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support. And, by deliberately fighting the invaders instead of simply defending the interior like the Nationalists, the communists gained both military expertise and broad popular appeal. World War II ended in 1945, but the following year Mao precipitated the Chinese civil war against Chiang’s Nationalists, which ended four years later in a communist victory. On October 1, 1949, Mao proclaimed creation of the People’s Republic of China, with himself as chairman and ZHOU ENLAI as premier. Against great odds the theory of revolutionary peasantry had triumphed. The communists had no sooner consolidated power than they were drawn into the Korean War, 1950–53, against American president HARRY S. TRUMAN. Chinese forces suffered terrible losses to the technologically superior Americans, yet fought them to a draw. Mao also established close diplomatic and economic ties with Soviet dictator JOSEPH STALIN, for whom he had
Mao Zedong (Library of Congress)
genuine admiration. In 1956 Mao attempted to address China’s pressing economic problems by promulgating the so-called Great Leap Forward, which entailed the mass collectivization of agriculture. The result was a disastrous famine that killed 20 million people and set back the economy a decade. He also instigated the SinoSoviet split after Premier NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV denounced Stalin’s excesses. This led to the immediate loss of technical and economic assistance from Russia and a militarization of borders between the two communist giants. Consequently, Mao’s heretofore sterling reputation was irreparably damaged, and he yielded the chairmanship to LIU SHAOQI in 1959. He nevertheless remained chairman of the powerful Communist Party. By 1966 Mao disliked the Soviet-style paths of development that Liu and other reformers had adopted. Determined to reignite revolutionary fervor among China’s youth, he sided with radical factions and unleashed the great cultural revolution of 1966–76. For 10 years bands of armed Red Guards harassed, arrested, and executed millions of perceived “capitalist roaders” within the Communist Party. Among its many victims were Chairman Liu, who died in prison, and Deng Xiaoping—a future premier—who was stripped of party rank and sent to a farm. Mao then reinstituted his official cult of personality through a compilation of his quotations, the Little Red Book, of which more than 350 million copies were printed. But these excesses only weakened China. In the face of a resurgent Soviet Union under Premier LEONID BREZHNEV, even Mao and his fellow hard-liners felt he had little recourse but to mend fences with the United States, their bitterest ideological enemy. In 1972 he invited President RICHARD M. NIXON to Beijing to reestablish friendly relations. Mao by then was old and infirm, so direction of the cultural revolution fell upon his wife, Jiang Qing, and her radical gang of four. The great chairman died in Beijing on September 9, 1976, and was replaced by HUA GUOFENG, his handpicked successor. Within a year his wife and the gang of four were arrested and tried, while Deng Xiaoping was rehabilitated. The revolutionary fervor of Maoism was then officially dropped in favor of more pragmatic approaches. But Mao nonetheless was widely mourned. More than any other individual, he brought China out of backwardness and onto the world stage. His revolutionary strategy ensured the perpetuation of communist rule, but at a tremendous cost in lives and personal freedom. Yet such was Mao’s reputation that party members dared