Mao Tse-tung 毛澤東 T. Jun-chih 潤之 Mao Tse-tung (26 December 1893-), leader of the Chinese Communist party and founder of the People's Republic of China.

Shaoshan, Hsiangt'an hsien, Hunan, was the birthplace of Mao Tse-tung. This agriculturally productive and culturally advanced section of Hunan produced two of the outstanding scholargenerals of the late Ch'ing period, Tseng Kuo-fan (ECCP, II, 751-56) and Tso Tsung-t'ang (ECCP, II, 762-67), and contributed soldiers' to the Hsiang-chün, which played a leading role in the defeat of the Taiping rebels in the 1860's. Mao Tse-tung's family background was undistinguished. His father, Mao Jen-sheng (d. 1927) was what Communist social analysis would term a rich peasant. The tile-roofed family house, though more spacious than many of its neighbors, was typical of the area. Mao Jen-sheng owned about 15 mou of land, and he later acquired additional land and operated a small grain business. A rough, autocratic man for whom existence was measured by the gap between buying cheap and selling dear, he embodied the narrow, grasping prejudices of the poor peasant once removed. His wife, Wen Ch'i-mei (d. 1919), an illiterate and superstitious woman from a nearby village, was known for her warmth and generosity. Mao Tse-tung was the eldest of their four children. The others were two boys, Mao Tse-min (q.v.) and Mao Tse-t'an (d. 1935), and a girl, Mao Tse-hung (d. 1930).

Mao Tse-tung received his early education at the village school in Shaoshan between 1901 and 1906. At the age of 13, he left primary school and began work on the family farm, laboring in the fields by day and keeping accounts for his father in the evening. He soon began to rebel against his father's authority. He disliked his father, despised his avariciousness, and feuded with him regularly. One point of contention was the young Mao's fondness for reading novels. Like countless other schoolboys in China, Mao devoured the San-kuo yen-yi {Romance of the Three Kingdoms) and the Shui-hu chuan {Water Margin). The adventure-filled tales of heroic deeds, clever stratagems, and righteous rebellion gripped the young Mao and stirred his imagination. He also was influenced by Cheng Kuan-ying's Sheng-shih wei-yen [words of warning to an affluent age], a contemporary reformist tract which advocated industrialization, improved communications, parliamentary government, and public libraries for China; it also denounced foreigners' treatment of the Chinese in Shanghai.

In 1909 Mao Tse-tung defied his father by leaving the family farm and going to nearby Hsianghsiang, the home of his mother's family, to enter the Tungshan Higher Primary School. Mao was somewhat of an outcast at school, for he was six years older than most of the students, ragged in appearance (he had only one decent suit), and lacking in social graces. However, the school's modern curriculum provided some compensation for his personal unhappiness. His knowledge of Chinese affairs expanded as he studied the writings of K'ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (qq.v.), while a book called Heroes of the World introduced him to George Washington, Napoleon, Wellington, and Peter the Great. Washington aroused Mao's enthusiasm because he had shown such admirable patriotism and military valor in eight bitter years of fighting for his country's independence. The American Revolution was distant, however; that in China was just approaching. Mao soon left his home district and walked to Changsha, the political, intellectual, and commercial capital of Hunan, to enter middle school. In Changsha, he became an avid reader of the Min-li pao [people's strength], edited by Yü Yu-jen (q.v.). The revolution that finally toppled the Ch'ing dynasty took place when Mao Tse-tung was not quite 18. On hearing of the Wuchang revolt of October 1911, Mao enthusiastically cut off his queue and set out for Wuchang, but he got no farther than the outskirts of Changsha before fighting broke out in Hunan. He joined a volunteer unit which was composed primarily of Changsha students and served under the direct command of Chao Heng-t'i (q.v.) and the over-all command of T'an Yen-k'ai (q.v.). With the agreement of January 1912 between Sun Yat-sen and Yuan Shih-k'ai, Mao decided that the revolutionary surge had ended, and he returned to his books. After attending classes at the First Provincial Middle School for six months, he spent several months reading independently in the Hunan provincial library. Through the translations made by Yen Fu (q.v.) and others of such works as Thomas Henry Huxley's Evolution and Ethics, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, he came to know something of Western political and social thought. In the spring of 1913 Mao Tse-tung enrolled at the Hunan Fourth Provincial Normal School. This institution was merged into the First Normal School that autumn, and Mao thus became a student at one of Changsha's most prosperous and intellectually competitive schools. As the provincial capital of Hunan, Changsha reflected the tensions between old and new that characterized the early republican period in China. A center of classical Chinese studies as early as Sung times, when the great Chu Hsi (1130-1200) had lectured there, Hunan long had produced traditional scholars known both for their personal dedication and for their intellectual conservatism. Hunan also had a strong reformist tradition, a radical outlook that encouraged examination of new ideas and action based on new premises. Indeed, Hunan had produced three of the most famous revolutionary leaders of the early twentieth century: Huang Hsing, Sung Chiao-jen, and Ts'ai O (qq.v.). All three of them died while Mao was a student in Changsha.

