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| | {{Quote|Politics is war without bloodshed, while War is politics with bloodshed.|Mao Zedong}} |
| |Image = Chairman Mao.jpg
| | '''Mao Zedong''' (December 26, 1893 - September 9, 1976) was the Communist Leader of the People's Republic of China and led the "Leap Forward" movement to break all traditions of Ancient China. He was the founding father of the People's Republic of China. His Cultural Revolution all but destroyed China's heritage. |
| |fullname = Mao Zedong
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| |skills = Army commanding<br>Leadership<br>Propaganda<br>Manipulation
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| |hobby = Writing poetry<br>Sailing<br>Reading
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| |alias = Chairman Mao<br>Mao Tse-tung<br>Great Helmsman<br>The Red Sun<br>Savior of the People<br>The Red Emperor<br>Li Desheng <small>(temporary alias)</small>
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| |occupation = Chairman of the [[Communist Party of China]] (1943 - 1976)
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| |goals = Establish The People's Republic of China (succeeded)<br> Take over Tibet (succeeded)<br>Completely unify Taiwan (failed)<br>Destroy the United States (failed)
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| |type of villain = Delusional Dictator
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| |origin = Shaoshin, Hunan, Qing Empire (now Shaoshan, Hunan Province, China) | |
| |crimes = [[Mass murder]]<br>[[War crimes]]<br>Conspiracy<br>Aiding and abetting<br>[[Crimes against humanity]]<br>Human rights violations<br>[[Torture]]<br>Mass starvation<br>Mass internment<br>Mass repression<br>Destruction of religious and cultural artifacts<br>[[Genocide]]<br>[[Anti-Japanese sentiment]]<br>[[Anti-Taiwanese sentiment]]<br>[[Hate Speech]]<br>[[Ethnic cleansing]]<br>[[Misogyny]]<br>[[Xenophobia]]<br>[[Kidnapping]]<br>[[Acephobia]]<br>[[Ableism]]<br>[[Discrimination]]
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| |name=Mao Zedong}}
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| {{Quote|Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.|Mao Zedong}} | |
| '''Mao Zedong '''(December 26<sup>th</sup>, 1893 - September 9<sup>th</sup>, 1976), commonly known as '''Chairman Mao''', was the Communist Leader of the People's Republic of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976 and led the "Great Leap Forward" movement to break all traditions of Ancient China. His Cultural Revolution all but destroyed China's heritage. | |
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| A major player in the [[Cold War]], Mao is considered to be a pioneer of communism alongside [[Joseph Stalin]], developing his own brand of communism known as Maoism (also known as Mao Zedong Thought). He also pioneered the [[People's War]] strategy commonly used by many Communists in armed struggle.
| | ==Villainy== |
| | The People's Republic of China was established on October 1, 1949. It was the culmination of over two decades of civil and international wars. From 1943 to 1976, Mao was the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chairman_of_the_Communist_Party_of_China Chairman of the Communist Party of China]. During this period, Mao was called Chairman Mao (毛主席, ''Máo Zhǔxí'') or the Great Leader Chairman Mao (伟大领袖毛主席, ''Wěidà Lǐngxiù Máo Zhǔxí''). Mao famously announced: "The Chinese people have stood up." |
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| Although many of Mao's campaigns, most notably The Great Leap Forward lead to the death of millions, many historians have pointed out that many of the deaths under Mao's regime were unintentional unlike many of the deaths under [[Nazi Party|Nazi Germany]] or the Soviet Union. He is widely considered one of the most polarizing and controversial figures in recent history, many regard him as a capable and necessary leader who improved health care, women's rights and industrialized China and see many of his campaigns as taking significant risks, while in contrast his critics have drawn comparisons between him and dictators such as [[Joseph Stalin]] and [[Adolf Hitler]] due to his radically destructive and neglectful polices against his own people. Some estimates say that between 30 million-80 million people in total died under his regime and for this reason he is considered by some historians to be ''the'' most brutal dictator in history.
| | Mao took up residence in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhongnanhai Zhongnanhai], a compound next to the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_City Forbidden City] in Beijing, and there he ordered the construction of an indoor swimming pool and other buildings. Mao's physician [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Zhisui Li Zhisui] described him as conducting business either in bed or by the side of the pool, preferring not to wear formal clothes unless absolutely necessary. Li's book, ''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Private_Life_of_Chairman_Mao The Private Life of Chairman Mao]'', is regarded as controversial, especially by those sympathetic to Mao. |
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| == Biography == | | In October 1950, Mao made the decision to send the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Volunteer_Army People's Volunteer Army] into Korea and fight against the United Nations forces led by the U.S. Historical records showed that Mao directed the PVA campaigns in the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War Korean War] to the minute details<span style="font-size:11px;line-height:0px;">.</span> |
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| === Early life ===
| | Along with [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-anti_and_Five-anti_Campaigns land reform], during which significant numbers of landlords and well-to-do peasants were beaten to death at mass meetings organized by the Communist Party as land was taken from them and given to poorer peasants, there was also the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_to_Suppress_Counterrevolutionaries Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries], which involved public executions targeting mainly former Kuomintang officials, businessmen accused of "disturbing" the market, former employees of Western companies and intellectuals whose loyalty was suspect. The [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_State U.S. State department] in 1976 estimated that there may have been a million killed in the land reform, and 800,000 killed in the counterrevolutionary campaign. |
| Mao was born in the village of Shaoshan in Hunan province, the son of a former peasant who had become affluent as a farmer and grain dealer. He grew up in an environment in which education was valued only as training for keeping records and accounts. From the age of eight he attended his native village’s primary school, where he acquired a basic knowledge of the <em>Wujing</em> (Confucian Classics). At 13 he was forced to begin working full-time on his family’s farm. Rebelling against paternal authority (which included an arranged marriage that was forced on him and that he never acknowledged or consummated), Mao left his family to study at a higher primary school in a neighbouring county and then at a secondary school in the provincial capital, Changsha. There he came in contact with new ideas from the West, as formulated by such political and cultural reformers as Liang Qichao and the Nationalist revolutionary Sun Yat-sen. Scarcely had he begun studying revolutionary ideas when a real revolution took place before his very eyes. On October 10, 1911, fighting against the Qing dynastybroke out in Wuchang, and within two weeks the revolt had spread to Changsha.
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| Enlisting in a unit of the revolutionary army in Hunan, Mao spent six months as a soldier. While he probably had not yet clearly grasped the idea that, as he later put it, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” his first brief military experience at least confirmed his boyhood admiration of military leaders and exploits. In primary school days, his heroes had included not only the great warrior-emperors of the Chinese past but Napoleon I and George Washington as well.
| | Mao himself claimed that a total of 700,000 people were killed in attacks on "counter-revolutionaries" during the years 1950–52. However, because there was a policy to select "at least one landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for public execution",<span style="font-size:11px;line-height:0px;"> </span>the number of deaths range between 2 million and 5 million. In addition, at least 1.5 million people,<span style="font-size:11px;line-height:0px;"> </span>perhaps as many as 4 to 6 million, were sent to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laogai "reform through labour"] camps where many perished. Mao played a personal role in organizing the mass repressions and established a system of execution quotas, which were often exceeded. He defended these killings as necessary for the securing of power. |
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| The spring of 1912 marked the birth of the new Chinese republic and the end of Mao’s military service. For a year he drifted from one thing to another, trying, in turn, a police school, a law school, and a business school; he studied history in a secondary school and then spent some months reading many of the classic works of the Western liberal tradition in the provincial library. That period of groping, rather than indicating any lack of decision in Mao’s character, was a reflection of China’s situation at the time. The abolition of the official civil service examination system in 1905 and the piecemeal introduction of Western learning in so-called modern schools had left young people in a state of uncertainty as to what type of training, Chinese or Western, could best prepare them for a career or for service to their country.
