Mao Tse Tung

Mao Tse Tung

(1893- 1976)

He was a chinese Marxist theorist, soldier, and statesman. He led China's communist revolution, was a chairman of the People's Republic of China from 1949 to 1959 and chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1931 to1976. He was commited to Marxism, which held that revolution lay in the hands of urban workers but Mao concluded that in China it was the peasantry, not the urban proletariat, that had to be mobilized.

He became chairman of a Chinese Soviet Republic formed in rural Jiangxi province; its Red Army withstood many attacks from Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist army, but at last undertook the Long March to a more secure position in northwestern China. There Mao became the head of the CCP. He had many tactics, policies and knew how to appeal to the local population's nationalist sentiments which gained the party military advantages against their Nationalist and Japanese enemies and also a wide support among the peasantry. Mao's agrarian Marxism was different from the Soviet model, but when the communists took power in China in 1949, the Soviet Union provided the new state with technical assistance. However, Mao's Great Leap Forward and his criticism of “new bourgeois elements” in the Soviet Union and China separated the Soviet Union and its aid was withdrawn in 1960. Mao followed the failed Great Leap Forward with the Cultural Revolution, also considered to have been a tremendous mistake. Mao died in september 9, 1976.

http://www.biography.com/articles/Mao-Zedong-93981421