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Here's how Mao Zedong changed the fate of modern China over 100 years ago
2024-06-12 21:37:23 / MISTERE&KURIOZITETE
The first National Congress of the Communist Party of China began on July 23, 1921 in Shanghai, but proceedings continued aboard a ship anchored in a lake in Jiaxing. The 12 delegates participating in that event drafted the party's first charter, which proposed seeking reparations for a war-torn, impoverished, and collapsing country.
One of the main objectives adopted in those days was the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the construction of a socialist society through class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the nationalization of the means of production. Among the founders was a 27-year-old young man who would take China from the Middle Ages to modernity in the following quarter of a century. His name was Mao Zedong.
The Great Helmsman who starved his people to death
A rebel and statist, a politician with a devilish wit and a skilled military strategist, the Maoist "Great Helmsman" of the Chinese Communist Revolution. A great figure who, however, will forever be associated with the magnitude of his crimes, and with an unprecedented period of terror in which tens of millions of people died.
Mao was born on December 26, 1893 in Shaoshan in Hunan Province, in the rural heart of China's Qin Empire. In 1911—when he was not yet 17 years old—he joined the popular revolt that led to the fall of the empire.
In 1923, at the third congress of the Communist Party of China, he was elected a member of the Central Committee. At that stage, Mao began to elaborate many of his political theses, identifying peasant rebellions as the source on which the revolution was to be based.
In 1928, the Chinese Communist Party Congress supported the establishment of rural soviets on the Russian model, and charged them with implementing agrarian reform. But his profile as an undisputed leader emerged in the 1930s, during the civil war.
In 1934 he led the so-called Long March, at a very high cost in terms of lives lost, the communist army succeeded in crushing the Nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek.
A bankrupt revolution
The communist revolution succeeded immediately after the end of World War II. On October 1, 1949, in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, Mao announced the birth of the People's Republic of China, which he led himself. From that moment, also thanks to the economic and military commitment of Moscow, China started the path towards modernity, but being oppressed by one of the most ruthless dictatorships of the 20th century.
The Great Helmsman nationalized the economy to encourage the rapid development of agriculture and industry, and instigated various reforms. In 1958, he launched the so-called Great Leap Forward, a major economic and social plan aimed at making China one of the world's major industrial powers.
But instead, due to the great famine that hit the country starting in 1959, about 30 million Chinese starved to death. It was an epochal failure, yet Mao managed to remain at the head of the country.
The Cultural Revolution: The Cure That Kills
To avoid his responsibility from the consequences of the economic and social catastrophe, and to oppose the Communist Party apparatus that was trying to reduce his powers, the Great Helmsman launched the so-called Cultural Revolution.
At that time, not only party leaders and officials were attacked, but all those who had expressed criticism of Mao's policies. Tens of thousands of ordinary citizens were persecuted, imprisoned, tortured and killed.
By 1968 there was a dramatic escalation of violence. Students recruited into the Red Guards mainly targeted teachers, who were attacked, humiliated and beaten in public, killed or forced to kill themselves.
The ensuing power struggle
Mao died on September 9, 1976. For years he had suffered from a degenerative disease and numerous problems caused by smoking. After a solemn funeral in Tiananmen Square attended by over 1 million people, his embalmed body was moved to a large Soviet-style mausoleum.
His death sparked a fierce power struggle between various party officials that had not been felt until then. In the end, the faction of President Ten Hsiao Pin dominated, which maintained the principle of absolute party authority against any kind of democratization and pluralism. / bota.al
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