| | Starting in 1951, Mao initiated two successive movements in an effort to rid urban areas of corruption by targeting wealthy capitalists and political opponents, known as the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-anti/five-anti_campaigns three-anti/five-anti campaigns]. While the three-anti campaign was a focused purge of government, industrial and party officials, the five-anti campaign set its sights slightly broader, targeting capitalist elements in general.<span style="font-size:11px;line-height:0px;"> </span>A climate of raw terror developed as workers denounced their bosses, spouses turned on their spouses, and children informed on their parents; the victims often were humiliated at [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_Session struggle sessions], a method designed to intimidate and terrify people to the maximum. Mao insisted that minor offenders be criticized and reformed or sent to labor camps, "while the worst among them should be shot." These campaigns took several hundred thousand additional lives, the vast majority via suicide. |
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| Mao eventually graduated from the First Provincial Normal School in Changsha in 1918. While officially an institution of secondary level rather than of higher education, the normal school offered a high standard of instruction in Chinese history, literature, and philosophy as well as in Western ideas. While at the school, Mao also acquired his first experience in political activity by helping to establish several student organizations. The most important of those was the New People’s Study Society, founded in the winter of 1917–18, many of whose members were later to join the Communist Party. | | In Shanghai, suicide by jumping from tall buildings became so commonplace that residents avoided walking on the pavement near skyscrapers for fear that suicides might land on them. Some biographers have pointed out that driving those perceived as enemies to suicide was a common tactic during the Mao-era. For example, in his biography of Mao, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Short Philip Short] notes that in the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan%27an_Rectification_Movement Yan'an Rectification Movement], Mao gave explicit instructions that "no cadre is to be killed," but in practice allowed security chief [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_Sheng Kang Sheng] to drive opponents to suicide and that "this pattern was repeated throughout his leadership of the People's Republic." |
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| From the normal school in Changsha, Mao went to Peking University in Beijing, China’s leading intellectual center. The half year he spent there working as a librarian’s assistant was of disproportionate importance in shaping his future career, for it was then that he came under the influence of the two men who were to be the principal figures in the foundation of the CCP: Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu. Moreover, he found himself at Peking University precisely during the months leading up to the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which was to a considerable extent the fountainhead of all of the changes that were to take place in China in the ensuing half century.
| | Following the consolidation of power, Mao launched the First [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China Five-Year Plan] (1953–58). The plan aimed to end Chinese dependence upon agriculture in order to become a world power. With the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union Soviet Union]'s assistance, new industrial plants were built and agricultural production eventually fell to a point where industry was beginning to produce enough capital that China no longer needed the USSR's support. The success of the First-Five Year Plan was to encourage Mao to instigate the Second [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China Five-Year Plan], the Great Leap Forward, in 1958. Mao also launched a phase of rapid [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivization collectivization]. The CPC introduced price controls as well as a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_character Chinese character simplification] aimed at increasing literacy. Large-scale industrialization projects were also undertaken. |
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| In a limited sense, May Fourth Movement is the name given to the student demonstrations protesting against the decision at the Paris Peace Conference to hand over former German concessions in Shandong province to Japan instead of returning them to China. But the term also evokes a period of rapid political and cultural change, beginning in 1915, that resulted in the Chinese radicals’ abandonment of Western liberalism for Marxism and Leninism as the answer to China’s problems and the subsequent founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. The shift from the difficult and esoteric classical written language to a far more-accessible vehicle of literary expression patterned on colloquial speech also took place during that period. At the same time, a new and very young generation moved to the centre of the political stage. To be sure, the demonstration on May 4, 1919, was launched by Chen Duxiu, but the students soon realized that they themselves were the main actors.
| | Programs pursued during this time include the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign Hundred Flowers Campaign], in which Mao indicated his supposed willingness to consider different opinions about how China should be governed. Given the freedom to express themselves, liberal and intellectual Chinese began opposing the Communist Party and questioning its leadership. This was initially tolerated and encouraged. After a few months, Mao's government reversed its policy and persecuted those, totalling perhaps 500,000<sup class="Template-Fact" style="white-space:nowrap;">[''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed citation needed]'']</sup>, who criticized, as well as those who were merely alleged to have criticized, the party in what is called the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Rightist_Movement Anti-Rightist Movement]. Authors such as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jung_Chang Jung Chang] have alleged that the Hundred Flowers Campaign was merely a ruse to root out "dangerous" thinking.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-181">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-181 []</sup> |
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| From then onward his generation never ceased to regard itself as responsible for the country’s fate, and, indeed, its members remained in power, both in Beijing and in Taipei (Taiwan), until the 1970s.
| | Li Zhisui, Mao's physician, suggested that Mao had initially seen the policy as a way of weakening those within his party who opposed him and was surprised by the extent of criticism and the fact that it began to be directed at his own leadership. It was only then that he used it as a method of identifying and subsequently persecuting those critical of his government. The Hundred Flowers movement led to the condemnation, silencing, and death of many citizens, also linked to Mao's Anti-Rightist Movement, with death tolls possibly in the millions. |
| | ===Great Leap Forward=== |
| | In January 1958, Mao Zedong launched the second [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China Five-Year Plan], known as the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward Great Leap Forward], a plan intended as an alternative model for economic growth to the Soviet model focusing on heavy industry that was advocated by others in the party. Under this economic program, the relatively small agricultural collectives which had been formed to date were rapidly merged into far larger [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_commune people's communes], and many of the peasants were ordered to work on massive infrastructure projects and on the production of iron and steel. Some private food production was banned; livestock and farm implements were brought under collective ownership. |
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| During the summer of 1919 Mao Zedong helped to establish in Changsha a variety of organizations that brought the students together with the merchants and the workers—but not yet with the peasants—in demonstrations aimed at forcing the government to oppose Japan. His writings at the time are filled with references to the “army of the red flag” throughout the world and to the victory of the Russian Revolution of 1917, but it was not until January 1921 that he was finally committed to Marxism as the philosophical basis of the revolution in China.
| | Under the Great Leap Forward, Mao and other party leaders ordered the implementation of a variety of unproven and unscientific new agricultural techniques by the new communes. Combined with the diversion of labor to steel production and infrastructure projects, these projects combined with cyclical [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_disasters natural disasters] led to an approximately 15% drop in grain production in 1959 followed by a further 10% decline in 1960 and no recovery in 1961. |
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| === Role in wars and political parties === | | In an effort to win favor with their superiors and avoid being purged, each layer in the party hierarchy exaggerated the amount of grain produced under them. Based upon the fabricated success, party cadres were ordered to requisition a disproportionately high amount of the true harvest for state use, primarily in the cities and urban areas but also for export. The net result, which was compounded in some areas by drought and in others by floods, left rural peasants with little food for themselves and many millions starved to death in the largest [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine famine] known as the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine Great Chinese Famine]. This famine was a direct cause of the death of some 30 million Chinese peasants between 1959 and 1962 and about the same number of births were lost or postponed.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-184">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-184 [184]]</sup> Further, many children who became emaciated and malnourished during years of hardship and struggle for survival died shortly after the Great Leap Forward came to an end in 1962.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Spence1999_p553_183-1">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-Spence1999_p553-183 [183]]</sup> |
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| ==== Mao And The Chinese Communist Party ====
| | The extent of Mao's knowledge of the severity of the situation has been disputed. Mao's physician believed he may have been unaware about the extent of the famine, partly due to a reluctance to criticize his policies and decisions and the willingness of his staff to exaggerate or outright fake reports regarding food production.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-185">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-185 [185]]</sup> Upon finding out the extent of the starvation, Mao vowed to stop eating meat, an action followed by his staff.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-186">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-186 [186]]</sup> |
| In September 1920 Mao became principal of the Lin Changsha primary school, and in October he organized a branch of the Socialist Youth League there. That winter he married Yang Kaihui, the daughter of his former ethics teacher. In July 1921 he attended the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, together with representatives from the other communist groups in China and two delegates from the Moscow-based Comintern (Communist International). In 1923, when the young party entered into an alliance with Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Party ([[Kuomintang]]), Mao was one of the first communists to join the Nationalist Party and to work within it. During the first half of 1924, he lived mostly with his wife and two infant sons in Shanghai, where he was a leading member of the Nationalists’ Executive Bureau.
