Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong (an alternative transliteration (using the Wade-Giles system is "Mao Tse-tung", although most Sinologists use the pinyin transliteration system, giving: "Mao Zedong") lived from December 26, 1893, to September 9, 1976. He was a Marxist atheist and an early member of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. In 1935, Mao was elected to the Executive Committee of the Comintern in Moscow and remained on this committee until it was publicly disbanded in 1943.

Mao was the author of Quotations from Chairman Mao, published in 1966, informally known as "the little red book." During his lifetime, almost everyone in the People's Republic of China was expected to have a copy. One of his most well known statements was that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun".

Quotations from Chairman Mao or popularly known as "the little red book" is required for every Chinese citizen to own, read, and carry it at all times under the latter half of Mao's rule.

Edgar Snow introduced Mao and Zhou Enlai to American readers in 1937 in his book, Red Star Over China, shortly after the Chinese Red Army’s rout by Chiang Kai-shek in 1934 and their year long retreat to Yenan known as the Long March. Snow wrote, "The political ideology, tactical line and theoretical leadership of the Chinese Communists have been under the close guidance, if not positive detailed direction, of the Communist International, which during the last decade has become virtually a bureau of the Russian Communist Party." And he further declared that the CCP had to subordinate itself to the "strategic requirements of Soviet Russia, under the leadership of Stalin."

With the aid of Comintern operatives in the U.S. Government subverting President Roosevelt's vision of a post-War United Nations enforcing peace by "the four policemen", Mao defeated Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, taking control of the Chinese mainland and establishing the People's Republic of China. As the leader of China, Mao initiated the Great Leap Forward, an economic plan intended to rapidly industrialize China's then largely rural economy. In the end it proved a ruinous failure, preventing the peasants from producing needed food and causing massive famines; over 20 million people starved to death. In 1966, Mao instigated the Cultural Revolution, in which those disloyal to the Chairman were killed or humiliated in order to solidify Mao's control. Richard Nixon was the first United States president to meet with Mao, and thus the first to acknowledge the existence of the People's Republic of China, as opposed to Taiwan's Republic of China.