Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) [mow’ zay-dong’] founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Along with the founders of the Han and Ming dynasties, he was one of only three peasants who rose to rule all of China in a single lifetime, and he led perhaps the greatest social revolution in human history. He gave theoretical legitimacy to the continuation of class struggle in the socialist and communist stages of development and is regarded, along with Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin, as one of the three great theorists of Marxian communism.
Early life. Mao was born on Dec. 26, 1893, into a well-to-do peasant family in Hunan province. It was in this setting that a young Mao forged his character against the strong will of his father, a man who ruled his house with an iron fist and often clashed with his headstrong son (, 1998). From 1911, the year that the republican forces of Sun Yat-Sen launched the overthrow of the Qing (or Manchu) dynasty, Mao spent most of ten years in the provincial capital, where he was exposed to the rapid political changes sweeping the country and served briefly in the republican army. By 1918 he had gone to Beijing, where he worked briefly as a library assistant at Beijing University. It may be partly due to his relative poverty during his student years that he never identified completely with cosmopolitan bourgeois intellectuals. He did establish contact with intellectual radicals who later figured prominently in the Chinese Communist Party. In 1919, Mao returned to Hunan, where he engaged in radical political activity while supporting himself as primary-school principal.
In 1920, Mao married Yang Kaihui, the daughter of one of his teachers. Yang Kaihui was executed by the Chinese nationalists in 1930. In that year Mao married He Zizhen, who accompanied him on the Long March. Mao divorced her (1937), and in 1939 he married Jiang Qing.
When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was organized in Shanghai in 1921, Mao was a founding member and leader of the Hunan branch. At this stage the new party formed a united front with Sun Yat-Sen’s Kuomintang (Guomindang). Mao worked in Shanghai, Hunan, and Guangzhou, concentrating variously on labor organization, party organization, propaganda, and the Peasant Movement Training Institute.
Conflict with the Nationalist. In the 1920's, Mao was not the most important Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader, but his report in 1927 was an accurate assessment of rural poverty and its potential as a catalyst for social revolution. This essay includes one of Mao’s famous maxims: "Revolution is not a dinner party;" and Mao as a serious revolutionary, defended the necessity and appropriateness of revolutionary violence (, 2003).
In the summer of 1934, Mao had an opportunity to test the army's bond with the people, when, surrounded by nationalist forces, he decided that his beleaguered troops would have to slip through enemy lines and make their way to a more secure area. What followed was the Long March, perhaps the single most epic undertaking of the Civil War period and a major element in the formation of Mao’s mythical revolutionary career (, 2000).
When the Japanese invasion of 1937 forced the CCP and the Kuomintang once again to form a united front, the Communists gained legitimacy as defenders of the Chinese homeland. Mao rose in stature as a national leader and established himself as a military theorist and important Marxist thinker.
By placing the peasantry at the center of the revolutionary process and challenging the Leninist persuasion and that of other revolutionary Marxists that the peasants occupied a secondary position to that of the industrial proletariat within the revolution, Mao struck at both the elitist assumptions of Leninism and the bureaucratic arrogance of Stalinism. Coupled with his insistence that the revolution must always combat revisionism and never cut itself off from the masses, these ideological differences defined the fundamental differences separating Maoism and Leninism. The same can be said for differences in military strategy Mao, for example, allied with the peasants to win over the countryside, encircle the cities, and seize the political victory, while Lenin encouraged the urban industrial proletariat to seize the cities, fashion a revolutionary army, and extend the revolution to the countryside (, 2000).
China’s Leader. The soundness of Mao’s self-reliance and rural guerrilla strategies was proved by the CCP’s rapid growth during the Yenan period. The shaky truce between the Communists and the Nationalists broke down at the end of the war, and civil war erupted. By 1949, Chiang’s government fled to Taiwan, leaving the People’s Republic of China, formed by the Communists in 1949, in control of the Chinese mainland.
When Mao’s efforts to open relations with the United States in the late 1940s were rebuffed, he allied himself with the USSR. The Korean War deepened hostility to the United States. During the early 1950s, Mao served as chairman of the CCP, chief of state, and chairman of the military commission. His uniqueness as a leader is evident from his commitment to continued class struggle under socialism, which led him to take a number of unusual initiatives in the late 1950s. In the Hundred Flowers movement of 1956-57 he encouraged intellectuals to make constructive criticism of the party, which revealed deep hostility to CCP leadership. By 1957, Mao was the supreme leader and ideological mentor (, 2003).
At about the same time, Mao called for the elimination of the last vestiges of rural private property and the formation of people’s communes, and for rapid industrial growth through a program known as the Great Leap Forward. The suddenness of these moves led to administrative confusion and popular resistance, while adverse weather resulted in severe flood shortages. As a consequence, Mao lost his position as a chief of state and found his influence over the party severely curtailed.