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| In the winter of 1924–25, Mao returned to his native village of Shaoshan for a rest. There, after witnessing demonstrations by peasants stirred into political consciousness by the shooting of several dozen Chinese by foreign police in Shanghai (May and June 1925), Mao suddenly became aware of the revolutionary potential inherent in the peasantry. Although born in a peasant household, he had, in the course of his student years, adopted the Chinese intellectual’s traditional view of the workers and peasants as ignorant and dirty. His conversion to Marxism had forced him to revise his estimate of the urban proletariat, but he continued to share Marx’s own contempt for the backward and amorphous peasantry. Now he turned back to the rural world of his youth as the source of China’s regeneration. Following the example of other communists working within the Nationalist Party who had already begun to organize the peasants, Mao sought to channel the spontaneous protests of the Hunanese peasants into a network of peasant associations.
| | Hong Kong-based historian [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Dik%C3%B6tter Frank Dikötter], who conducted extensive archival research on the Great Leap Forward in local and regional Chinese government archives,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-187">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-187 [187]]</sup> challenged the notion that Mao did not know about the famine until it was too late: |
| | The idea that the state mistakenly took too much grain from the countryside because it assumed that the harvest was much larger than it was is largely a myth—at most partially true for the autumn of 1958 only. In most cases the party knew very well that it was starving its own people to death. At a secret meeting in the Jinjiang Hotel in Shanghai dated March 25, 1959, Mao specifically ordered the party to procure up to one third of all the grain, much more than had ever been the case. At the meeting he announced that "When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill." <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Dikottersite_188-0">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-Dikottersite-188 [188]]</sup> |
| | In ''Hungry Ghosts'', [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Becker Jasper Becker] notes that Mao was dismissive of reports he received of food shortages in the countryside and refused to change course, believing that peasants were lying and that [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rightists rightists] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulaks kulaks] were hoarding grain. He refused to open state granaries,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Becker81_189-0">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-Becker81-189 [189]]</sup> and instead launched a series of "anti-grain concealment" drives that resulted in numerous purges and suicides.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-190">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-190 [190]]</sup> Other violent campaigns followed in which party leaders went from village to village in search of hidden food reserves, and not only grain, as Mao issued quotas for pigs, chickens, ducks and eggs. Many peasants accused of hiding food were tortured and beaten to death.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-191">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-191 [191]]</sup> |
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| ==== The Communists And The Nationalists ====
| | In contrast, journals such as the ''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monthly_Review Monthly Review]'' have disputed the reliability of the figures commonly cited, the qualitative evidence of a "massive death toll", and Mao's complicity in those deaths which occurred.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-192">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-192 [192]]</sup> |
| Pursued by the military governor of Hunan, Mao was soon forced to flee his native province once more, and he returned for another year to an urban environment—Guangzhou (Canton), the main power base of the Nationalists. However, though he lived in Guangzhou, Mao still focused his attention on the countryside. He became the acting head of the propaganda department of the Nationalist Party—in which capacity he edited its leading organ, the <em>Political Weekly</em>, and attended the Second Kuomintang Congress in January 1926—but he also served at the Peasant Movement Training Institute, set up in Guangzhou under the auspices of the Nationalists, as principal of the sixth training session. [[Chiang Kai-shek]] (Jiang Jieshi) had become the leader of the Nationalists after the death of Sun Yat-sen in March 1925, and, although Chiang still declared his allegiance to the “world revolution” and wished to avail himself of aid from the Soviet Union, he was determined to remain master in his own house. He therefore expelled most communists from responsible posts in the Nationalist Party in May 1926. Mao, however, stayed on at the institute until October of that year. Most of the young peasant activists Mao trained were shortly at work strengthening the position of the communists.
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| In July 1926 Chiang Kai-shek set out on what became known as the Northern Expedition, aiming to unify the country under his own leadership and to overthrow the conservative government in Beijing as well as other warlords. In November Mao once more returned to Hunan; there, in January and February 1927, he investigated the peasant movement and concluded that in a very short time several hundred million peasants in China would “rise like a tornado or tempest—a force so extraordinarily swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to suppress it.” Strictly speaking, that prediction proved to be false. Revolution in the shape of spontaneous action by hundreds of millions of peasants did not sweep across China “in a very short time,” or indeed at all. Chiang Kai-shek, who was bent on an alliance with the propertied classes in the cities and in the countryside, turned against the worker and peasant revolution, and in April he massacred the very Shanghai workers who had delivered the city to him. The strategy of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin for carrying out revolution in alliance with the Nationalists collapsed, and the CCP was virtually annihilated in the cities and decimated in the countryside. In a broader and less literal sense, however, Mao’s prophecy was justified. In October 1927 Mao led a few hundred peasants who had survived the autumn harvest uprising in Hunan to a base in the Jinggang Mountains, on the border between Jiangxi and Hunan provinces, and embarked on a new type of revolutionary warfare in the countryside in which the Red Army (military arm of the CCP), rather than the unarmed masses, would play the central role. But it was only because a large proportion of China’s hundreds of millions of peasants sympathized with and supported that effort that Mao Zedong was able in the course of the protracted [[Civil War|civil war]] to encircle the cities from the countryside and thus eventually defeat Chiang Kai-shek and gain control of the country.
| | Whatever the case, the Great Leap Forward caused Mao to lose esteem among many of the top party cadres and was eventually forced to abandon the policy in 1962, while losing some political power to moderate leaders, perhaps most notably [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Shaoqi Liu Shaoqi] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping Deng Xiaoping] in the process. However, Mao, supported by national propaganda, claimed that he was only partly to blame. As a result, he was able to remain Chairman of the Communist Party, with the Presidency transferred to Liu Shaoqi. |
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| ==== The Road To Power ====
| | The Great Leap Forward was a tragedy for the vast majority of the Chinese. Although the steel quotas were officially reached, almost all of the supposed steel made in the countryside was iron, as it had been made from assorted scrap metal in home-made furnaces with no reliable source of fuel such as coal. This meant that proper [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smelting smelting] conditions could not be achieved. According to Zhang Rongmei, a geometry teacher in rural Shanghai during the Great Leap Forward: |
| [[File:Mao-Zedong-group-followers-1944.jpg|thumb|249x249px|Mao Zedong addressing a group of his followers in 1944.|link=Special:FilePath/Mao-Zedong-group-followers-1944.jpg]] | | "We took all the furniture, pots, and pans we had in our house, and all our neighbors did likewise. We put everything in a big fire and melted down all the metal." |
| Mao Zedong’s 22 years in the wilderness can be divided into four phases. The first of those is the initial three years when Mao and Zhu De, the commander in chief of the army, successfully developed the tactics of guerrilla warfare from base areas in the countryside. Those activities, however, were regarded even by their protagonists, and still more by the Central Committee in Shanghai (and by the Comintern in Moscow), as a holding operation until the next upsurge of revolution in the urban centers. In the summer of 1930 the Red Army was ordered by the Central Committee to occupy several major cities in south-central China in the hope of sparking a revolution by the workers. When it became evident that persistence in that attempt could only lead to further costly losses, Mao disobeyed orders and abandoned the battle to return to the base in southern Jiangxi. During that year Mao’s wife was executed by the Nationalists, and he married He Zizhen, with whom he had been living since 1928.
