Asian Studies

Mao Zedong is considered as the most celebrated Chinese leader who revolutionized China and greatly influenced all aspects of life in the country. Mao was a great Marxist, a proletarian revolutionist, a strategist, and a great theoretician. Mao was therefore a political leader, a poet, and a statesman. His ideas were varied between flexible pragmatism and Utopian visions, exemplified in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. He was the main architect and leader of the Communist Party of China and the chairman of the Peoples Republic of China. Mao has been regarded as the greatest leader ever to have emerged from China during his generation. As a great leader, Mao led his people in victorious battles of liberation, he led the Chinese in the adoption of the socialist doctrines, he established the base for the prosperity of the Chinese people and the country at large, and he is also credited for liberating the Chinese from an oppressive regime. It is therefore important to observe that Maos contribution towards the Chinese historical development was great and can not be wished away. This paper is going to explore the notion that without Mao Zedong, there would be no new China by looking at his contribution towards the development of China as a communist republic.

Mao Zedong  his contributions to China
Mao was born in the year 1893 in the village of Shaoshan, Xiang Tan County, Hunan Province. Mao refused to work in the family farm as a young boy and instead yarned for every opportunity to be educated. He joined the army in the year 1911 for six years before returning to his education for a spell of another six months reading on his own in the library before joining formal schooling. Maos birth coincided with great social, political, and cultural dynamics in China. During this time, China was under pressure from imperialism that led to many scholars and government officials among others pushing for reforms that would modernize China. Mao was a true patriot who thought that it was only through education that improvement of the Chinese people and nation would be realized.
Mao Zedong was merely 17 when the Revolution of 1911 erupted in China. Imperialism in Europe and America led to the debilitation of the weakening Qing government and there was a growing public discontent with the spread of the dynastic system. The frustrated individuals were determined to revolt and joined forces to launch a revolution. The revolution started as a military revolt at Wuhan against the Qing Government and later spread quickly to other parts of China and this forced Qing to formally give up in 1912. Though Mao never participated in the ensuing battle, he was for the revolution especially in its aims to reform both social and political spheres. After the surrender of Qing, Mao briefly joined the Republican army where he worked for six months before he left to resume his studies. He joined a middle school in Changsha where he was interested in the study of the world history, literature, and philosophy. During this period in time, the Republic that had been established by the revolutionary government was already experiencing difficulties. The revolutionary government led by SUN Yat-sen and his party known as the Guomindang were submerged by political forces. The government was disorderly and characteristic of corrupt officials failing in the establishment of a central authority in China. This allowed for the local military strongmen to get hold of power and take control of the provinces.

Upon graduation from the middle school, Mao traveled to Beijing where he continued with his studies at the University of Beijing. At the University Mao combined as an assistant to the librarian under the curatorship of Li Dazhao who later became of great influence on Maos future thinking. At the University, Mao was able to attend seminars and talks organized by intellectuals that included Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, and Qian Xuantong. He actively became involved in the May Fourth Movement through the publication of articles in the local journals that promoted cultural reforms. In 1920, Mao had settled in Changsha where he opened a small radical bookstore while continuing with his contribution to the local journals on the new cultural trends that would arise in China. In 1921, Mao was among the very first architects of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It is said that during the Bertrand Russells visit to Hunan, Mao agitated for the legitimacy of forceful seizure of power in opposition to the reformist views that were advocated for by Russell. During the 1920s, Mao concentrated and focused on the political expedition in his Province of birth and Jianxi Province. In 1921, Mao participated in the National Congress of the Communist party of China that was held in Shanghai. After a couple of years, Mao was elected as one of the five commissars of the Central Committee of the Party during its third congregation. Mao then returned to Hunan after he was directed to do so by the Communist Partys central committee and the Guomindang Central Committee with order to organize the Hunan branch to represent the Guomindang. In the year 1924, Mao was a delegate during the opening Conference of the Guomindang and was elected as an Alternate Executive of the Central Committee. In the same year, Mao was accorded the Executive membership status of the Shanghai branch of the Guomindang and the Secretary of the Organization Department. The Guomindang was the Chinese Nationalist Party that ousted the Qing dynasty.
Mao committed himself to revolutionary activities especially in Hunan and Guangzhou. Mao was shut out of Chinese Communist Party leadership by those who favored the Soviet socialism which agitated for the traditional urban proletariat revolution. However, following the Long March (1934-1935) that expanded from Southeast to Northwest of the Country, Mao was reinstated to power. This provided Mao with an opportunity to carry out his visionary of peasant revolution. Maos push for agrarian Marxism was embraced by the Communist Party at the expense of the Nationalists. Mao was made the supreme leader of the Communist Party and Mao Zedong Thought was accepted and adopted as the official ideology in the year 1945 during the seventh CCPs conference. At the time of WWII, Japan engaged China in the Sino-Japanese War between the years 1937 to 1945. The war ended following the surrender of the Japanese after the Hiroshima bombings. This however opened a new avenue for the Chinese civil war that ensued in the years 1945 to 1949 after the CCP prevailed.
In the first ten years following the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China, Mao as both the chairman of the government and the Party was faced with the task of rebuilding and unifying the country after long spells of war. He introduced land reforms and administered the transition of the Chinese economy to embrace the socialist perspective. Maos thinking was overhauled following de-Stalinization that occurred in the Soviet Union from 1956. With determination to avoid what was considered as the rise of bourgeois elements in Russia, Mao instituted the infamous Great Leap Forward with the goal of industrializing China from the grassroots. This turned to be a terrible failure that led to widespread hunger in China following the diversion of resources from agriculture. During the Great Leap Forward, the industrialization process was expected to utilize the slack labor-force in an effort to tremendously increase output. Individuals were to be motivated by the political zeal putting the politics in command where the enterprising party branches assumed the direction of most of the factories. The Great Leap Forward program focused on a new socio-economic and political structure mainly in the countryside and few urban localities. In 1958, there were about 750,000 agricultural producers cooperatives that had been amalgamated into 23,000 communes with each composing of an average of about 5000 households or 22,000 individuals. Each commune was granted the means of production and was eligible to operate as an independent accounting unit. Planning was left to the local individual units as the influence of central planning was curtailed. The Great Leap Forward created an economic crisis in China. There was a leap in the industrial sector by 55 with the agricultural sector gathering a good harvest in 1958. In the subsequent years however, the program recorded disastrous results following poor weather conditions, poorly constructed water control projects, and other misallocations of resources that resulted in declining agricultural produce. The gross agricultural output felt drastically causing a widespread famine that was witnessed in China especially among the rural communities. It is approximated that 14 people perished due to starvation in the period between 1958 and 1961.

