanese favoured the Communists over the Nationalists. For starters,
the Communists were more attuned to how to wage guerrilla war, having done so for many
years against the Nationalist government in the late 1920s and early 1930s. As a consequence,
they were better prepared for doing so against the Japanese, and as they won a series of
victories against the Japanese, the Red Army became the more attractive option for Chinese
people seeking to oppose the foreign occupation. Moreover, Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang seemed
to many to simply be the Chinese manifestation of the right-wing movements which had brought
Japan into China to begin with, and as the Chinese Communist Party or CPC expanded in
size, Mao also consolidated his control, in 1943 he acquired the chairmanship of both
the Party Secretariat and the Politburo of the Party for the first time. It was also
during these war years that he began affirming that Chinese Communism would have a distinctly
different shape than that which had developed in Russia. Beijing would be no puppet of Moscow
in future years.
The
nature of the war against the Japanese changed from 1943 onwards as Japan suffered a series
of severe setbacks in its struggle against the United States, while its European allies,
Germany and Italy, were also fighting an increasingly doomed war against Russia, Britain and the
US. Once the allies were victorious there, all their resources would be employed against
the Empire of Japan. Consequently, in the final years of the war, thoughts once again
turned to China's politics and who would hold power once the country had been freed
from the Japanese. As early as 1940, there were serious cracks in the alliance between
Mao's Communists and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists and by 1942, open fighting between
the two had broken out yet again as the Chinese Civil War resumed. It would fully erupt again
following the end of the Pacific War. On the 6th and 9th of August 1945, the United
States dropped two atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Simultaneously,
the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria, which Japan had occupied all the way back in 1931.
As a result, within weeks, the Empire of Japan had formally surrendered to the Allies. The
Second World War was over and the Chinese Civil War once more commenced between the
Nationalists and Mao's Communists. Mao was in a far more advantageous position in 1945
than he had been ten years earlier after the Long March. If the Long March had kept the
Chinese Communist movement alive, then the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and the
eight years of war with Japan allowed the Communists to strengthen their position immensely
In a curious twist of history, the Japanese invasion of China indirectly led to the Communists
seizing power in the country. Early in 1946, Mao was handed an extra advantage when Stalin
handed over Manchuria to the Chinese Communist Party. Yet it would take three years of further
intense fighting between the Communists and the Nationalists before a breakthrough was
made. In September 1948, the Communists secured full control of East Central China in the
region south of Beijing with the capture of Shandong Province in the Huaihai Campaign.
Then in the winter of 1948, Mao launched the Pingjin Campaign against Chiang Kai-shek's
forces in northern China. Over a two-month campaign, over a half a million Nationalist
troops were killed, captured or wounded, and the north of the country was left in Communist
hands. With northern China largely secured by early 1949, Mao and the Red Army commanders
took the decision that spring to drive south of the Yangtze River into the heartland of
Nationalist-held territory. This was done despite the efforts of the Soviet leader Joseph
Stalin to encourage Mao to form a coalition government with the Nationalists. Stalin did
not want a rival for power amongst the Communist leaders, but he would soon have one. On the
23rd of April 1949, the Red Army seized the Nationalist capital of Nanjing. A series of
further striking gains saw Chiang Kai-shek retreat south with his remaining supporters
to Guangzhou by the autumn of 1949. Just weeks later, he and the remaining Nationalists decided
to make a strategic retreat from the Chinese mainland to the island of Formosa, more commonly
known today as Taiwan. Here the Nationalists formed a government which they proclaimed
as the continuation of the Republic of China, which had been established back in 1911. Meanwhile,
back on the mainland, Mao had proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of
China on the 1st of October 1949. The Chinese civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists
was at an end after more than twenty years of conflict. Mao now entered office as the
first chairman of the Central People's Government. The first measure to be taken was to tidy
up the loose ends of the war. In the spring of 1950, the Red Army launched a campaign
against the island of Hainan off the southeast coast of China. Within weeks, the 100,000
strong Nationalist forces there were forced to surrender. The international community
now expected that Mao would proceed with an invasion of Taiwan, and indeed, even the American
government, a long-time supporter of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, had decided not
to recognize his new regime in Taiwan in the belief that it would soon be defeated by Mao
and the Communists. But no invasion came, and despite numerous crises between the two
sides, Taiwan remains self-governing to this day, and this period immediately after the
conclusion of the civil war also saw Mao head to Moscow in the winter of 1949 to 1950. Here,
he secured large injections of Russian financial support for China, as well as technological
advisers, although the agreement came with a tacit admission by Mao of Stalin's primacy
within the Communist world. Mao would have to wait several years before he could attempt
to go his own way. The post-war years in China saw the initiation
of wide-ranging political, social and economic reforms. Firstly, a massive land reform campaign
was initiated to transfer agricultural land out of the hands of large-scale farmers and
landlords and into the hands of poorer peasants. While this reduced economic inequality, it
was not without violence, and there were many, many instances of the former landlords being
attacked or even murdered across China in the early 1950s. In tandem, a huge drive was
initiated to crack down on opium production and consumption across the country, a habit
which was partly a legacy of British meddling into the Chinese economy in the 19th century.