| | The worst of the famine was steered towards enemies of the state.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-193">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-193 [193]]</sup> As [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Becker Jasper Becker] explains: |
| | "The most vulnerable section of China's population, around five per cent, were those whom Mao called '[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemies_of_the_people enemies of the people]'. Anyone who had in previous campaigns of repression been labeled a 'black element' was given the lowest priority in the allocation of food. Landlords, rich peasants, former members of the nationalist regime, religious leaders, rightists, counter-revolutionaries and the families of such individuals died in the greatest numbers."''<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-194">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-194 [194]]</sup>'' |
| | ===Consequences=== |
| | At the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lushan_Conference Lushan Conference] in July/August 1959, several leaders expressed concern that the ''Great Leap Forward'' had not proved as successful as planned. The most direct of these was Minister of Defence and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War Korean War] General [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peng_Dehuai Peng Dehuai]. Mao, fearing loss of his position, orchestrated a purge of Peng and his supporters, stifling criticism of the Great Leap policies. Senior officials who reported the truth of the famine to Mao were branded as "right opportunists."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-195">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-195 [195]]</sup> A campaign against right opportunism was launched and resulted in party members and ordinary peasants being sent to camps where many would subsequently die in the famine. Years later the CPC would conclude that 6 million people were wrongly punished in the campaign.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-196">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-196 [196]]</sup> |
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| The second phase (the Ziangxi period) centers on the founding in November 1931 of the Jiangxi Soviet (Chinese Soviet Republic) in a portion of Jiangxi province, with Mao as chairman. Since there was little support for the revolution in the cities, the promise of ultimate victory now seemed to reside in the gradual strengthening and expansion of the base areas. The Soviet regime soon came to control a population of several million. The Red Army, grown to a strength of some 200,000, easily defeated large forces of inferior troops sent against it by Chiang Kai-shek in the first four of the so-called encirclement and annihilation campaigns. But it was unable to stand up against Chiang’s own elite units, and in October 1934 the major part of the Red Army, Mao, and his pregnant wife abandoned the base in Jiangxi and set out for the northwest of China, on what is known as the Long March. | | The number of deaths by starvation during the Great Leap Forward is deeply controversial. Until the mid-1980s, when official census figures were finally published by the Chinese Government, little was known about the scale of the disaster in the Chinese countryside, as the handful of Western observers allowed access during this time had been restricted to model villages where they were deceived into believing that the Great Leap Forward had been a great success. There was also an assumption that the flow of individual reports of starvation that had been reaching the West, primarily through Hong Kong and Taiwan, must be localized or exaggerated as China was continuing to claim record harvests and was a net exporter of grain through the period. Because Mao wanted to pay back early to the Soviets debts totaling 1.973 billion [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_yuan yuan] from 1960 to 1962,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Yang_Jisheng_197-0">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-Yang_Jisheng-197 [197]]</sup> exports increased by 50%, and fellow Communist regimes in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea North Korea], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Vietnam North Vietnam] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_People%27s_Republic_of_Albania Albania] were provided grain free of charge.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Becker81_189-1">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-Becker81-189 [189]]</sup> |
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| There is wide disagreement among specialists as to the extent of Mao’s real power, especially in the years 1932–34, and as to which military strategies were his or other party leaders’. The majority view is that, in the last years of the Jiangxi Soviet, Mao functioned to a considerable extent as a figurehead with little control over policy, especially in military matters. In any case, he achieved de facto leadership over the party (though not the formal title of chairman) only at the Zunyi Conference of January 1935 during the Long March.
| | Censuses were carried out in China in 1953, 1964 and 1982. The first attempt to analyse this data in order to estimate the number of famine deaths was carried out by American demographer Dr. Judith Banister and published in 1984. Given the lengthy gaps between the censuses and doubts over the reliability of the data, an accurate figure is difficult to ascertain. Nevertheless, Banister concluded that the official data implied that around 15 million excess deaths incurred in China during 1958–61, and that based on her modelling of Chinese demographics during the period and taking account of assumed under-reporting during the famine years, the figure was around 30 million. The official statistic is 20 million deaths, as given by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Yaobang Hu Yaobang].<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-198">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-198 [198]]</sup> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Jisheng Yang Jisheng], a former [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinhua_News_Agency Xinhua News Agency] reporter who had privileged access and connections available to no other scholars, estimates a death toll of 36 million.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Yang_Jisheng_197-1">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-Yang_Jisheng-197 [197]]</sup> Frank Dikötter estimates that there were at least 45 million premature deaths attributable to the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-199">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-199 [199]]</sup> Various other sources have put the figure at between 20 and 46 million.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-maostats_200-0">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-maostats-200 [200]]</sup> |
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| When some 8,000 troops who had survived the perils of the Long March arrived in Shaanxi province in northwestern China in the autumn of 1935, events were already moving toward the third phase in Mao’s rural odyssey, which was to be characterized by a renewed united front with the Nationalists against Japan and by the rise of Mao to unchallenged supremacy in the party. That phase is often called the Yan’an period (for the town in Shaanxi where the communists were based), although Mao did not move to Yan’an until December 1936. In August1935 the Comintern at its Seventh Congress in Moscow proclaimed the principle of an antifascist united front, and in May 1936 the Chinese communists for the first time accepted the prospect that such a united front might include Chiang Kai-shek himself, and not merely dissident elements in the Nationalist camp. The so-called Xi’an Incident of December 1936, in which Chiang was [[Kidnapping|kidnapped]] by military leaders from northeastern China who wanted to fight Japan and recover their homelands rather than participate in civil war against the communists, accelerated the evolution toward unity. By the time the Japanese began their attempt to subjugate all of China in July 1937, the terms of a new united front between the communists and the Nationalists had been virtually settled, and the formal agreement was announced in September 1937.
| | On the international front, the period was dominated by the further isolation of China. The [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_split Sino-Soviet split] resulted in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita_Khrushchev Nikita Khrushchev]'s withdrawal of all Soviet technical experts and aid from the country. The split was triggered by arguments over the control and direction of world communism and other disputes pertaining to foreign policy.<sup class="Template-Fact" style="white-space:nowrap;">[''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed citation needed]'']</sup> Most of the problems regarding communist unity resulted from the death of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin Joseph Stalin] in March 1953 and his replacement by Khrushchev. Only [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Republic_of_Albania Albania] under the leadership of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enver_Hoxha Enver Hoxha] openly sided with China against the Soviets, which began an alliance between the two countries which would last until the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Albanian_split Sino-Albanian split] after Mao's death in 1976. |
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| In the course of the anti-Japanese war, the communists broke up a substantial portion of their army into small units and sent them behind the enemy lines to serve as nuclei for guerrilla forces that effectively controlled vast areas of the countryside, stretching between the cities and communication lines occupied by the invader. As a result, they not only expanded their military forces to somewhere between a half-million and a million at the time of the Japanese surrender but also established effective grassroots political control over a population that may have totaled as many as 90 million. It has been argued that the support of the rural population was won purely by appeals to their nationalist feeling in opposition to the Japanese. That certainly was fundamental, but communist agrarian policies likewise played a part in securing broad support among the peasantry.
