Mao Tse-Tung

Mao Tse-Tung (b 1893) was born in Shaoshan, Hunan Province, China on December 26, 1893, the eldest of four children of a fairly successful farmer and money lender. At the time China was in a period of transition from the Manchu Dynasty to a bold new modernity. His early education reflected this transition.

In 1911 he interrupted his education and became involved in the Republican Revolution, serving in the Hunan Provincial Army. After the Revolution, Mao returned to school in Changsha, and graduated from the Hunan First Normal University in 1918. Later that year, Mao traveled to Beijing for the first time. With the help of Professor Yang Changji, a former teacher of Mao’s who had brought Mao to Beijing with him, Mao found work as an assistant librarian at Peking University. He also registered as a part-time student at the university, attending lectures given by many of the leading scholars of China at the time. In addition, he read extensively, and the many intellectual stimuli to which he was exposed led him to embrace radical politics.

The common course for Chinese radicals in the early 1920s was to travel abroad, but Mao preferred to travel across China. When he finally returned to Hunan, it was as a leading advocate of workers’ rights and collective action by the masses of the Chinese population.

In 1921, he attended the First Congress of the Communist Party of China in Shanghai at the age of 27. Two years later, he was elected to the Central Committee of the Third Congress of the Communist Party of China. He was not yet thirty. In 1925, by now an important figure in Chinese communism, Mao moved to Canton, a city firmly under the control of the Nationalist Kuomintang party. The Communists and Nationalists were cooperating in a popular front at the time, and Mao served as Director of the Kuomintang’s Peasant Training Institute.

In 1927, Mao was dispatched to Hunan Province to report on recent peasant uprisings. With his report, he began his career as a political theorist. Mao recognized that Marx’s original model for introducing communism into a country via a revolution by industrial workers living in urban centers would not be possible in an agrarian nation like China. He retooled the communist theory to allow for the revolution to take place led by rural peasants. His notion which would be ridiculed and dismissed by many communists elsewhere in the world, but it was indeed appropriate to China’s circumstances, and he proved its workability in the Chinese Civil War.

Later in 1927, Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek ordered his army to turn on the Communist forces with which they had been allied in what has been called the “White Terror.” Mao narrowly escaped the anti-leftist violence of this incident and, after leading a failed uprising in Hunan Province, gathered surviving Communist forces in the refuge of the Jinggang Mountains. He established the Chinese Soviet Republic in this mountain stronghold and was elected its chairman. Communist forces were besieged by Nationalists, and in 1934 they began the Long March, a grueling 5000 mile year-long retreat to Yan’an in the far northwest of China, near the Soviet border. During the march Mao was made head of the Communist Party, and on reaching Yan’an he spent several years building up his forces and recovering from the losses his forces had suffered on the March.

In 1937, when Japan invaded China, Mao’s Communist forces resisted the Japanese occupation. The Kuomintang, which was by then the government of China, devoted the bulk of its military resources to destroying the Communists, calling Japan “a disease of the skin” and Communism “a disease of the heart.” Mao also fought the Kuomintang during the Sino-Japanese War, and both he and Chiang were criticized for failing to ally with one another against a common threat.

In 1942, Mao resisted the Race when its Conquest Fleet invaded. Now the threat was too great to allow him to fight Chiang, and he made common cause with the Nationalists, and even with Japanese forces stranded in China. The popular front did not preserve China's independence; it was overrun and was not invited to attend the peace conference in Cairo.

Chinese forces continuously resisted the Race, making China one of the most restive Race colonies on Tosev 3. The Communists took the lead, with tremendous material support from the Soviet Union (though Mao strongly distrusted Joseph Stalin and found Vyacheslav Molotov even harder to work with, a feeling that was mutual). He was also helped by the United States.

In 1963, Mao's forces temporarily expelled the Race from the city of Shanghai. They were not able to hold the city long, but they were able to force the Race's authorities to treat with them diplomatically, though mutual distrust hampered the negotiations.

A very effective guerrilla leader, Mao never attained his ultimate goal: the possession of an atomic bomb.