In the 1950s, millions of opium addicts and habitual users were press-ganged into labor
reform camps. They were joined in these by the hundreds of thousands of individuals who
Mao's regime branded as counter-revolutionaries, many of them being former members of the Kuomintang,
and Mao also launched the new People's Republic onto the world stage by entering into the
Korean War, which broke out in the summer of 1950 between a Communist North and an American-backed
North. Massive Chinese aid ensured that the conflict ended in a stalemate three years
later. It also led to a split of relations between Mao's new regime and the United States,
one which involved a trade embargo which lasted for over twenty years.
In the 1950s, Mao had formed a clear idea of how he believed communism should develop
in China. It would be incorrect to assume that Mao Zedong was simply a power-monger
who used Communist ideology to secure authority in China. Certainly, he was a brutal autocrat,
a fact which would become strikingly clear as his long chairmanship continued on into
the 1960s and 1970s. But he had also read widely on Marxist-Leninist thought and had
a vision for how communism would develop in China. In the early 1950s, that vision involved
the industrial capacity of China's burgeoning cities of the East Coast and its great rivers,
leading the country away from its reliance on agriculture. As Mao described it, the Communists
had come to power by the Red Army encircling the cities, occupied by the Nationalists and
the Japanese, and then absorbing the cities when they were strong enough. Now, the direct
opposite was needed. China's cities would need to expand outward and bring the country
closer to achieving communism as Marx had intended it. To that end, in 1953, the first
Five-Year Plan was initiated in China, in imitation of the Five-Year Plans which the
Soviet Union had begun employing in Russia in the 1920s. The first Five-Year Plan of
1953 to 1957 was geared primarily towards reducing the reliance of the Chinese economy
on agricultural output and moving towards becoming a global power through the creation
of an industrial economy. With Soviet financial support and expertise provided through Russian
advisers, new factories were built across the country during the plan, farms were collectivized
across China and placed under state management, and billions of yuan were spent in total on
completing 595 large and medium-sized infrastructural and economic projects, including railways,
major roads, and new dams, often linking parts of China with each other in ways which had
never been possible before. As a result, Chinese industrial productivity increased by 128 percent,
and steel production alone jumped from 1.35 million tons in 1953 to over 5 million in
1957. Coal extraction doubled during the five years, while in agriculture, yields of grain
and cotton rose by over 30 percent during the same time period. Overall, the first Five-Year
Plan under Mao was a tremendous success in pure economic terms, but in its success were
sown the seeds of destruction, for a hubris now entered into Mao and his colleagues'
thinking, a hubris which would be injected with catastrophic consequences into the second
Five-Year Plan, or as it is more commonly known, the Great Leap Forward. On the 22nd
of May 1957, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who had succeeded Stalin on his death in 1953,
delivered a speech at a regional meeting of Soviet representatives, in the course of
which he proclaimed that it was his goal that the Soviet Union should, "...catch up and
overtake America in economic output by 1980." A few months later, in November 1957, at a
gathering in Moscow of international communist leaders to celebrate the 40th anniversary
of the October Revolution, which had brought the Soviets to power in 1917, he repeated
his claim, only now he was even more ambitious. The Soviets would now eclipse the Americans
within 15 years. Mao, who wished for China to rival the Soviet Union, and whose relationship
with Khrushchev was more antagonistic than it had been with Stalin, began pondering this
goal in the aftermath of the Soviet leader's speech. Not to be outdone, he quickly determined
to make similar claims, and made it known that it was China's goal to catch up with
Britain's economy within 15 years, and exceed their production of steel and other
core industrial outputs. With this goal in mind, in 1958, the Chinese Communist Party
