Mao Zedong and Related Topics

Chinese Communist Party

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Founding and sole ruling party of the People's Republic of China (PRC).

Site of the first CCP Congress, in the former Shanghai French Concession

Flag of the HistoryChinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army

Mao Zedong declared the establishment of the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949.

Chinese communists celebrate Joseph Stalin's birthday, 1949.

A temporary monument displayed in Changsha, Hunan Province, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the CCP's founding

A monument dedicated to Karl Marx (left) and Friedrich Engels (right) in Shanghai

A billboard advertising Xi Jinping Thought in Shenzhen, Guangdong

The 18th National Congress, convened in November 2012

Front cover of the Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party

Xi Jinping (second from left) with Enrique Peña Nieto (second from right), the former President of Mexico and a leading member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party

Mao Zedong was a founding member of the party and rose through its ranks to become its leader and chairman in 1943.

Cultural Revolution propaganda poster. It depicts Mao Zedong, above a group of soldiers from the People's Liberation Army. The caption reads, "The Chinese People's Liberation Army is the great school of Mao Zedong Thought."

The Cultural Revolution, formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement in the People's Republic of China (PRC) launched by Mao Zedong in 1966, and lasting until his death in 1976.

Long March

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Military retreat undertaken by the Red Army of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the forerunner of the People's Liberation Army, to evade the pursuit of the National Army of the Chinese Nationalist Party (CNP/KMT).

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek encircled the Communists in Jiangxi in 1934.

Map drawn by the Red Army Command before the Battle of Xiangjiang

Tiger Leaping Gorge in the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain massif of western Yunnan province

A Communist leader addressing Long March survivors

The CPC, under the eventual command of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, escaped in a circling retreat to the west and north, which reportedly traversed over 9,000 km over 370 days.

Zhou Enlai

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The first Premier of the People's Republic of China serving from 1 October 1949 until his death on 8 January 1976.

Zhou Enlai as a student in Nankai Middle School

Zhou Enlai as the director of the Political Department at Whampoa Military Academy (1924)

Chiang Kai-shek (center) and Zhou Enlai (left) with cadets at Whampoa Military Academy (1924)

Zhou (far left) with Mao Zedong (center-left) in Yan'an (1935)

Zhou with Communist general Ye Jianying (left) and Kuomintang official Zhang Zhong (center) in Xi'an 1937, illustrating the alliance between the two parties which was the outcome of the Xi'an Incident

Zhou (left) with his wife Deng Yingchao (center) and Sun Weishi

Zhou Enlai and Sun Weishi in Moscow, 1939.

The Marshall Mission (1946), left to right: Zhang Qun, George C. Marshall, Zhou Enlai

Zhou with Kim Il-sung at the signing of the Sino-North Korean Mutual Aid and Cooperation Friendship Treaty in 1961

Zhou Enlai and Sanusi Hardjadinata, the chairman of the Bandung Conference.

Zhou and his wife Deng at the Badaling section of the Great Wall of China (1955)

Zhou, shown here with Henry Kissinger and Mao Zedong.

Zhou shakes hands with President Richard Nixon upon Nixon's arrival in China in February 1972.

Zhou at the outset of the Cultural Revolution (with Lin Liheng, daughter of Lin Biao)

Statue of Zhou and Deng in the Memorial to Zhou Enlai and Deng Yingchao in Tianjin.

A bronze statue of Zhou in Nanjing, wearing a Western suit (something he never wore after his youth)

Zhou served under Chairman Mao Zedong and helped the Communist Party rise to power, later helping consolidate its control, form its foreign policy, and develop the Chinese economy.

Strategic Issues of Anti-Japanese Guerrilla War (1938)

Maoism

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Strategic Issues in the Chinese Revolutionary War (1947)

Beijing, 1978. The billboard reads, "Long Live Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought!"

Maoist leader Prachanda speaking at a rally in Pokhara, Nepal

Maoism is described as being Marxism–Leninism adapted to Chinese conditions whereas its variant Marxism–Leninism–Maoism is considered universally applicable

The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre) in February 2013

Mao Zedong meets Richard Nixon on February 21, 1972, leading to a radical turn of events in which Nixon took steps to placate tensions between the People's Republic of China and the United States, beginning the slow process of reestablishing diplomatic relations between the two global powers

Despite falling out of favor within the Chinese Communist Party by 1978, Mao is still revered, with Deng's famous "70% right, 30% wrong" line

Maoism, officially called Mao Zedong Thought by the Communist Party of China, is a variety of Marxism–Leninism that Mao Zedong developed for realising a socialist revolution in the agricultural, pre-industrial society of the Republic of China and later the People's Republic of China.

