He’s a face you can't escape if you spend more than five minutes in China. His portrait stares down from the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing. His face is on every single banknote of the Renminbi. To some, he's the "Great Helmsman" who dragged a feudal society into the modern age. To others, he’s a man whose policies led to more deaths than almost any other leader in human history. So, who was Mao Zedong exactly? Honestly, the answer depends entirely on who you ask, but the facts paint a picture of a man who was as brilliant a strategist as he was a disastrous administrator.
From Farm Boy to Revolutionary
Mao wasn't born into power. Not even close. He was born in 1893 in Shaoshan, Hunan province, to a peasant family that was actually doing okay for themselves. His dad was a grain dealer. Mao was a bookworm. He hated manual labor on the farm and obsessed over stories of Chinese rebels and George Washington. Yeah, Washington. He saw parallels between the American Revolution and China’s need to kick out foreign imperialists.
By the time he moved to Beijing to work as a library assistant at Peking University, he was a sponge for radical ideas. This is where he found Marxism. While other intellectuals were looking at the Soviet Union and thinking the "proletariat" (factory workers) would save the world, Mao had a different hunch. He looked at China’s millions of starving, angry farmers and thought, That’s my army. He was right.
The Rise of the CCP and the Long March
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) started small in 1921. Mao was one of the founding members, but he wasn't the top dog yet. For years, the CCP had a messy "will-they-won't-they" relationship with the Kuomintang (KMT), the nationalist party led by Chiang Kai-shek. Eventually, Chiang got tired of the communists and started killing them.
This led to the Long March in 1934. Imagine walking 6,000 miles through swamps, over snowy mountains, and across freezing rivers while being shot at. Only about one-tenth of the people who started the march survived. This is where Mao cemented his power. He convinced the survivors that his guerrilla tactics were the only way to win. By the time they reached Yan'an, Mao was the undisputed leader. He turned a military retreat into a founding myth that still powers the CCP's legitimacy today.
1949: The World Changes
After World War II and a brutal civil war, Mao stood atop Tiananmen Square on October 1, 1949, and declared the founding of the People's Republic of China. He famously said the Chinese people had "stood up."
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The early years were actually pretty successful in terms of basic metrics. Life expectancy went up. Literacy rates climbed because he simplified the Chinese writing system. Women were told they "held up half the sky" and were given rights they’d never had under imperial rule, like the right to divorce and own land. But the honeymoon didn't last.
Who Was Mao Zedong During the Great Leap Forward?
If you want to understand why Mao is so controversial, you have to look at 1958. Mao wanted China to overtake the UK and the US in steel production. Fast. He called it the Great Leap Forward.
It was a catastrophe.
He forced peasants into massive communes. He told them to stop farming and start making steel in "backyard furnaces." People melted down their cooking pots and farm tools to make worthless lumps of pig iron. Meanwhile, because nobody was farming properly and local officials were lying about crop yields to please Mao, a massive famine hit.
Historians like Frank Dikötter, who gained access to Chinese provincial archives, estimate that between 30 and 45 million people died of starvation or violence during this period. It’s a number so large it’s hard to wrap your head around. It wasn't just bad luck; it was a policy failure of epic proportions. Mao eventually stepped back from day-to-day governance, but he didn't stay quiet for long.
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The Chaos of the Cultural Revolution
By 1966, Mao felt his grip on power slipping. He thought the party was becoming too "bourgeois" and bureaucratic. His solution? Chaos.
He launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He encouraged students—the Red Guards—to attack "the four olds": old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. They took it literally. They beat their teachers. They destroyed ancient temples. They humiliated anyone perceived as an "intellectual" or a "class enemy."
Mao used the youth of China to purge his political rivals. The country descended into something close to a civil war. Schools closed for years. A whole generation lost their education. It only ended when Mao died in 1976.
Understanding the Maoist Legacy Today
You might wonder why the CCP doesn't just disown him like the Soviets did with Stalin. Well, they can't. To the CCP, Mao is the foundation. If Mao is a total failure, then the party's right to rule is shaky.
The official line in China, popularized by his successor Deng Xiaoping, is that Mao was "70% good and 30% bad." * The 70%: He unified China, ended the "Century of Humiliation" by foreign powers, improved health, and gave the country a sense of national pride.
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- The 30%: The "mistakes" of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
Outside of China, those percentages are usually flipped, or worse. Scholars like Jung Chang and Jon Halliday argue in their biography Mao: The Unknown Story that he was a monster from the start. Others, like Maurice Meisner, point out that despite the horrors, Mao’s era laid the industrial foundation that allowed China to become the economic superpower it is today.
It’s a messy, uncomfortable reality. You have to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at once: he was a liberator who modernized a nation, and he was a tyrant who oversaw unimaginable suffering.
Surprising Facts You Might Not Know
- He loved swimming. Mao used swimming as a political statement. In 1966, at age 72, he swam across the Yangtze River to show the world (and his rivals) that he was still strong and fit to lead.
- He didn't like to brush his teeth. Apparently, he preferred rinsing his mouth with tea and chewing on tea leaves, which led to significant dental issues later in life.
- He was a poet. Unlike many modern dictators, Mao was genuinely cultured in classical Chinese literature. His calligraphy is still widely admired and imitated.
How to Research Mao Further
If you're trying to get a handle on the "real" Mao, you've got to look at diverse sources. Don't just stick to one side of the fence.
- Read his own words. The Little Red Book (Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong) gives you a sense of his populist, "willpower-over-everything" philosophy.
- Check out the "Mao's Trilogy" by Frank Dikötter. This provides a grim, evidence-based look at the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution using actual party archives.
- Watch the documentary 'The Gate of Heavenly Peace'. It focuses on the 1989 protests but gives incredible context on how Mao’s legacy still haunts Tiananmen Square.
- Examine the memoirs. The Private Life of Chairman Mao by his personal physician, Li Zhisui, offers a fly-on-the-wall perspective of Mao’s personality and habits, though some historians debate its absolute accuracy.
The story of Mao is the story of modern China. You can't understand the current tensions in the South China Sea, the way the Chinese government views "stability," or even the rise of Xi Jinping without understanding the shadow Mao left behind. He was a man who believed that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," and he spent his entire life proving it.
To truly grasp the impact of Mao Zedong, start by comparing the state of China in 1945 to its state in 1976. Look at the industrial output growth alongside the human cost. Study the "Socialist Education Movement" to see how he tested his ideas before the Cultural Revolution. Visit a local museum or an online archive of "Propaganda Posters" from the 1960s to see how the personality cult was built. This multi-angled approach is the only way to move past the caricatures and see the historical figure for who he actually was.