initiated the Second Five-Year Plan, or what was soon referred to as the Great Leap Forward,
for the country's economy. It would result in the most catastrophic famine the world
has ever seen. Mao believed that the key indicators of how
China's economy was progressing would be seen in grain and steel production. If these
could be increased rapidly, it would show the Soviets in Moscow, and the world in general,
that China was asserting itself on the world stage. Accordingly, all of the instruments
of the state were deployed in 1958 to begin increasing the rate of grain and steel production,
by establishing new smelting factories, and turning ever greater amounts of agricultural
land over to grain production. Massive amounts of farmland were collectivized into giant
state farms towards this end, and millions of workers were redeployed to different parts
of the economy than they were trained for. Huge amounts of state funding were also given
out to aid in the effort, and party officials were sent out into the countryside and the
towns, charged with maximizing production. However, many of these initiatives were potentially
hazardous to begin with, as the state was employing experimental farming methods, in
some instances, and in others, was turning over land to grain production, which was more
suited to other crops. In other instances, workers were being sent into steel factories
with little or no training in what they were doing. It was an inauspicious beginning in
1958, but one which would get much worse over time.
Despite these structural issues, there were some initial signs of progress. Steel and
iron production did increase in the initial stages of the Great Leap Forward, perhaps
by as much as 30 to 40 percent in 1958, but the mechanism whereby it was being increased
would prove catastrophic in some instances. In their eagerness to show good results, local
party cadres throughout the country were often resorting to unimaginably short-sighted
and brutal tactics. The more cruel methods involved overworking their laborers in the
factories to try to have larger amounts of steel produced. But within a few months, party
officials throughout the country were also setting up what became known as backyard furnaces,
the use of which Mao had actually encouraged. These were essentially makeshift steel furnaces,
which were often set up in the yards of people's homes. Scrap metal was used to produce pig
iron, which was almost totally useless. But the worst thing was that farming tools and
other instruments which were needed for producing food throughout the country were often being
thrown into these backyard furnaces and melted down so that local party officials could record
higher outputs of alleged steel production in their areas. The result was a lack of basic
tools for farming as the months went by. The effect of all this between 1958 and 1961 was
catastrophic, with millions of farmers being press-ganged into working in factories in
the cities and towns. There was not enough people available to produce food throughout
China in a country which was often on a subsistence food level anyway. Added to this was the practice
of party officials destroying basic farming equipment to inflate the amount of steel they
were producing in their areas. Furthermore, the party had begun trying to use experimental
irrigation methods, which had rendered large amounts of farmland temporarily unusable in
some areas. Given all this, it is unsurprising that even by the autumn of 1958, just months
after the Great Leap Forward had started, there were major food shortages in some parts
of the country, and this was further compounded by the fact that the government continued
to export grain and other agricultural products in order to increase its revenue and also
keep up the appearance that productivity was increasing. By late 1958, people in certain
parts of the country were beginning to start foraging for wild foods in the countryside,
and others were starving to death. This was just the beginning though, and by 1959, grain
production had fallen by roughly 15-20% in total across the country.
There is considerable debate as to how much Mao knew about what was unfolding across China
as a result of the Great Leap Forward. It is quite possible that in late 1958 and early
1959, he was unaware of the famine conditions, but evidence has been uncovered which suggests
he knew by at least the late spring of 1959, and yet did not do enough to change course.
