About Chairman Mao
Born on December 26, 1893, Mao Zedong, known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary with an estimated net worth of $1 thousand. As one of the most influential leaders in the 1900s he led a communist revolution in China.
Mao was born into a poverty stricken farming family who had slowly become moderately wealthy. Mao was given a basic education from the age of 8 until 13, he then returned to work on the family farm. It was troubling for Mao, as he did not suit the rural life and yearned to continue his studies and move to the city. At the age of 16 he returned to school and after spending a short time serving in the army moved to Beijing. There he gained a position as a university library assistant, which gave him an opportunity to study further. It also collided him with some of the future key figures in the Chinese socialist movement.
It wasn’t long until the politically motivated Mao became a key figure in the newly formed Chinese Communist Party. He later became part of a guerrilla war against the Nationalist government in 1927, attaining a leadership position in the “Red Army”. By 1934, the Red Army troops were penned in by Nationalist forces and major damage was caused both physically to the men and to the men’s moral. Mao was promoted to General and ordered to plan and execute a retreat. Mao’s tactics were considered more agile and after moving over 6,000-miles over arduous terrain, Mao was considered a hero. The retreat went on for a year and while casualties were extremely high over “The Long March”, as it became to be known, it was considered a victory to avoid a total loss.
After The Communists claimed power through the civil war. Mao was held in such high regard that, in October 1949, he managed to establishment the People’s Republic of China with himself as leader. While much is unknown about what transpired after the establishment of China, it is considered by Western scholars to have been a terribly unpleasant time in the country’s history.
As the need for money became more necessary for the survival of the new republic, Mao tightened his gripe enforcing tougher policies of suppression and land reform.
Mao instigated the grand economic “5 year plans” in 1953, with the objective to modernize China and reinvent the country as an industrial powerhouse. As Mao’s plans faltered, a further plan was set into motion known as “The Great Leap Forward”. It is this plan that included organizing the peasant class into communes to further streamline the goals of the country as a whole. However, with ever high production targets, the demands of Mao’s new republic soon became impossible to meet. The Great Leap Forward ended in famine, killing an estimated 20 million people.
The epic failure did not go unnoticed and Mao was partially sidelined by his own party.
Then, in 1966, in what is considered an attempt by Mao to assert greater leadership control over China. He put fourth what has become known as “The Cultural Revolution”. It is largely considered that the plan was to enforce communist dogma and strictly eliminate capitalist values. In what became a reign of terror, those who were considered to hold views contrary to the policies set fourth by the republic were persecuted and sent to “re-education” camps. The death tolls at the camps were not insignificant and academics and Buddhist monks were sent at a statistically alarming rate.
The worst of the violence that was being directed toward intellects, and seemingly anyone else who raised their hand in objection, had subsided by 1968. “The Cultural Revolution” continued until Mao’s own death in 1976.
