Mao Tse Tung

Mao Tse Tung

BIOGRAPHY

Mao Tse-tung was born on Dec. 26, 1893. As a child he worked in the fields and attended a local primary school, where he studied the traditional Confucian classics. 1918, Mao had graduated from the Hunan First Normal School and had gone to Peking, the national capital, where he worked briefly as a library assistant at Peking University. In 1920, Mao married Yang K'ai-hui, the daughter of one of his teachers. Mao died in Peking on Sept. 9, 1976.

When the Chinese Communist party (CCP) was organized in Shanghai in 1921, Mao was a founding member and leader of the Hunan branch. By the next year, when he had control of the Nationalist armies as well as the Nationalist government, Chiang purged all Communists from the movement. As a result, Mao was forced to flee to the countryside. It was this almost accidental innovation--the fusion of Communist leadership with a guerrilla force operating in rural areas with peasant support--that was to make Mao the leader of the CCP. Because of their growing military power, Mao and Chu were able by 1930 to defy orders of the Russian-controlled CCP leadership that directed them to try to capture cities. When Mao's efforts to open relations with the United States in the late 1940s were rejected, he concluded that China would have to "lean to one side," and a period of close alliance with the USSR started. The Cultural Revolution was largely orchestrated by Mao's wife, Chiang Ch'ing. In February 1989, a member of the Central Advisory Commission to the Communist party wrote in an official Peking newspaper, the Guangming Daily, that "Mao was a great man who embodied the calamities of the Chinese people, but in his later years he made big mistakes over a long period, and the result was great disaster for the people and the country. He created a historical tragedy."

http://cla.calpoly.edu/~lcall/mao.bio.html