By 1960, when he delegated control of certain parts of the Great Leap Forward program to
others, the Central Party members were actively trying to prevent the worst, but by then,
it was too late. The forces which were unleashed in 1958 and 1959 reverberated into 1960 and
1961, and famine struck China over each of these years with varying degrees of severity.
There have been many different estimates of the number of people who died in recent years,
as the opening of certain archives in China has allowed for more accurate assessments,
but scholars are generally agreed that at least 25 million people died in a country,
the population of which was approximately 660 million in 1958. Frank Dicotta, who studied
the period in detail and who saw the Great Leap Forward as Mao's Great Famine in the
title of his study of these events, suggested the death toll was as many as 55 million people,
others would suggest somewhere between 30 and 45 million, making this the most catastrophic
famine in human history in terms of sheer numbers of deaths.
The second five-year plan, advertised as the Great Leap Forward, came to an end in
1962. Curiously, it was relatively under-reported internationally, as much of the information
concerning it was transmitted through the Republic of China's government in Taiwan
or the British enclave of Hong Kong, and many foreign services believed they were exaggerating
the extent of the suffering caused for political purposes. Internally, however, it had badly
compromised Mao's leadership. On the 27th of April 1959, Mao's term as Chairman of the People's
Republic of China came to an end, although he retained his position as Chairman of the Communist
Party and of Military Affairs, he was succeeded by Liu Xiaoqi and by January 1962, the Great
Leap Forward was being wound down. At this time, Liu made a speech at what was to become known as
the 7000 Carters Conference, in which he denounced the Great Leap Forward. It was a
very thinly-veiled public rebuke of Mao, the likes of which would have been unimaginable
five years earlier. Nevertheless, while Mao had lost some of his authority for now, he
was still very much in charge. He would, however, have to govern in a more collective fashion,
with figures such as Xiaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who had done much to recover the economic
situation in the wake of the disastrous policies of the late 1950s. The 1960s also saw China
increasingly isolated on the world stage. Tensions had been brewing between Mao and
the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev ever since the latter succeeded Stalin in the mid-1950s.
Mao was particularly perturbed by Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's brutal authoritarianism
and more moderate stance towards the Western powers. He also found himself increasingly
ad-loggerheads with Moscow about the two regimes' interpretation of orthodox Marxism. Relations
were bad by the late 1950s, but they became particularly acute in the early 1960s,
especially once the Cuban Missile Crisis inspired Khrushchev to begin working more closely with the
US government of John F. Kennedy to defuse the Cold War in ways which Mao opposed. A sign of the
split was seen in 1961, when Mao denounced the Soviet regime as revisionist traitors. For his
part, Khrushchev was increasingly wary of Mao's attitude towards the possibility of a nuclear war
with the West. Mao once worryingly suggested that if 300 million Chinese people died in a nuclear
war, the other half would still be alive to secure victory, and so the Russian leader must have been
concerned in 1964 when the Chinese successfully tested their first nuclear bomb, but by then,
the Sino-Soviet split was complete. While much is known about the political life of the man who
oversaw this split with Russia and the catastrophes of the Great Leap Forward, the more private Mao
remains something of an enigma. His fourth marriage, that to Zhang Qing in 1938, lasted for
the remainder of his life. Though Mao engaged in a string of extramarital affairs, including most
controversially in his later life with a private secretary, Zhang Yufeng, who was in her early
twenties when she first entered Mao's employ. He had at least ten children, several of whom had
been born in the 1920s and with whom he had very little relationship, as he had had to leave them
with others during the long civil war years. He spent much of his private time writing and was a
prolific composer of political writings and poems, while his reading habits tended to favour traditional
Chinese literature. By temperament, he would become aggressive when challenged, but his demeanour was
certainly not genuinely unhinged like Stalin had been in Russia during the 1930s and 1940s.