| | Stalin had established himself as the successor of "correct" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist Marxist] thought well before Mao controlled the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_China Communist Party of China], and therefore Mao never challenged the suitability of any Stalinist doctrine (at least while Stalin was alive). Upon the death of Stalin, Mao believed (perhaps because of seniority) that the leadership of the "correct" Marxist doctrine would fall to him. The resulting tension between Khrushchev (at the head of a politically and militarily superior government), and Mao (believing he had a superior understanding of Marxist ideology) eroded the previous patron-client relationship between the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_the_Soviet_Union Communist Party of the Soviet Union] and the CPC.<sup class="Template-Fact" style="white-space:nowrap;">[''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed citation needed]'']</sup> In China, the formerly favorable Soviets were now denounced as "revisionists" and listed alongside "American imperialism" as movements to oppose.<sup class="Template-Fact" style="white-space:nowrap;">[''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed citation needed]'']</sup> |
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| During the years 1936–40, Mao had, for the first time since the 1920s, the leisure to devote himself to reflection and writing. It was then that he first read in translation a certain number of Soviet writings on philosophy and produced his own account of dialectical materialism, of which the best-known portions are those entitled “On Practice” and “On Contradiction.” More important, Mao produced the major works that synthesized his own experience of revolutionary struggle and his vision of how the revolution should be carried forward in the context of the united front. On military matters there was first <em>Strategic Problems of China’s Revolutionary War</em>, written in December 1936 to sum up the lessons of the Jiangxi period (and also to justify the correctness of his own military line at the time), and then <em>On Protracted War</em> and other writings of 1938 on the tactics of the anti-Japanese war. As to his overall view of the events of those years, Mao adopted an extremely conciliatory attitude toward the Nationalists in his report entitled <em>On the New Stage</em> (October 1938), in which he attributed to it the leading role both in the war against Japan and in the ensuing phase of national reconstruction. By the winter of 1939–40, however, the situation had changed sufficiently so that he could adopt a much firmer line, claiming leadership for the communists. Internationally, Mao argued, the Chinese revolution was a part of the world proletarian revolution directed against imperialism (whether it be British, German, or Japanese); internally, the country should be ruled by a “joint dictatorship of several parties” belonging to the anti-Japanese united front. For the time being, Mao felt, the aims of the CCPcoincided with the aims of the Nationalists, and therefore communists should not try to rush ahead to socialism and thus disrupt the united front. But neither should they have any doubts about the ultimate need to take power into their own hands in order to move forward to socialism. During that period, in 1939, Mao divorced He Zizhen and married a well-known film actress, Lan Ping (who by that time had changed her name to [[Jiang Qing]]).
| | Partly surrounded by hostile American military bases (in South Korea, Japan, and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan Taiwan]), China was now confronted with a new [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union Soviet] threat from the north and west. Both the internal crisis and the external threat called for extraordinary statesmanship from Mao, but as China entered the new decade the statesmen of the People's Republic were in hostile confrontation with each other. |
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| The issues of Nationalist-communist rivalry for the leadership of the united front are related to the continuing struggle for supremacy within the CCP, for Mao’s two chief rivals—Wang Ming, who had just returned from a long stay in Moscow, and Zhang Guotao, who had at first refused to accept Mao’s political and military leadership—were both accused of excessive slavishness toward the Nationalists. But perhaps even more central in Mao’s ultimate emergence as the acknowledged leader of the party was the question of what he had called in October 1938 the “Sinification” of Marxism—its adaptation not only to Chinese conditions but to the mentality and cultural traditions of the Chinese people. | | At a large Communist Party conference in Beijing in January 1962, called the "Conference of the Seven Thousand," State Chairman Liu Shaoqi denounced the Great Leap Forward as responsible for widespread famine.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Chang_201-0">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-Chang-201 [201]]</sup> The overwhelming majority of delegates expressed agreement, but Defense Minister [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Biao Lin Biao] staunchly defended Mao.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Chang_201-1">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-Chang-201 [201]]</sup> A brief period of liberalization followed while Mao and Lin plotted a comeback.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Chang_201-2">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-Chang-201 [201]]</sup> Liu Shaoqi and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping Deng Xiaoping] rescued the economy by disbanding the people's communes, introducing elements of private control of peasant smallholdings and importing grain from Canada and Australia to mitigate the worst effects of famine.<sup class="Template-Fact" style="white-space:nowrap;">[''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed citation needed]'']</sup> |
| | ===Cultural Revolution=== |
| | Mao was concerned with the nature of post-1959 China. He saw that the revolution had replaced the old elite with a new one. He was concerned that those in power were becoming estranged from the people they were supposed to serve. |
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| | Mao believed that a revolution of culture would unseat and unsettle the "ruling class" and keep China in a state of "perpetual revolution" that, theoretically, would serve the interests of the majority, not a tiny elite.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-202">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-202 [202]]</sup> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Shaoqi Liu Shaoqi] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping Deng Xiaoping], then the State Chairman and General Secretary, respectively, had favored the idea that Mao should be removed from actual power but maintain his ceremonial and symbolic role, with the party upholding all of his positive contributions to the revolution. They attempted to marginalize Mao by taking control of economic policy and asserting themselves politically as well. Many claim that Mao responded to Liu and Deng's movements by launching the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution Cultural Revolution] in 1966. Some scholars, such as Mobo Gao, claim the case for this is perhaps overstated.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-203">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-203 [203]]</sup> Others, such as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Dik%C3%B6tter Frank Dikötter], hold that Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to wreak revenge on those who had dared to challenge him over the Great Leap Forward.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-204">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-204 [204]]</sup> |
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| Mao could not claim the firsthand knowledge possessed by many other leading members of the CCP of how communism worked within the Soviet Union nor the ability to read Karl Marx or [[Vladimir Lenin]] in the original, which some of them enjoyed. He could and did claim, however, to know and understand China. The differences between him and the Soviet-oriented faction in the party came to a head at the time of the so-called Rectification Campaign of 1942–43. That program aimed at giving a basic grounding in Marxist theory and Leninist principles of party organization to the many thousands of new members who had been drawn into the party in the course of the expansion since 1937. But a second and equally important aspect of the movement was the elimination of what Mao called “foreign dogmatism”—in other words, blind imitation of Soviet experience and obedience to Soviet directives.
