Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong was a Marxist theorist, revolutionary, and, from 1949 to 1959, the first chairman of the People’s Republic of China. Mao was one of the most influential and controversial political figures of the 20th century, in China and abroad. The sweeping urban and agrarian reforms he enacted throughout his leadership—via China’s first five-year plan (1953–57), the Great Leap Forward (1958–60), and the Cultural Revolution (1966–76)—often had disastrous consequences for China’s people and economy. Mao ultimately resorted to increasingly authoritarian tactics to maintain principal control over the trajectory of his country.

Maoism is the doctrine formulated by Mao Zedong and his associates. Mao’s particular strand of revolutionary theory took from the Marxist, Leninist, and Stalinist traditions but was also culturally tailored for the Chinese people. Maoism departed from other strands of Marxism in its understanding of peasantry: not as a class incapable of achieving political consciousness but as one with a dormant but tappable source of revolutionary energy. Maoism harbored other idiosyncrasies, including its conception of contradictions and of permanent revolution. Although regarded as something of an ideological relic in present-day China, the doctrine has nonetheless inspired other revolutionary movements.

While perhaps well intended, many of Mao Zedong’s policies were implemented to disastrous effect during his time as leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The government that succeeded him began to dismantle many of the policies that Mao had put in place as chairman of the People’s Republic, in some cases while Mao was still alive: China’s agriculture was decollectivized, for example, and its economy was (and continues to be) refashioned to be more free trade-friendly. This has not necessarily eliminated some of the more authoritarian practices of the Chinese government, which—even after Mao’s death—continues to censor its media, jail dissidents without trial, and suppress protests.

Mao Zedong has a complex legacy, neither wholly good nor wholly bad. On the one hand, Mao’s revolution achieved China’s sovereignty, and his land reforms bequeathed land to a formerly landless peasantry. On the other hand, Mao ran an authoritarian government that quashed dissidence and caused years of terror, suffering, and famine for its people. Some of his most reactionary policies—state-controlled media, for example, or the one-party system—have persisted in China. The Chinese government’s official position on Mao is that his actions were laudable until the summer of 1957, after which they get harder to defend.

Mao Zedong was born in 1893 to a peasant family. He left his family’s farm at age 16 to pursue his education, abandoning an arranged marriage. In 1920 he married Yang Kaihui, who was later killed during the Chinese civil war. Shortly afterward Mao married He Zizhen, with whom he’d already been living for several years. She accompanied him on the Long March (1934–35) while pregnant, an ordeal for which she was celebrated. Nonetheless, in 1939 Mao divorced her and married the movie star Jiang Qing, who later wielded a sizable amount of power during the Cultural Revolution.