For Mao, state violence was engaged in for political rather than personal purposes, but a
great deal about his other personal motivations and inclinations are shrouded behind a public image
which was closely managed during his lifetime. The Sino-Soviet split and the catastrophic
consequences of the Great Leap Forward were the background against which Mao initiated what has
today become known as simply the Cultural Revolution, but the full name of which was the
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Launched in 1966, the Cultural Revolution was designed to be
a political and social movement which aimed to purify Chinese society and Chinese communism
by removing any of the vestiges of Chinese traditionalism which remained and the capitalist
bourgeois elements within it. Mao claimed that a bourgeois bureaucracy had developed within the
Chinese Communist Party that was leading China in the wrong direction and this, along with communist
revisionists such as those who were now in power in Russia, needed to be stopped and a renewed
dedication to the communist cause developed. In particular, Mao called on the younger generations
of China, those which had been born after the Second World War and who had never known life in
China before communist rule, to bombard the headquarters to purify Chinese society of these
bourgeois capitalist elements and to reinvigorate the communist movement. There has been a widespread
debate as to what Mao's motivations for launching the Cultural Revolution were. Some historians have
argued that he genuinely believed that the Chinese Communist Party and the huge administration which
operated under it throughout China had been compromised by nearly twenty years in power
and that a cultural reawakening was necessary to stop the bureaucratic degeneration of the country.
However, while this might have been a motivating factor for Mao, there is no doubt that the Cultural
Revolution was primarily conceived as a way for the chairman to resuscitate his control
over the Communist Party and the country as a whole. By its very nature, the movement allowed
Mao to use the party's apparatus and wider organs of the state to purge the government of his
opponents and competing factions. These had multiplied in number in the early 1960s as the
catastrophic impact of the Great Leap Forward was felt across the country. Now, Mao would eliminate
those who had dared to cross him in the most brutal purges seen within the Chinese Communist Party.
The result would be years of unrest which turned ordinary Chinese people against each other
and created an environment of fear and suspicion. The Cultural Revolution was initiated in May 1966,
with Mao urging the people and students in particular to act to purify the party ranks.
Within weeks, gangs of students were attacking their teachers, intellectuals, government officials,
and even people who were deemed to be wearing bourgeois clothing. These attacks could range from
being mild to moderately violent, such as when teachers were attacked by gangs of students and
had their heads shaved, to truly bloody acts, such as when government officials were actually murdered
or driven to commit suicide. As the frenzy built up in the summer of 1966, official party newspapers
stoked the flames by calling on the masses to clear away the evil habits of the old society
and attack the monsters and demons. By now, students in classrooms and on college campuses
across China were organizing themselves into bands of so-called Red Guards, committed to preserving
the Communist Revolution and rooting out what were termed the Four Olds, old ideas, old customs,
old habits, and old culture. By the early autumn, gangs of teenagers wearing red armbands roamed the
streets of cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, and the unrest was so visceral that August became
known as Red August. Soon, the initial student-led violence spread to other groups and factory
workers and laborers on collectivized farms began joining what was termed the Red Terror.
Meanwhile, Mao was directing these groups as best they could be directed, against his enemies within
the government and the wider party apparatus. But as a means of purging the party of his opponents,
this was a very unstable method. By 1967, radical elements were threatening to move beyond Mao's
ability to control them, but the Cultural Revolution nevertheless continued. In 1968,
Mao initiated the Down to the Countryside, whereby the children of supposed middle-class bourgeois
urban families were forced into what were effectively re-education camps in the countryside.