| | Believing that certain liberal bourgeois elements of society continued to threaten the socialist framework, groups of young people known as the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Guards_%28China%29 Red Guards] struggled against authorities at all levels of society and even set up their own tribunals. Chaos reigned in much of the nation, and millions were persecuted, including a famous philosopher, Chen Yuen. During the Cultural Revolution, the schools in China were closed and the young intellectuals living in cities were ordered to the countryside to be "re-educated" by the peasants, where they performed hard manual labor and other work. |
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| In March 1943 Mao achieved for the first time formal supremacy over the party, becoming chairman of the Secretariat and of the Political Bureau (Politburo). Shortly thereafter the Rectification Campaign took, for a time, the form of a harsh purge of elements not sufficiently loyal to Mao. The campaign was run by Kang Sheng, who was later to be one of Mao’s key supporters in the Cultural Revolution. Exaggerating considerably that dimension of events, Soviet spokesmen have bitterly denounced the Rectification Campaign as an attempt to purge the CCP of all those elements genuinely imbued with “proletarian internationalism” (i.e., devotion to Moscow). It is therefore not surprising that, as Mao’s campaign in the countryside moved into its fourth and last phase—that of civil war with the Nationalists—Stalin’s lack of enthusiasm for a Chinese communist victory should have become increasingly evident. Looking back at that period in 1962, when the Sino-Soviet conflict had come to a head, Mao declared:
| | The Revolution led to the destruction of much of China's traditional cultural heritage and the imprisonment of a huge number of Chinese citizens, as well as creating general economic and social chaos in the country. Millions of lives were ruined during this period, as the Cultural Revolution pierced into every part of Chinese life, depicted by such Chinese films as ''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Live_%28film%29 To Live]'', ''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Kite The Blue Kite]'' and ''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farewell_My_Concubine_%28film%29 Farewell My Concubine]''. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, perished in the violence of the Cultural Revolution.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-maostats_200-1">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-maostats-200 [200]]</sup> |
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| {{Quote|In 1945, Stalin wanted to prevent China from making revolution, saying that we should not have a civil war and should cooperate with Chiang Kai-shek, otherwise the Chinese nation would perish. But we did not do what he said. The revolution was victorious. After the victory of the revolution he [Stalin] next suspected China of being a Yugoslavia, and that I would become a second Tito.}}
| | When Mao was informed of such losses, particularly that people had been driven to suicide, he is alleged to have commented: "People who try to commit suicide — don't attempt to save them! . . . China is such a populous nation, it is not as if we cannot do without a few people."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-205">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-205 [205]]</sup> The authorities allowed the Red Guards to abuse and kill opponents of the regime. Said [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xie_Fuzhi Xie Fuzhi], national police chief: "Don't say it is wrong of them to beat up bad persons: if in anger they beat someone to death, then so be it."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-206">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-206 [206]]</sup> As a result, in August and September 1966, there were 1,772 people murdered in Beijing alone.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-207">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-207 [207]]</sup> |
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| That account of Stalin’s attitude is substantiated by a whole series of public gestures at the time, culminating in the fact that, when the People’s Liberation Army (successor to the Red Army) took the Nationalist capital of Nanjing in April 1949, the Soviet ambassador was the only foreign diplomat to accompany the retreating Nationalist government to Guangzhou. Stalin’s motives were obviously those described by Mao in the above passage; he did not believe in the capacity of the Chinese communists to achieve a clear-cut victory, and he thought they would be a nuisance if they did.
| | It was during this period that Mao chose [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Biao Lin Biao], who seemed to echo all of Mao's ideas, to become his successor. Lin was later officially named as Mao's successor. By 1971, however, a divide between the two men became apparent. Official history in China states that Lin was planning a military coup or an assassination attempt on Mao. Lin Biao died in a plane crash over the air space of Mongolia, presumably on his way to flee China, probably anticipating his arrest. The CPC declared that Lin was planning to depose Mao, and posthumously expelled Lin from the party. At this time, Mao lost trust in many of the top CPC figures. The highest-ranking Soviet Bloc intelligence defector, Lt. Gen. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Mihai_Pacepa Ion Mihai Pacepa] described his conversation with [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%C5%9Fescu Nicolae Ceauşescu] who told him about a plot to kill Mao Zedong with the help of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Biao Lin Biao] organized by the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGB KGB].<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Pacepa0_208-0">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-Pacepa0-208 [208]]</sup> |
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| ==== Formation Of The People’s Republic Of China ====
| | In 1969, Mao declared the Cultural Revolution to be over, although the official history of the People's Republic of China marks the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 with Mao's death. In the last years of his life, Mao was faced with declining health due to either [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_disease Parkinson's disease] or, according to his physician, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amyotrophic_lateral_sclerosis amyotrophic lateral sclerosis],<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-209">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-209 [209]]</sup> as well as lung ailments due to smoking and heart trouble. Some also attributed Mao's decline in health to the betrayal of Lin Biao. Mao remained passive as various factions within the Communist Party mobilized for the power struggle anticipated after his death. |
| Nevertheless, when the communists did take power in China, both Mao and Stalin had to make the best of the situation. In December 1949 Mao, now chairman of the People’s Republic of China—which he had proclaimed on October 1—traveled to Moscow, where, after two months of arduous negotiations, he succeeded in persuading Stalin to sign a treaty of mutual assistance accompanied by limited economic aid. Before the Chinese had time to profit from the resources made available for economic development, however, they found themselves dragged into the [[Korean War]] in support of [[Kim Il-sung]]'s Moscow-oriented regime in North Korea. Only after that baptism of fire did Stalin, according to Mao, begin to have confidence in him and believe he was not first and foremost a Chinese nationalist.
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| Despite those tensions with Moscow, the policies of the People’s Republic of China in its early years were in very many respects based, as Mao later said, on “copying from the Soviets.” While Mao and his comrades had experience in guerrilla warfare, in mobilization of the peasants in the countryside, and in political administration at the grass roots, they had no firsthand knowledge of running a state or of large-scale economic development. In such circumstances the Soviet Union provided the only available model. A five-year plan was therefore drawn up under Soviet guidance; it was put into effect in 1953 and included Soviet technical assistance and a number of complete industrial plants. Yet, within two years, Mao had taken steps that were to lead to the breakdown of the political and ideological alliance with Moscow.
| | This period is often looked at in official circles in China and in the West as a great stagnation or even of reversal for China. While many—an estimated 100 million—did suffer,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-210">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-210 [210]]</sup> some scholars, such as Lee Feigon and Mobo Gao, claim there were many great advances, and in some sectors the Chinese economy continued to outperform the west.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-ReferenceA_211-0">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#cite_note-ReferenceA-211 [211]]</sup> They hold that the Cultural Revolution period laid the foundation for the spectacular growth that continues in China. During the Cultural Revolution, China exploded its [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_No._6 first H-Bomb] (1967), launched the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dong_Fang_Hong Dong Fang Hong] satellite (January 30, 1970), commissioned its first nuclear submarines and made various advances in science and technology. Healthcare was free, and living standards in the countryside continued to improve |
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| ==== The Emergence Of Mao’s Road To Socialism ==== | | ==Death== |
| In the spring of 1949, Mao proclaimed that, while in the past the Chinese revolution had followed the unorthodox path of “encircling the cities from the countryside,” it would in the future take the orthodox road of the cities leading and guiding the countryside. In harmony with that view, he had agreed in 1950 with Liu Shaoqi that collectivization would be possible only when China’s heavy industry had provided the necessary equipment for mechanization. In a report of July 1955, he reversed that position, arguing that in China the social transformation could run ahead of the technical transformation. Deeply impressed by the achievements of certain cooperatives that claimed to have radically improved their material conditions without any outside assistance, he came to believe in the limitless capacity of the Chinese people, especially of the rural masses, to transform at will both nature and their own social relations when mobilized for revolutionary goals. Those in the leadership who did not share that vision he denounced as “old women with bound feet.” He made those criticisms before an ad hoc gathering of provincial and local party secretaries, thus creating a groundswell of enthusiasm for rapid collectivization such that all those in the leadership who had expressed doubts about Mao’s ideas were soon presented with a fait accompli. The tendency thus manifested to pursue his own ends outside the collective decision-making processes of the party was to continue and to be accentuated.
| | Mao had been in poorer health for several years and had declined visibly for at least six months prior to his death. There are unconfirmed reports that he possibly had ALS or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Gehrig%27s_disease Lou Gehrig's disease]. Mao's last public appearance was on May 27, 1976, where he met the visiting Pakistani Prime Minister [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulfikar_Ali_Bhutto Zulfikar Ali Bhutto] during the latter's one-day visit to Beijing. |
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| Even before Stalin’s successor, [[Nikita Khrushchev]], had given his secret speech (February 1956) denouncing his predecessor’s crimes, Mao Zedong and his colleagues had been discussing measures for improving the morale of the intellectuals in order to secure their willing participation in building a new China. At the end of April, Mao proclaimed the policy of “letting a hundred flowers bloom”—that is, the freedom to express many diverse ideas—designed to prevent the development in China of a repressive political climate analogous to that in the Soviet Union under Stalin. In the face of the disorders called forth by de-Stalinization in Poland and Hungary, Mao did not retreat but rather pressed boldly forward with that policy, against the advice of many of his senior colleagues, in the belief that the contradictions that still existed in Chinese society were mainly nonantagonistic. When the resulting “great blooming and contending” got out of hand and called into question the axiom of party rule, Mao savagely turned against the educated elite, which he felt had betrayed his confidence. Henceforth he would rely primarily on the creativity of the rank and file as the agent of modernization. As for the specialists, if they were not yet sufficiently “red,” he would remold them by sending them to work in the countryside.
