Mao Zedong

Biography

Mao Zedong was born on December 26, 1893, in Shaoshan village in Hunan province, the son of a prosperous peasant farmer. His rise from provincial schoolteacher to ruler of the world's most populous nation is one of the most dramatic political trajectories in history — and the Second Sino-Japanese War was the crucible in which his eventual victory was forged. By 1937, Mao led the Chinese Communist Party's battered survivors of the Long March — a ragged army of perhaps 30,000 who had trekked 6,000 miles through murderous terrain to reach their base in Yan'an in northern Shaanxi. The Japanese invasion paradoxically rescued Mao from near-certain destruction. The Xi'an Incident of December 1936 forced Chiang Kai-shek to accept a Second United Front with the Communists against Japan, halting the Nationalist campaigns that had nearly eliminated the Communist movement. The war gave Mao eight years to rebuild. Mao's strategic genius during the war was his insight that the Communists should not waste their strength fighting Japan in conventional battles — that was Chiang's job. Instead, Mao's Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army should expand into the vacuum created in the Japanese-occupied countryside, building mass political organizations, training guerrilla forces, and governing liberated zones. His treatise 'On Protracted War' (1938) provided the theoretical framework: Japan was strong but overextended; China was weak but vast; time was on China's side if the Communists could build bases that outlasted Japanese occupation. While Chiang's Nationalist armies bore the overwhelming burden of conventional fighting — absorbing Japan's main blows at Shanghai, Wuhan, and in hundreds of costly battles — Mao's forces grew exponentially. By 1945, the Communist armies had expanded from 80,000 to nearly one million troops, with a political base controlling territory inhabited by 100 million people. The Communists had fought Japan — most famously at the Hundred Regiments Offensive of 1940 — but always on their own terms, conserving strength and building political organization. When Japan surrendered in 1945, Mao and Chiang raced to seize Japanese-held territory. The civil war that followed, though ostensibly about who would govern China, was in many ways decided by the eight years of contrasting wartime strategies. The Communists emerged stronger, better organized, more politically legitimate, and in control of vast rural populations. Chiang's Nationalists emerged weaker, more corrupt, economically devastated, and having lost the goodwill of many of the urban elites who might have sustained them. On October 1, 1949, Mao declared the People's Republic of China from the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing.

Key Battles