Meanwhile, the chairman was building up an ever-greater cult of personality around himself,
in part led by the publication of his Little Red Book, a collection of his sayings and writings
which became central to the concept of Maoism in China around this time. The violence continued
unabated through the late 1960s, but by 1971, even Mao was aware of the need to scale things back,
and though the Cultural Revolution is deemed by some to have only ended with Mao's death in 1976,
the worst of the unrest subsided in the early 1970s. As with the enormous famine created by
the Great Leap Forward ten years earlier, historians have found it difficult to precisely
identify how many people died as a result of the Cultural Revolution. Estimates tend to vary between
500,000 and 2 million people having lost their lives as a result of the violence which swept
through China between 1966 and 1971. Many of these were killed by the Red Guards and other groups,
triggered into fanaticism by Mao's injunctions, however probably the greater proportion of these
lost their lives in instances where the army was called in to quell the unrest or by the army and
the Communist Party being directed to purge certain groups by Mao himself. Just as damaging
was the psychological pain inflicted on a society where people were effectively turned against each
other by the state. Perhaps the most glaring example of this occurred in Guangxi Province
in the south of the country, where between 100,000 and 150,000 lives were lost during the Cultural
Revolution. People here even resorted to burying the persecuted alive or boiling or disemboweling
them and there was systematic cannibalism engaged in in Guangxi as the frenzied masses sought to
literally devour their enemies in their fervor. Ultimately, the Cultural Revolution scarred Chinese
society in ways which are hard to quantify. The early 1970s witnessed a major event in China's
relations on the international stage which has had important implications down to the present day.
Chinese involvement in the Korean War had seen diplomatic ties between the People's Republic
and the United States government effectively shut down with trade sanctions imposed on China
by Washington. However, with the passage of 20 years, both sides were cautiously investigating
the possibility of re-establishing diplomatic ties. During the course of the 1968 US presidential
election, the Republican candidate Richard Nixon had proposed making overtures to China to that
effect and after he entered office, negotiations commenced. In 1971, Nixon's National Security
Advisor Henry Kissinger went on a secret diplomatic mission to Beijing and this was followed in
February 1972 by an official state visit in China by Nixon during the course of which he met Mao.
The first meeting between a Chinese and American head of state since the Second World War which has
grown ever greater in importance since and which is now regarded by many as the most significant
international relationship between two states in the world. Despite the veneer of normality which
was lent to US-Chinese relations by the official state visit of Nixon in 1972, at home the Chinese
government continued to operate in an extreme fashion. By the time Nixon visited, Mao was nearly
80 years of age and owing to years of chain smoking, he was suffering from numerous physical
ailments. It was due to this and the cult of personality which he had built up around himself
that he allowed a number of senior Communist Party members to become immensely influential
in China in his final years. These were known as the Gang of Four which consisted of Mao's wife
Jiang Qing, Jiang Qiongqiao, an ultra-Maoist writer who had come to prominence during the 1960s for
his denunciation of bourgeois elements within Chinese society, a close ally of Chun Qiao's,
Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen, a younger political figure who had risen from within the Shanghai
branch of the Chinese Communist Party to become one of its highest-ranking figures during the
Cultural Revolution. The Gang of Four had done much to promote the worst excesses of the Cultural
Revolution between 1966 and 1971, but even after the most extreme period of the purges ended in
the late 1960s, their influence over Mao's government continued. The last years of Mao's
life and his primacy in the politics of China are hard to characterize, as competing forces were at
work in the halls of power in Beijing. Certainly, Mao remained wedded to the idea of clinging to
power until the very end. As a result, he continued to allow the Gang of Four and their supporters
to hold considerable influence in the country. However, separately, there was a growing clique
of individuals who coalesced around other older stalwarts of the Party, such as the former head
of the Red Army and Premier Zhou Enlai, and the former General Secretary of the Party Dong Xiaoping.
They wished to break from some of the more traditional ideological values of the Party,
espoused by Mao, and introduce a greater degree of professionalism into the running of the government
and the economy. There was also much bitterness within the Party establishment at the damage
wrought by the Cultural Revolution, as individuals who had fought the Japanese and the Nationalists
in the 1930s and 1940s had often been purged from the Party in the late 1960s, only to be
gradually rehabilitated in the 1970s. Acrimony between all these groups characterised the
politics of China in the final years of Mao's life, and it was he himself who was largely
responsible for creating this situation. The political uncertainty of the post-Cultural
Revolution period was still unresolved as Mao entered the final stages of his life.
