Mao Tse Tung

Born:
26/12/1893
Died:
09/09/1976
Birthplace:
Hunan Province
Mao Zedung was born to a farming family in the Hunan Province in 1893. After
witnessing the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and the early years of China's
awakening nationalism, he served briefly in the Hunan Republican Army.
Here, Mao came into contact with socialist ideals, and embarked on a self-directed
course of political and economic study, inspired primarily by Marx's class struggle and
Lenin's anti-imperialist stance.
In 1921, Mao was amongst the feuding members of the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP). In 1925 he returned to Hunan, fleeing from the Nationalist Party's (Guo Midung
or GMD) persecution of Communists under Chiang Kai-Shek. Two years later, Mao
carried out a study of the impoverished Hunanene peasantry, concluding that the
countryside, and not the cities, could launch the Chinese Communist Revolution.
Between 1934-35, under threat from the GMD, Mao led the Long March to Yan'du,
where they built their headquarters and Mao became Chairman of the CCP. The rest of
the decade was distinguished by CCP and GMD efforts against Japanese invasion.
In 1949, with Russia's support, the CCP consolidated a series of victories against the
GMD by seizing power. 'Mao Thought', as outlined in the 1942-44 rectification campaign
had been adopted as CCP doctrine. This enabled Mao to launch the Land Reform, the
First Five Year Plan and the Great Leap Forward in 1958. The latter was an affort to
rapidly modernise and industrialise China, that resulted in a disastrous famine that
claimed aproximately 20 million lives between 1959-1962, but did little to harm the
authority of Mao.
The Socialist education movement of the early 1960s laid the groundwork for the
Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. Under the pretext that certain liberal "bourgeois"
elements of society, labeled as class enemies, continue to threaten the socialist
framework under the existing dictatorship of the proletariat, the idea that a Cultural
Revolution must continue after armed struggle allowed Mao to circumvent the
Communist Party hierarchy by giving power directly to the Red Guards, groups of young

people, often teenagers, who set up their own tribunals. Chaos reigned over the country
and millions were prosecuted and ultimately killed during a dark period in the country's
history.
After a series of illnesses, Mao Zedung died in September 1976. In the reformist
atmosphere of the years following his death, the CCP acknowledged Mao had made
errors, in the cautious ratio of 70% right and 30% wrong

Mao Tse-Tungs Contribution to Marxism-Leninism

N.

Sanmugathasan From Liberation Vol. 1, No. 2 [Dec. 1967, published by the Communist
Party of India (M-L)] [This article does not deal with the contribution of Comrade Mao
Tse-tung to the development of Political Economy or his contribution to Marxist military
thinking. We hope to deal with those problems at some later time. This article is
reproduced from the Red Flag of October 3, 1967, published from Colombo. The Editor
of this weekly says in a note: This article has been written by Comrade N.
Sanmugathasan, member of the Political Bureau of the Ceylon Communist Party, on the
basis of discussions he had with leading members of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of China during his recent visit to China in May-June 1967. Editor,
Liberation] The position inside the international communist movement today bears
certain resemblance to the situation that existed immediately after the Great October
Revolution in 1917. The success of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in leading the revolution in
Russia had naturally discredited the old-line social democrats who opposed revolution
and instead preached peaceful transition through parliamentary means. A great
revolutionary intellectual ferment took place inside all the old social democratic parties
of the Second International. Under the guidance of Lenin, the revolutionary left inside
these social democratic parties broke with the revisionist theories of the leadership of
the Second International and came forward to form the new Third Communist
International. A similar ferment has been taking place inside the international communist
movement during the past few years. Under the guidance of Comrade Mao Tse-tung,
the greatest MarxistLeninist alive, and inspired by the success of the Chinese
Revolution as well as of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, revolutionary groups
from inside the old communist parties have been breaking away politically and
organizationally from the revisionist leadership of these parties. Many new MarxistLeninist groups and parties have emerged in recent times. The study of MarxismLeninism and the thought of Mao Tse-tung is important for the building of these new
Marxist-Leninist parties. The most important requirement for these parties in order that
they could fulfill their tasks as the vanguard of the working class is that they should be
armed with Marxism-Leninism and the Thought of Mao Tse-tung. This question was
stressed by Lenin in his two classical works, Two Steps Forward, One Step Backward
and What Is To Be Done as well as by Stalin in The History Of The Communist Party Of
The Soviet Union (Bolsheviks).