Despite the failure of the Great Leap Forward, Mao still carried on with his vision through the launch of the Cultural Revolution in the year 1966. However, Mao had withdrawn from active rule following the failures of the Great Leap Forward. He left the leadership of the Communist Party in the hands of Maoist loyalists including Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping. The new leadership shifted from the ideological purity of Mao with an emphasis on expertise. Mao was concerned with the revisionist direction that had been adopted in the USSR and feared that China was going the same direction. This made him gather a group of like-minded thinkers who were communist radicals to launch an attack on the leadership of the Communist Party. Mao rooted for a renewal of the Party through the Cultural Revolution aimed at unseating and unsettling of the ruling class that would in turn enable China to perpetually remain in a revolutionary state, serving the interests of the many as opposed to the few elites. During this period in time, young Chinese adults and students were mobilized to serve as the agents of the Revolution commonly referred to as the Red Guards. The Red Guards served to extinguish ancient traditions and remove any counter-revolutionary elements. This was yet another disastrous mistake committed by Mao as the movement resulted into political disorder, characterized with acts of violence and terror as the nation was thrown into chaotic violence. The nation is said to have suffered great human losses in a bloody conflict that ensued following
Maos call for revitalization of the Communist movement.

Mao was disturbed by the nature of post-1949 Peoples Republic that he had formed. To him there was need to replace the old elites with fresh blood as he thought that the then leadership of the Communist Party was becoming estranged from the public that they were supposed to serve. Corruption was another thing that troubled Mao as the vice was rife within the Communist Party. He saw a greater threat to China originating from within the Party as opposed to having to come from outside the country. With the belief that some of the liberal bourgeois elements continued to pose danger to the socialism, the Red Guards were determined in their struggle against the authorities setting up their own tribunals. There were chaos in many parts of the nation and many individuals in their millions are believed to have been persecuted during this time. As part of the Revolution, the schools were shut down with the young intellectuals in the cities being ordered to move to the countryside for some lessons from the peasants. These intellectuals were subjected to hard manual labor and other odd jobs by the peasants in the countryside. The Revolution led to massive destruction not only for the traditional Chinese Cultural heritage but also in the general social and economic spheres.

The architects of the Cultural Revolution included Jiang Qing who was Maos wife Lin Biao, the Minister of defense Chen Boda Kang Sheng Wang Dongxing. During the Revolution, Mao created a personality cult through the Red Guards who claimed total devotion to the Communist Chairman, Mao. The radical revolutionist lasted until the death of Mao in 1976 when reformers led by Deng Xiaoping regained power over the government. The reformers had to spend the next several years working to get rid of the many policies that had been established by the Mao regime. During the late 1970s and 80s, the Peoples Republic of China had begun to de-collectivize agriculture and also opened the local markets to the international trade. Chinas economy was remodeled in the 1990s to incorporate some elements of a free market economy.

Mao Zedong was and is still held as a central figure in the formation of the Peoples Republic of China which he himself founded in 1949. Mao Zedong is regarded as the greatest military strategist in the Chinese history. He is said to have unified the Chinese and also led them against the Japanese invasion. He announced to the whole world about the formal establishment of the Peoples Republic of China on October 1st 1949. He is also regarded as a great revolutionary leader in the Chinese history having led to the transformation of an incoherent and semi-feudal old China to a new and unified Republic where individuals their own affairs. As a national hero in China, Mao stressed the importance of national solidarity and he was selfless in serving the public. He also rebuffed corruption within the Party leadership accusing such officials of going against the tenets of communism by encouraging capitalistic tendencies.

Mao Zedong had far reaching influence in the social, economic, and political spheres amongst the Chinese. Though he is remembered for both the positive and negative contribution in the development history of China, the negatives are often disregarded as the positive contributions are emphasized. His influence on the Communist Party are still felt even today as it is characteristic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to maintain strict control over the Chinese citizens even in the wake of globalization. The press, the media, and access to information have been made difficult due to the strict censorship that has been imposed by the CCP. China has also been accused of gross human atrocities by the Human Rights watchdogs where imprisonment, detention, and general human rights violation has raised a growing concern globally. Nevertheless, Maos influence in the history of China has deeply traversed the nation and he is often remembered as a great revolutionist who inspired millions of Chinese in rebuilding their nation. It should also be noted that despite the policy blunders by Mao following the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution that led to massive suffering and death of millions of Chinese in 1981, the CCP concluded that the positive contributions Mao had on the Chinese Revolution were far much greater than the gross mistakes he committed during his reign. It is therefore imperative to conclude that Mao Zedong is the chief architect of the new China as his contributions are highly appreciated in the Peoples Republic of China.