Leon Trotsky exhorting Red Army soldiers in the Polish–Soviet War

Marxism–Leninism

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Communist ideology which was the main communist movement throughout the 20th century.

Mao Zedong with Anna Louise Strong, the American journalist who reported and explained the Chinese Communist Revolution to the West

Enver Hoxha, who led the Sino-Albanian split in the 1970s and whose anti-revisionist followers led to the development of Hoxhaism

Vladimir Lenin, who led the Bolshevik faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

Tsar Nicholas II addressing the two chambers of the Duma at the Winter Palace after the failed 1905 Russian Revolution which exiled Lenin from Imperial Russia to Switzerland

Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish Marxist who supported Lenin's revolutionary defeatism

From 4 to 15 January 1919, the Spartacist uprising in the Weimar Republic featured urban warfare between the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and anti-communists, secretly aided by the Imperial German government led by the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)

Béla Kun, leader of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, speaks to supporters during the 1919 Hungarian Revolution

At his death on 21 January 1924, Lenin's political testament ordered the removal of Stalin as General Secretary because of his abusive personality

A 1929 metallurgical combine in Magnitogorsk demonstrates the Soviet Union's rapid industrialisation in the 1920s and 1930s

A Chinese Communist Party cadre-leader addresses survivors of the 1934–1935 Long March

Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Stalin established the post-war order of the world with geopolitical spheres of influence under their hegemony at the Yalta Conference

Josip Broz Tito's rejection in 1948 of Soviet hegemony upon the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia provoked Stalin to expel the Yugoslav leader and Yugoslavia from the Eastern Bloc

The Chinese Communist Revolution (1946–1949) concluded when Mao Zedong declared the establishment of the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949

The Sino–Soviet split facilitated Russian and Chinese rapprochement with the United States and expanded East–West geopolitics into a tri-polar Cold War that allowed Premier Nikita Khrushchev to meet with President John F. Kennedy in June 1961

Che Guevara and Fidel Castro (leader of the Republic of Cuba from 1959 until 2008) led the Cuban Revolution to victory in 1959

Daniel Ortega led the Sandinista National Liberation Front to victory in the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1990

Guerrillas of the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War

In Apartheid South Africa, a trilingual sign in English, Afrikaans and Zulu enforces the segregation of a Natal beach as exclusively "for the sole use of members of the white race group." The Afrikaner Nationalist Party cited anti-communism as a reason for the treatment of the black and coloured populations of South Africa.

Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, who sought to end the Cold War between the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact and the United States-led NATO and its other Western allies, in a meeting with President Ronald Reagan

Map of current and former Communist states, most of which followed, as party or state–party ideology, or were inspired by Marxist–Leninist ideology and development:

1933 Soviet propaganda encouraging peasants and farmers to strengthen working discipline in collective farms in the Azeri Soviet Socialist Republic

A 1920 Bolshevik pro-education propaganda which reads the following: "In order to have more, it is necessary to produce more. In order to produce more, it is necessary to know more."

In establishing state atheism in the Soviet Union, Stalin ordered in 1931 the razing of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow

Criticism of Marxism–Leninism largely overlaps with criticism of communist party rule and mainly focuses on the actions and policies of Marxist–Leninist leaders, most notably Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot.

Great Leap Forward

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Economic and social campaign led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1958 to 1962.

Sending government officials to work in the countryside, 1957

In the beginning, commune members were able to eat for free at the commune canteens. This changed when food production slowed to a halt.

People in the countryside working at night to produce steel

The minecart leading to the steel base in October 1957

An earthen blast furnace taken in mid-October 1958.

Backyard furnaces in China during the Great Leap Forward era

On August 13, 1958, the People's Daily reported on the front page that the Macheng Jianguo Commune in Hubei Province had set a "record" of 36,956 jin of early rice per mu

Commune members working fields at night using lamps

The Great Leap Forward produced a significant spike in the global number of deaths (1950–2017)

The Eurasian tree sparrow was the most notable target of the Four Pests Campaign.

CCP Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to reconstruct the country from an agrarian economy into a communist society through the formation of people's communes.

Mao Zedong (left) and Nikita Khrushchev (right) in Beijing, 1958

Sino-Soviet split

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The breaking of political relations between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union caused by doctrinal divergences that arose from their different interpretations and practical applications of Marxism–Leninism, as influenced by their respective geopolitics during the Cold War of 1945–1991.

