Mao Zedong

Chinese political leader, poet and statesman, founder of People's Republic of China. Mao Zedong's ideas varied between flexible pragmatism and Utopian visions, exemplified in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. His literary production contains mainly speeches, essays and poems. Mao published some 40 poems written in classical tradition with political message. Worshiped by millions, Mao is also considered one of the 20th century most brutal dictators. It has been estimated that he was responsible for well over 70 million deaths.

Mao was born in the village of Shoshana in the Hun an Province of China. At the age of six he began to work on his parents farm. His father, Mao Jen-sheng, was a peasant farmer, who beat his sons regularly. Mao's mother, Wen Chi-Mei, was a devout Buddhist. After graduating from a teacher's training in Changsha, Mao continued his studies at the University of Beijing, where he worked as an assistant at the library.  

During this period he discovered Marx, but also began to hate books and all things highly cultivated. Under the influence of Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, China's first major Marxist figures, Mao turned to Marxism. In 1921 Mao became a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party. During Bertrand Russell's visit to Hunan, he argued for the legitimacy of seizing power by force against Russell's reformist views. In the 1920s he concentrated on political work in his native Province and Jianxi Province. His highly pragmatic strategy was one of the main influences on Fidel Castro, when in 1959 he was able to take over Cuba with Che Guevara.


"The people are like water and the army is like fish," Mao wrote in Aspects of China's Anti-Japanese Struggle (1948). He recognized the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. Marx and Lenin had seen in their urban doctrine the working class as the leading revolutionary force. However, when first articulated, Mao's views were rejected by the Party in favor of orthodox policy. Mao himself was also an exception to the rule: he was one of only three peasants to gain control of his country throughout its long history - the others were the founders of the Han and Ming dynasties.

http://kirjasto.sci.fi/mao.htm