| | At around 5:00 pm on September 2, 1976, Mao suffered a heart attack, far more severe than his previous two and affecting a much larger area of his heart. X-rays indicated that his current lung infection had worsened. Three days later, on September 5, Mao's condition was critical, and Hua Guofeng called his wife, Jiang Qing, back from her trip. She visited him before returning to her own residence in the Spring Lotus Chamber. |
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| It was against that background that Mao, during the winter of 1957–58, worked out the policies that were to characterize the Great Leap Forward, formally launched in May 1958. While his economic strategy was by no means so one-sided and simplistic as was commonly believed in the 1960s and ’70s and although he still proclaimed industrialization and a “technical revolution” as his goals, Mao displayed continuing anxiety regarding the corrupting influence of the fruits of technical progress and an acute nostalgia for the perceived purity and egalitarianism that had marked the moral and political world of the Jinggang Mountains and Yan’an eras.
| | He was taken off life support and was pronounced dead at 12:10 am on September 9, 1976. September 9 was chosen as the day to let Mao die because it was seen as an easy day to remember, being the ninth day of the ninth month of the calendar. |
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| Thus it was logical that he should endorse and promote the establishment of “people’s communes” as part of the Great Leap strategy. As a result, the peasants, who had been organized into cooperatives in 1955–56 and then into fully socialist collectives in 1956–57, found their world turned upside down once again in 1958. Neither the resources nor the administrative experience necessary to operate such enormous new social units of several thousand households were in fact available, and, not surprisingly, the consequences of those changes were chaosand economic disaster.
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| By the winter of 1958–59, Mao himself had come to recognize that some adjustments were necessary, including decentralization of ownership to the constituent elements of the communes and a scaling down of the unrealistically high production targets in both industry and agriculture. He insisted, however, that in broad outline his new Chinese road to socialism, including the concept of the communes and the belief that China, though “poor and blank,” could leap ahead of other countries, was basically sound. At the Lushan meeting of the Central Committee in July–August 1959, Peng Dehuai, the minister of defense, denounced the excesses of the Great Leap and the economic losses they had caused. He was immediately removed from all party and state posts and placed in detention until his death during the Cultural Revolution. From that time, Mao regarded any criticism of his policies as nothing less than a crime of lèse-majesté, meriting exemplary punishment.
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| ==== Retreat And Counterattack ====
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| Though few spoke up at Lushan in support of Peng, a considerable number of the top leaders sympathized with him in private. Almost immediately, in 1960, Mao began building an alternative power base in the People’s Liberation Army, which the new defense minister, [[Lin Biao]], had set out to turn into a “great school of Mao Zedong Thought.” At about the same time, Mao began to denounce the emergence, not only in the Soviet Union but also in China itself, of “new bourgeois elements” among the privileged strata of the state and party bureaucracy and the technical and artistic elite. Under those conditions, he concluded, a “protracted, complex, and sometimes even violent class struggle” would continue during the whole socialist stage.
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| The open split with the Soviet Union, which had become public and irreparable by 1963—though it can be traced to Mao’s resentment at Khrushchev’s failure to consult him before launching de-Stalinization—resulted, above all, from the Soviet reaction to the Great Leap policies. Khrushchev regarded Mao’s claims for the communes as ideologically presumptuous, and he heaped ridicule on them; he underlined his displeasure by withdrawing Soviet technical assistance in 1960, leaving many large industrial plants unfinished. Khrushchev also tried to put pressure on China in its dealings with Taiwan and India and in other foreign policy issues. Mao forgot neither the affront to his and China’s dignity nor the economic damage.
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| As for class struggle in China itself, Mao’s fear that revisionism might appear there was heightened by the policies pursued in the early 1960s to deal with the economic consequences of the Great Leap Forward. The disorganization and waste created by the Great Leap, compounded by natural disasters and by the termination of Soviet economic aid, led to widespread famine in which, according to much later official Chinese accounts, millions of people died. The response to that situation by Liu Shaoqi (who had succeeded Mao as chairman of the People’s Republic in 1959), [[Deng Xiaoping]], and the economic planners was to make use of material incentives and to strengthen the role of individual households in agricultural production. At first Mao agreed reluctantly that such steps were necessary, but during the first half of 1962 he came increasingly to perceive the methods used to promote recovery as implying the repudiation of the whole thrust of the Great Leap strategy. It was as a direct response to that challenge that at the 10th Plenary Session of the Central Committee in September 1962 he issued the call, “Never forget the class struggle!”
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| During the next three years Mao waged such a struggle, primarily through the Socialist Education Movement in the countryside, and it was over the guidelines for that campaign that the major political battles were fought within the Chinese leadership. At the end of 1964, when Liu Shaoqi refused to accept Mao’s demand to direct the main thrust of class struggle against “capitalist roaders” in the party, Mao decided that “Liu had to go.”
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| ==== The Cultural Revolution ====
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| The movement that became known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution represented an attempt by Mao to go beyond the party rectification campaigns—of which there had been many since 1942—and to devise a new and more radical method for dealing with what he saw as the bureaucratic degeneration of the party. It also represented, beyond any doubt or question, however, a deliberate effort to eliminate those in the leadership who, over the years, had dared to cross him. The victims, from throughout the party hierarchy, suffered more than mere political disgrace. All were publicly humiliated and detained for varying periods, sometimes under very harsh conditions; many were beaten and tortured, and not a few were killed or driven to suicide. Among the casualties was Liu, who died because he was denied proper medical attention.
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| The justification for those sacrifices was defined in a key slogan of the time: “Fight selfishness, criticize revisionism.” When the young Chinese known as the [[Red Guards]], who constituted the first shock troops of Mao’s enterprise, burst onto the scene in the summer of 1966 with their battle cry “To rebel is justified!” it seemed for a time that not only the power of the party cadres but also authority in all its forms was being questioned. It soon became evident that Mao, who in 1956 had justified decentralization as a means to building a “strong socialist state,” still believed in the need for state power. When the Shanghai leftists Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan—who were later to make up half the Gang of Four—came to see him in February 1967, immediately after setting up the Shanghai Commune, Mao asserted that the demand for the abolition of “heads” (leaders), which had been heard in their city, was “extreme anarchism” and “most reactionary”; in fact, he stated, there would “always be heads.” Communes, he added, were “too weak when it came to suppressing counterrevolution” and in any case required party leadership. He therefore ordered them to dissolve theirs and to replace it with a “revolutionary committee.”
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| Those committees, based on an alliance of former party cadres, young activists, and representatives of the People’s Liberation Army, were to remain in place until two years after Mao’s death. At first they were largely controlled by the army. The Ninth Congress of 1969 initiated the process of rebuilding the party; and the death of Lin Biao in 1971 diminished, though it by no means eliminated, the army’s role. Thereafter it seemed briefly, in 1971–72, that a compromise, of which [[Zhou Enlai]] was the architect, might produce some kind of synthesis between the values of the Cultural Revolution and the pre-1966 political and economic order.