During the 1960s Mao made a comeback, attacking the party leadership and the new chief of state, Liu Shao-Qi, through a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which peaked from 1966 to 1969 and was largely orchestrated by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. As events threatened to get out of hand, Mao was obliged to rely increasingly on the military, led by Lin Biao, who was named as Mao’s successor in 1969. By 1971, however, Lin was reported to have died in a plane crash after having plotted to assassinate Mao, who was once more firmly in control. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s sayings (printed in a little red book) and buttons bearing his image were widely distributed, his word was considered ultimate authority, and his person was the subject of ecstatic adulation, although Mao continued to state his belief in the Leninist notion of collective party leadership.
Mao came to view war as "the highest form of struggle for resolving contradictions . . . between classes, nations, states, or political groups.” Within the ranks of the army he pursued similar goals of socialist reconstruction by sharing a common, spartan lifestyle with his troops and introducing new democratic values by abolishing "the feudal practice of bullying and beating" troops of inferior rank. The youthful composition and democratic character of the army reinforced the unconventional image of happy, energetic soldiers radiating self-confidence, marching in unison, and singing enthusiastically to maintain the pace and sustain their revolutionary morale. Indeed, what emerged from this unorthodox approach was not the image of an army sparkling in spit and polish but an impression better suited to "a prep school on a holiday excursion (, 2000).
Throughout his life Mao never deviated in his commitment to learn from the masses; nor did he ever compromise his respect for their revolutionary spirit or underestimate the risk of isolating the leadership from their support. Viewing the masses as "the real heroes" of the revolution, he stressed the need to engage them in regular consultations and have the army become "one with the people" to ensure its invincibility and the defeat of Japan.
Toward the end of his life, Mao stated that the world’s states were divided into three groups: the underdeveloped nations, the developed nations, and the two superpowers (the United States and the USSR). This analysis underscored China’s position as a leader of the Third World and helped to rationalize a rapprochement with the United States. In 1972, Mao lent his prestige to this policy change by receiving U.S. President Richard M. Nixon in Beijing.
Mao himself had something to say on the subject of his own posterity. He too easily protested that he was waiting to see God. As a casual Daoist philosopher he cheerfully welcomed the flux of the universe. At times he seemed not to care about history. There were also times when he manipulated history on the self-conscious basis of "taking the past to serve the present" (yi gu wei jin), but, as a revolutionary, Mao was not interested in "disparaging the present by extolling the past" (yi gu fei jin). Perhaps one of the most intriguing questions of modern Chinese politics is how Mao, as one of the greatest revolutionaries of the twentieth century, could rationalize his own personality cult since it was rooted in a presumably reactionary tradition of emperor worship (, 2004).
Mao died in Beijing on Sept. 9, 1976 at age 82, having led China through war, man-made famines that killed tens of millions and the political violence of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, which scarred a generation. Although he was criticized after his death for the failure of his economic policies and the revolutionary excesses of his later years, his basic foreign policy was continued and his theories remained influential in the Third World.
But time has mellowed Mao's image, and today he is an object of widespread nationalistic admiration as a wily guerrilla commander and the creator of modern China. His philosophy, a hodgepodge of cryptic aphorisms and can-do exhortations known simply as "Mao Zedong Thought," is inscribed in the constitution and a required course for college students.
Celebrated at home and abroad as an inspirational revolutionary figure, a heroic military leader, and a utopian visionary, Mao’s political stature and historical legacy are clearly enormous. By stressing the need for direct contact between the people and the government, he authored a new people-centered approach to resolving China's problem of agrarian modernization. But unlike Stalin, who abandoned the peasants in favor of rapid industrialization, Mao embraced the peasantry and emphasized the importance of mass psychic involvement in recasting China's economy. His policies did, however, suffer from certain endemic inconsistencies, as he frequently vacillated between the more traditional methods of government experts and the more unorthodox contribution of peasants in the countryside. His approach, however, was truly remarkable in that it enabled the Chinese people to draw upon their own resources and initiative in pursuit of an industrial breakthrough with only minimal help or assistance from the outside world.
In formulating his own political thought, Mao was also able to disseminate a revolutionary political doctrine, which originated from within one of the most backward corners of the world. His role as the architect of a people's war of liberation, which combined social revolution and a prolonged national struggle against foreign oppression, spread throughout Asia, as was graphically demonstrated by the Vietnam War. But of all his contributions, the one that may persist the longest is his concept of total revolution, of the need to remake the individual as a whole and imbue that individual with a complete, unconditional revolutionary vision, grounded in personal sacrifice and total ideological commitment (, 2000).
Although Mao at first borrowed economic theory from the Soviets, he increasingly mixed it with his own beliefs and whims. The peace dividend at first brought China progress, but soon the inefficiencies of Communist economics and Maoist theories slowed development (, 1998). No person in history has had more power over more people than Mao Zedong, and no one shaped the destiny of an Asian nation so completely and for so long.
References
0 comments:
Post a Comment