Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong in 1935

Mao Zedong (December 26, 1893 – September 9, 1976) was a Chinese Communist leader. He was the leader of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976. Some people think Mao was a bad man, and some people think Mao was good. The reasons people have called him bad are because they blame him for millions of Chinese deaths, and say that he was not skilled at running the government. People who do not like Mao Zedong also say that he was impatient and would not wait for things he wanted. But people who agreed with Mao's Chinese Communist group say that he was a hero, who helped women and peasants gain rights. They also say that he saved China from foreign rule.

Beginning

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Mao was born on December 26, 1893 in the Hunan province of China. He grew up in a farming family, and became a Communist while working at a library. Throughout the 1920's, his power increased, or became larger, in the Communist Party of China, and by 1933, he was its leader. This kind of "party" is a group of people who think the same way about politics or their country. During the 1920s, the group began to fight with rival Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek and his group, the Kuomintang. This fight was called the Chinese Civil War. Some people say Chiang Kai-shek wanted China to be a democracy where people could choose their leader, but others say that Kai-shek only wanted to keep power. The Communists fought to make the country a socialist one-party state, a country where only one political party is allowed.

The Chiang Kai-shek's group, the Nationalists, had more fighters in 1935. They defeated, or beat, Mao's Communists and made them move out of the country. The Communists left to a fort that they owned. This move was called the Long March. Mao escaped from the Nationalists with other Communists to a part of China called Yenan. By this time, in 1935, he may have been the person who caused more than 500,000 deaths.

When Japan invaded China in 1937, Mao and Chiang stopped fighting. After the United States entered World War 2, they attacked each other again. Nobody really knows who started this new fight; some people say it was the Nationalists, other people say it was the Communists.

The United States defeated Japan in 1945 and this made the Japanese Army leave China. The Chinese Civil War had been going on during World War 2, but after the war it became very violent. Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists had friends in the cities and among the middle class. Mao and the Communists had many friends in the farms and the countryside. In those days in China there were more farmers than city people, so Mao had more friends than Chiang. By 1949, Mao had chased the Nationalists to an island called Taiwan, and told the people that China would be Communist, with him as leader.

Actions

Mao Zedong's picture at the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing

Mao had many plans for how China could move forward in technology very fast and catch up with countries like the United Kingdom and United States. Mao was responsible for the First Five Year Plan and also, The Second Five Year Plan. The Second Five Year Plan had some ideas that did not work the way that Mao had wanted them to. Farms could not produce, or make, much food because of bad farming plans, and cities did not make many things like clothes and machines. Because of the lack or food, many people died of starvation.

Mao wanted to change everything about China. He wanted to change the way Chinese people thought about China, and even change the way they remembered history. Because of this, he forced people to change things very fast, even if they did not want to. These changes were called The "Cultural Revolution". Mao did not like it if someone talked about his ideas a bad way, but many people in Chinese cities did not like Mao's ideas because of the food problems. There was also no freedom to do many different things when the Communists were running the country. To keep people from saying bad things about the Communists and making groups of friends to try and get rid of him, Mao told all of China's best and brightest people quit their jobs, and go into the farms. China become poorer and weaker because of this.

About the same time Mao became the leader in China, Nikita Khrushchev became the leader in the Soviet Union. Krushchev and Mao were both Communists dictators. Before Khrushchev became the leader in Russia, China and Russia were friends with each other. Joseph Stalin was the leader in the Soviet Union before Krushchev, and Mao liked Stalin and respected his way to lead. Krushchev thought Stalin was a criminal dictator, and led the country very differently. Both Mao and Krushchev did not like each other, so the Soviet Union was no longer friends with China. China now had only a few friends like Albania, North Korea, Democratic Kampuchea, and Pakistan. This change of friends was called the Sino-Soviet Split. "Sino" is another way to say "Chinese" in this case.

Mao also made several changes to the Chinese language, such as switching from the Wade Giles system of Romanization to Pinyin, which is different. For this reason, Nanking is now called Nanjing on modern maps. Taiwan still uses Wade Giles, so its capital is called Taipei instead of the pinyin Taibei. He also simplified the Chinese characters, making them easier to read and write so that more people would be able to read.

Legacy

Some Chinese mainlanders still believe Mao Zedong was a great leader, but they also knew that he did many unwise and bad things. According to Deng Xiaoping, Mao was "seven parts right and three parts wrong", and his "contributions are primary and his mistakes secondary." Some people think Mao made China lose its best ally, or friend, the Soviet Union, in the Sino-Soviet Split. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were two of the things that Mao did that many people disliked. Most historians, people who study history, think that about 70,000,000 people died because of Mao's bad ideas and neglect. That is the biggest number of people to ever die without a war. Some people disliked Mao because he did not support family planning, and this caused too many babies to be born, making too many people in too small places. Leaders of China after Mao had to make a new rule called one child policy.

Sources and other websites

1. [1] Washington State University.

• BBC 中国丛谈特辑（上）
• BBC 中国丛谈特辑（上）采访录音
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• 開放出版社 《毛澤東：鮮為人知的故事》中文版
• 《毛澤東：鮮為人知的故事》 英文注釋
• 德国之声，含采访录音 张戎：鲜为人知的毛泽东是怎样写成的
• Spence. J. MAO 1999 Weidenfeld & Nicolson LONDON