In the Asian theatre of World War II, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek of the KMT was kidnapped by one of his own officers and forced to ally with the Communist Mao Zedong of the CCP as reluctant co-belligerents to expel Imperial Japan from China.

Chairman Mao with US journalist Anna Louise Strong, whose work presented and explained the Chinese Communist revolution to the Western world. (1967)

The Sino-Soviet split arose from the ideological clash between Soviet first secretary Khrushchev's policies of De-Stalinisation and peaceful coexistence and Mao Zedong's bellicose and Stalinist policies.

The Communist bloc: pro-Soviet (red), pro-Chinese (yellow), the non-aligned (black) North Korea and Yugoslavia.

Solidarity: China's Mao Zedong and Albania's Enver Hoxha were united in both their stance against Revisionism as well as retaining Stalinism as the form of government for their countries.

In late 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis concluded when the US and the USSR respectively agreed to remove intermediate-range PGM-19 Jupiter nuclear missiles from Italy and Turkey, and to remove intermediate-range R-12 Dvina and R-14 Chusovaya nuclear missiles from Cuba. In the context of the Sino-Soviet split, Mao said that the USSR's military stand-down was Khrushchev's betrayal of Marxist–Leninist geopolitics.

A public appearance of Chairman Mao and Vice Chairman Lin Biao among Red Guards, in Beijing, during the Cultural Revolution (November 1966)

The Sino-Soviet split allowed minor border disputes to escalate to firefights for areas of the Argun and Amur rivers (Damansky–Zhenbao is southeast, north of the lake (2 March – 11 September 1969).

To counter the USSR, Chairman Mao met with US President Nixon, and established Sino-American rapprochement, in 1972.

The elimination of Marshal Lin Biao, in 1971, lessened the political damage caused by Mao's Cultural Revolution and facilitated the PRC's transition to the Realpolitik of the Tri-polar Cold War.

China
Soviet Union
Countries that shared borders with both: Mongolia was Soviet-aligned while Afghanistan and North Korea remained neutral, with the former eventually becoming Soviet-aligned in the late 1970s.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Sino-Soviet debates about the interpretation of orthodox Marxism became specific disputes about the Soviet Union's policies of national de-Stalinization and international peaceful coexistence with the Western Bloc, which Chinese founding father Mao Zedong decried as Marxist revisionism.

A Hawker Siddeley Trident, similar to the aircraft involved.

Lin Biao

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Chinese politician and Marshal of the People's Republic of China who was pivotal in the Communist victory during the Chinese Civil War, especially in Northeast China from 1946 to 1949.

Lin Biao with wife Ye Qun and their children

Lin as commander-in-chief of the Manchurian Field Army (~1947–1948)

On 1 October 1959, Lin Biao, as defense minister, surveyed the honor guards at the military parade celebrating the 10th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.

Lin Biao's calligraphy in the Summer Palace, 1966

Lin Biao (right), Mao Zedong (center) and Zhou Enlai, waving copies of the Little Red Book, at Tiananmen, during the Cultural Revolution (1967)

Lin Biao reading the Little Red Book. This is the last photo of him ever taken (1971)

Qinhuangdao Shanhaiguan Airport, provenance of the aircraft

Graffiti with Lin Biao's foreword to Mao's Little Red Book. Lin's name (lower right) was later scratched out, presumably after his death.

Lin became instrumental in creating the foundations for Mao Zedong's cult of personality in the early 1960s, and was rewarded for his service in the Cultural Revolution by being named Mao's designated successor as the sole Vice Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, from 1966 until his death.

Peng Dehuai

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Prominent Chinese Communist military leader, who served as China's Defense Minister from 1954 to 1959.

By his mid-thirties, Peng was one of the most senior generals in the Jiangxi Soviet (1934-1935).

Peng Dehuai commanded the largest communist offensive in the war against Japan.

A statue of Peng now stands on the Chinese border with Korea, on the place that Peng crossed into North Korea in 1950.

In 1953, Peng signed the armistice agreement which ended the Korean War.

After returning to China from the Korean War, Peng became engaged in a rivalry with Mao Zedong over the political future of China (photo: Hou Bo).

Following the Korean War, Peng rose in prominence and is here seen welcoming Kim Il-sung to Beijing in 1955.

During the Great Leap Forward, many farmers were forced to work in primitive backyard furnaces in order to produce poor-quality steel.

Peng Dehuai (1966) was brought to Beijing in chains by Red Guards, where he would be tortured and publicly humiliated for years.

After Wang was defeated, Peng briefly rejoined Chiang Kai-shek's forces before joining the Chinese Communist Party, allying himself with Mao Zedong and Zhu De.

A report on Mao Zedong

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