His health had further deteriorated in the mid-1970s, and he was suffering from several
heart and lung ailments, the latter aggravated considerably by his chain smoking, while there
were unconfirmed rumours of a considerable reliance on sleeping pills which had developed
over the years. On the 27th of May 1976, he met the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto,
on a state visit, at which the last known photo of Mao was taken, but by then he had already
suffered the first of several heart attacks that occurred between the spring and autumn of 1976,
and which left him increasingly incapacitated. The final one on the 5th of September left him
largely unable to move, and he died four days later. A state funeral lasting a week followed,
between the 11th and the 18th of September 1976, during which one million Chinese people
filed past his body. Today, the enormous mausoleum of Mao Zedong housing his embalmed body,
stands in the middle of Tiananmen Square in central Beijing, on the site where the Gate of
China, the southern gate of the old imperial city between the 14th and the 20th centuries,
used to stand, before its destruction in 1954. It is perhaps fitting as a statement of where
ancient China ended and modern China began. Mao's death occurred at a time when the older
leadership of the entire Chinese Communist Party, the generation who had come to political
consciousness during the May 4th movement all the way back in 1919, was fading from Chinese life,
the old leader of the Red Army, and a possible successor to Mao, Zhou Enlai, had pre-deceased
Mao by just a few months. Consequently, Mao had appointed the Minister for Public Security,
Hua Guofeng, as his successor, shortly before his death. He succeeded as chairman of the Chinese
Communist Party in 1976, but he would not last long. Guofeng was outmaneuvered in the years that
followed by Deng Xiaoping, who became the de facto leader of China in 1978. Though Guofeng's brief
period as leader was significant in arresting and charging the Gang of Four as being responsible for
the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, in all but one instance, they subsequently were sentenced
to life in prison under Deng Xiaoping's leadership. Elsewhere, despite his impeccable communist
credentials, Deng Xiaoping quickly moved China away from its planned economy and the more
authoritarian aspects of Mao's reign, setting term limits on the holding of office. It was during
Deng's tenure as Mao's successor that the roots of China's economic miracle can really be found,
as he opened the country up to foreign investment and expertise. Thus, in the end, Mao proved to be
the impediment to China's growth, rather than the deliverer of it. Mao Zedong is one of the most
contentious individuals in Chinese history, and indeed the history of the modern world, to some
he was a brutal tyrant and a mass murderer, under whose rule, between 1949 and 1946, over 50 million
people and perhaps as many as 80 million died prematurely, whether as a result of the catastrophic
failures of the Great Leap Forward, the waves of violence unleashed during the Cultural Revolution,
or government-orchestrated disasters such as the Banqiao Dam failure of 1975, which by some estimates
resulted in the deaths of over 200,000 people. However, to many others, he is one of the great
heroes of modern-day China, the man who ensured that the cause of Chinese communism survived
during the Long March of the 1930s, the commander who led Chinese resistance to the Japanese
occupation during the Second World War, and the individual who thereafter led the Red Army to
victory over the Nationalists. Many who focus on his achievements will also point towards the fact
that life expectancy rates and living standards in China increased dramatically between the 1940s
and the 1970s, and argue that Mao laid the basis for China's economic miracle, which began in the
late 20th century. It is indeed striking that one individual can provoke such widely diverging
opinions. There is no doubting Mao's critical role in ensuring the ascent to power of the Communist
Party in China. Without Mao, the movement might not have survived the 1930s, and his leadership
was also critical in the post-war period, but once he secured power, this individual, who was clearly
possessed of a considerable intellect and ability, became obsessed with retaining and expanding his
control of China, at the expense of lives and social stability. It was his desire to not play
second fiddle to Khrushchev and the Russians, which drove China into the disastrous Great Leap
Forward, and his unwillingness to accept how badly things had gone wrong, which saw the famine which
the second Five-Year Plan created, drag on for years and kill somewhere between 30 and 50 million
Chinese people. It was Mao's pathological desire to reinforce his position as head of the Chinese
state in the mid-1960s, which led to the violence and instability of the Cultural Revolution. The
Mao of the 1950s and 1960s was a different one to the individual who first joined the party in 1921
and initiated the Long March in 1934. Those who knew him over the course of his life often confirmed
that he changed considerably over the years. What do you think of Mao Zedong? Do you think
he was actually committed to the idea of communism? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
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