Mao Zedong

Chinese communist politician and theoretician, leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 1935–76. Mao was a founder of the CCP in 1921, and became its leader in 1935. He organized the Long March 1934–35 and the war of liberation 1937–49, following which he established a People's Republic and communist rule in China. He was state president until 1959, and headed the CCP until his death. His influence diminished with the failure of his 1958–60 Great Leap Forward, but he emerged dominant again during the 1966–69 Cultural Revolution, which he launched in order to promote his own antibureaucratic line and to purge the party of ‘revisionism’.

Mao adapted communism to Chinese conditions, as set out in the Little Red Book (1960), in which he stressed the need for rural rather than urban-based revolutions in Asia; for reducing rural–urban differences; and for perpetual revolution to prevent the emergence of new elites. He advocated a ‘mass line’ form of leadership, involving the broad mobilization of the people in economic, social, and political movements. He was also an advocate of a non-aligned strategy for the developing world, and helped to precipitate the Sino-Soviet split after 1960, which arose when the USSR withdrew military and technical support from China. His writings and thoughts dominated the functioning of the People's Republic 1949–76, and some 740 million copies of his Quotations have been printed to date, while his works as a whole total over 2,000 publications.