Who is Mao Tse Tung?
Mao Tse-tung, alternately spelled Mao Zedung, was born in Hunan Province in South China on 26 December 1893. He is regarded as one of the leading communists of the last century. His theories on communism, warfare and revolution have been extremely influential. He was also responsible for a revolutionary program called The Great Leap Forward that cost the lives of 20 to 30 million people. Although Mao’s parents were farmers, they were by no means poor, and he received a good education. Around the age of 16, Mao began to develop a political consciousness. He joined a local army unit in 1911 and became part of the republican revolution. In 1911, while working at a Beijing University, 3,000 students held a government protest in Tiananmen Square. Mao soon began to develop a Marxist-Leninist form of thinking. He believed that by using the potential of the peasant workers, the revolution in China would succeed. By 1920, Mao was head of a primary school in Changsha. His efforts to bring educat
The Communist successes under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung propelled Mao into legendary status as leader of the Chinese Communist Party, having proved that under the proper leadership, his people could march to victory. In the fifties and sixties, Mao Tse-tung acted as leader of the both the Chinese revolution and the Chinese Communist Party. Distraught at the present state of his country, whose fruits of victory were being to sour, he became determined to launch a second revolution with an objective of a socialist utopia. The Mao was suspicious almost to the point of paranoia, fearing that those who had sworn loyalty to him were turning against him in droves. He also had an ingrained distrust for the intellectuals whose interests were slowly turning from the ideological to the technological. He feared that the increasing professional bureaucracy he had witnessed taking place in the Soviet Union was destined to occur in his own country as well. During this time period, Marxism was fa