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| He was one of the main supporters of [[Pol Pot]] and his [[Khmer Rouge]] during the Cambodian Civil War. Upon the Khmer Rouge taking power in 1975, Pol Pot largely based his "Year Zero" policies on Mao's Cultural Revolution, which would ultimately result in the [[Cambodian Genocide]]. Mao would serve as the Khmer Rouge's primary supporter during their years in power, after Vietnam distanced themselves from the regime. He also was a strong ally of [[Ho Chi Minh]] (and later [[Le Duan]]) during the [[Vietnam War]].
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| Even before Zhou’s death in January 1976, however, that compromise had been overturned. All recognition by Mao of the importance of professional skills was swallowed up in an orgy of political rhetoric, and all things foreign were regarded as counterrevolutionary. Mao’s last decade, which had opened with manifestos in favour of the Paris Commune model of mass democracy, closed with paeans of praise to that most implacable of centralizing despots, Shihuangdi, the first emperor of the ancient Qin dynasty.
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| ==== Death ====
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| Mao's last public appearance—and the last known photograph of him alive—was on May 27, 1976, when he met the visiting Pakistani Prime Minister [[Zulfikar Ali Bhutto]] during the latter's one-day visit to Beijing. At around 5:00 pm on 2 September 1976, Mao suffered a heart attack, far more severe than his previous two and affecting a much larger area of his heart. Three days later, on 5 September another heart attack randered him an invalid. On the afternoon of 7 September, Mao's condition completely deteriorated. Mao's organs failed quickly and he fell into a coma shortly before noon where he was put on life support machines.
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| Mao Zedong died nearly four days later just after midnight, at 00:10, on September 9, 1976, at age 82. The Communist Party of China delayed the announcement of his death until 16:00 later that day, when a radio message broadcast across the nation announced the news of Mao's passing while appealing for party unity.
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| Mao's embalmed, CPC-flag-draped body lay in state at the Great Hall of the People for one week.<sup>[16]</sup> During this period, one million people (none of them foreign diplomats, and many crying openly or displaying some kind of sadness) filed past Mao to pay their final respects. Chairman Mao's official portrait was hung on the wall, with a banner reading: "Carry on the cause left by Chairman Mao and carry on the cause of proletarian revolution to the end", until September 17. On September 17, Chairman Mao's body was taken in a minibus from the Great Hall of the people to Maojiawan to the 305 Hospital that Liu Zhisui directed, and Mao's internal organs were preserved in formaldehyde.
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| On September 18, guns, sirens, whistles and horns across China were simultaneously blown and a mandatory three-minute silence was observed. Tiananmen Square was packed with millions of people and a military band played "The Internationale". [[Hua Guofeng]], who would go on to succeed Mao as Chairman, concluded the service with a 20-minute-long eulogy atop Tiananmen Gate. Despite Mao's request to be cremated, his body was later permanently put on display in the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong, in order for the Chinese nation to pay its respects.
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| == Legacy ==
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| {{Quote|But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao<br>You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow.<br>|The Beatles, "Revolution"}}[[File:Mao Zedong portrait.jpg|thumb|263x263px|Portrait of Mao Zedong.]]
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| While the Cultural Revolution was an entirely logical culmination of Mao's last two decades, it was by no means the only possible outcome of his approach to revolution, nor need a judgment of his work as a whole be based primarily on that last phase.
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| Few would deny Mao Zedong the major share of credit for devising the pattern of struggle based on guerrilla warfare in the countryside that ultimately led to victory in the civil war and thereby to the overthrow of the Nationalists, the distribution of land to the peasants, and the restoration of China's independence and sovereignty. Those achievements must be given a weight commensurate with the degree of injustice prevailing in Chinese society before the revolution and with the humiliation felt by the Chinese people as a result of the dismemberment of their country by the foreign powers. "We have stood up," Mao said in September 1949. Those words will not be forgotten.
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| Mao's record after 1949 is more ambiguous. The official Chinese view, defined in June 1981, is that his leadership was basically correct until the summer of 1957, but from then on it was mixed at best and frequently wrong. It cannot be disputed that Mao’s two major innovations of his later years, the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution, were ill-conceived and led to disastrous consequences. His goals of combating bureaucracy, encouraging popular participation, and stressing China’s self-reliance were generally laudable—and the industrialization that began during Mao’s reign did indeed lay a foundation for China’s remarkable economic development since the late 20th century—but the methods he used to pursue them were often violent and self-defeating.
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| There is no single accepted measure of Mao and his long career. How does one weigh, for example, the good fortune of peasants acquiring land against millions of executions and deaths? How does one balance the real economic achievements after 1949 against the starvation that came in the wake of the Great Leap Forward or the bloody shambles of the Cultural Revolution? It is, perhaps, possible to accept the official verdict that, despite the "errors of his later years," Mao's merits outweighed his faults, while underscoring the fact that the account is very finely balanced.
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| ==Trivia==
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| *Mao personally didn't like purging his officials despite seeing it as necessary.
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| *Mao was reportedly a great swimmer and it has been said that he managed to swim across a flowing river in a very short amount of time.
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| *Mao Zedong, despite being a repressive controversial dictator that caused millions of deaths, was against imperialism and fought as a general in the Second Sino-Japanese War against [[Imperial Japan]], a conflict that saw him briefly join forces with future Taiwanese dictator Chiang Kai-Shek and the [[Kuomintang]]. Furthermore, Mao was so disgusted by the horrific [[Rape of Nanking]] committed by Japanese forces during the war that he refused to speak of the horrendous atrocity for the rest of his life.
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| **However he rather thanked Japan for invading China, He ironically said these words: ''" Don't say that, on the contrary, Japanese helped us (Communist) in a big way. "'' Meaning he refused to accept Japan's apology and rather thanked the Japanese invasion of Mainland China as well as supporting the denials of Nanking Massacre until his death in 1976 the rise of Anti-Japanese sentiment rose.
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| **According to Watchmojo's [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9yPMWpjN9k&t=173s 10 Most EVIL Men in History video], Mao Zedong is the sixth most evil man in the history of mankind.
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| ==Videos==
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| <YouTube width=320 height=180>https://youtu.be/PJIIZm_JO_4</YouTube>
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| <YouTube width=320 height=180>https://youtu.be/fsME7AXcf6E</YouTube>
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| <YouTube width=320 height=180>https://youtu.be/g_2FZ-V_4zs</YouTube>
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| <YouTube width=320 height=180>https://youtu.be/uWKNVZqC0yo</YouTube>
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| <YouTube width=320 height=180>https://youtu.be/oSmHz1S9K2Q</YouTube>
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| <YouTube width=320 height=180>https://youtu.be/dW_ekZRGalk</YouTube>
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|
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|
| | His body lay in state at the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hall_of_the_People Great Hall of the People]. A memorial service was held in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square Tiananmen Square] on September 18, 1976. There was a three-minute silence observed during this service. His body was later placed into the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausoleum_of_Mao_Zedong Mausoleum of Mao Zedong], though he had expressed a wish to be cremated and had been one of the first high-ranking officials to sign the "Proposal that all Central Leaders be Cremated after Death" in November 1956. |
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| | After Mao's death, there was a power struggle for control of China. On one side was the left wing led by the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Four_%28China%29 Gang of Four], who wanted to continue the policy of revolutionary mass mobilization. On the other side was the right wing opposing these policies. Among the latter group, the right wing restorationists, led by Chairman [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hua_Guofeng Hua Guofeng], advocated a return to central planning along the Soviet model, whereas the right wing reformers, led by Deng Xiaoping, wanted to overhaul the Chinese economy based on market-oriented policies and to de-emphasize the role of Maoist ideology in determining economic and political policy. Eventually, the reformers won control of the government. Deng Xiaoping, with clear seniority over Hua Guofeng, defeated Hua in a bloodless power struggle a few years late |
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