Louise Chipley Slavicek - Mao Zedong

October 1, 1949, marked a pivotal point in China's history. With Beijing's Tiananmen Square filled with excited onlookers, Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the Peoples' Republic of China. Mao's resourcefulness in reaching that goal proved him to be one of the century's most important military leaders.

Source: Associated Press.

From 1949 until his death in 1976 at the age of 82, Mao Zedong would dominate the new communist state that his adept military leadership had helped to create. Chairman Mao was the key figure behind every important military and political path that the People's Republic followed during those three decades: its early alliance with the Soviet Union and the eventual collapse of that coalition; its deep involvement in the Korean War and more limited role in the Vietnamese conflict; its reliance on the national army to promote and then to rein in the terror of the notorious Cultural Revolution; and finally, its startling rapprochement with a long-standing and powerful enemy, the United States.

Mao Zedong will long be remembered as one of the twentieth century's most resourceful military and political leaders. Unquestionably, he was also one of its most influential. For as Mao was building and maintaining his considerable personal power within China, he was also making his once weak and divided homeland into a major global power and transforming forever the lives of billions of his compatriots.

• 1. Quoted in Ross Terrill, Mao Zedong: A Biography. Rev. ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 198.
• 2. Quoted in Philip Short, Mao: A Life. New York: Henry Holt, 2000, p. 419.
• 3. Quoted in Jonathan Spence, Mao Zedong. New York: Penguin, 1999, p. 75.

Mao Zedong was born in the tiny village of Shaoshan in south-central China on December 26, 1893. Mao made his appearance in the world at a painful time in his homeland's long history, as China confronted grave threats to its economic and political independence from abroad and weak leadership at home. Traditionally, the Chinese had viewed their vast country as the "Middle Kingdom," the very heart of the civilized world. By the late 1800s, however, faced with the modernized armies and technological expertise of the imperialist West, the once proud Middle Kingdom had been humiliated and demoralized.

After years of self-imposed isolation from the outside world, during the half-century preceding Mao Zedong's birth China found itself besieged by western merchants and governments determined to carve out "spheres of influence" for themselves in Asia's largest and most populous country. As the nineteenth century progressed, the ineffectual emperors of China's ruling family, the Qing Dynasty, made only feeble efforts to halt the growing exploitation of their country's economy and natural resources by England, Russia, and other foreign powers. Intimidated by their modernized armies, China's leaders allowed the intruders to set up their own courts of law within the empire and evade Chinese justice; control naval stations, railroad, and mining rights in a number of vital areas; and exact sweeping trade privileges.

When Mao was still an infant, China's chief Asian rivalJapantook advantage of its neighbor's weakness by invading Korea, a longtime Chinese tributary. By 1895, Japan's modernized army had managed to conquer not only Korea but also Taiwan, which China had governed for centuries. Five years later, the Middle Kingdom's national pride received another blow when the Boxer Rebellion, a violent crusade to expel all foreigners from China, was crushed with brutal efficiency by an international army including Japanese, American, and European troops.

The poverty and backwardness of China's predominantly rural populace added greatly to the country's weakness in the face of its foreign rivals. At the turn of the twentieth century, China was far less industrialized or urbanized than Japan or any of its western rivals. As had been the case for countless centuries, the vast majority of Chinese were illiterate peasants who barely managed to eke a living out of the land. Compelled to rent their fields at prohibitive rates from a small group of wealthy landlords, they were perpetually in debt, with scant hope of ever improving their economic situation. Consequently, social unrest was rampant among the Chinese peasantry, especially in Mao's home province of Hunan, where land rents were notoriously high. During Mao's childhood, thousands of angry peasants descended on the provincial capital of Changsha, demanding food after drought and famine struck Hunan. Their protest, however, ended quickly when government forces opened fire on the marchers.