As a patriotic young Hunanese, Mao Tse-tung was conscious of Hunan's fading significance in China's national politics and of China's declining influence in Asian politics. Thus, when the Hsin ch'ing-nien [new youth] of Ch'en Tu-hsiu (q.v.) first appeared in 1915, he responded enthusiastically to its bold ideas and vigorous literary style. The April 1917 issue of this journal contained Mao's first significant published article, "T'i-yu chih yen-chiu" [a study of physical culture]. A product of Mao's ardent interest in physical fitness (an interest which was itself of Western influence), this essay was notable for its spirit of elemental nationalism. It proposed a series of athletic exercises which, by helping to stimulate a new national ethic blending civil and military virtues, would serve to remedy China's weakness. As Mao put it: "The principal aim of physical education is military heroism." He objected to Confucianism because of its emphasis on family loyalty at the expense of nationalism and its deprecation of military virtues, but he cited the Hunanese scholar-official Tseng Kuo-fan as an outstanding example of a worthy Chinese statesman who maintained bodily fitness. At the same time that Mao Tse-tung found his central goal to be nationalism, as distinguished from the culturalism characteristic of traditional Chinese civilization, he sought a broader intellectual foundation for his mood of social protest. He was strongly influenced by such liberal-minded faculty members of the First Normal School as Yang Ch'ang-chi and Hsu T'e-li (qq.v.). Yang, whose daughter Mao later was to marry, was a respected scholar known locally as "Confucius." Under his tutelage, the students absorbed some Western ethical theory as well as the precepts of major Chinese thinkers of the Ming and Ch'ing periods. The Western book that most influenced Mao at this time was Friedrich Paulsen's System of Ethics, translated into Chinese by Ts'ai Yuan-p'ei (q.v.) and used by Yang Ch'ang-chi as a textbook. In teaching traditional Chinese values, Yang emphasized self-discipline, self-cultivation, patriotism, and resistance to alien rule. Mao, who was Yang's favorite pupil in ethics, once wrote an essay on "Hsin chih-li" [the power of the mind] for which Yang awarded him the maximum mark of 100 points with a special added "plus 5." Yang Ch'ang-chi's socially oriented individualism affected Mao Tse-tung's extracurricular activities as well as his classroom work. Mao was secretary of the Changsha student association in 1915-16 and its director in 1917-18. He also created a committee for student self-government to deal collectively with the school authorities. In the summer of 1917 he began working to form a new student organization dedicated to "strengthening China through strengthening Chinese youth." Ts'ai Ho-sen (q.v.), a fellow-student at the First Normal School who was three years older than Mao, played a leading role in this effort. The resulting Hsin-min hsüeh-hui [new people's study society] held its first meeting at the Ts'ai residence in Changsha on 18 April 1918. When news reached Changsha of the work-study program [see Li Shih-tseng) sponsored by several older Kuomintang leaders with European connections, the Hsin-min hsüeh-hui sent Ts'ai Ho-sen to Peking in June 1918 to investigate the situation. In June 1918 Mao Tse-tung was graduated from the First Normal School. During the summer, Ts'ai Ho-sen wrote to suggest that more members of the Hsin-min hsüeh-hui go to Peking to study French so that they could participate in the work-study program; Yang Ch'ang-chi, who had accepted an invitation to teach at Peking University, also wrote to urge Mao to go to Peking. In September 1918 the 24-year-old Mao left Changsha for his first extended journey outside Hunan. He arrived in Peking to encounter a broader and more complex intellectual world than that offered by Changsha. Through Yang Ch'ang-chi, he gained an introduction to Li Ta-chao (q.v.), the recently appointed chief librarian at Peking University. Li's influence on the students of that period stemmed from his willingness to lend a sympathetic ear to their personal problems as well as from his writings and lectures. Because Mao appeared to be in straitened circumstances, Li arranged for his employment as a clerk in the university library. Like many other young men, Mao was deeply influenced by Li Ta-chao's dedication to the vision of a new, self-reliant China and by his personal thoughtfulness. Mao also met Ch'en Tu-hsiu and Hu Shih (qq.v.), but he failed to gain their attention. After spending the winter working in the library and auditing some courses at Peking University, Mao went to Shanghai in the early spring of 1919. On the way, he paid a visit to the birthplace of Confucius in Shantung province. In Shanghai, Mao assisted in the final preparations made by friends from Hunan before they embarked for France on the work-study program. Mao left Shanghai in April when he learned that his mother had become seriously ill and had been moved to Changsha for medical treatment. He returned to Hunan and cared for his mother until her death a few weeks later. In the spring of 1919 Changsha was affected by the May Fourth Movement, and Mao Tse-tung responded by attempting to mobilize the Hunan students. He played an active role in the creation, on 3 June, of the United Students' Association of Hunan. The situation in Changsha provided Mao, then an obscure normal-school graduate, with new opportunities for action, influence, and prestige. On 14 July 1919 he founded the weekly Hsiang-chiang p'ing-lun [Hsiang river review], published by the United Students' Association and patterned on the Mei choup' ing-lun [weekly critic] edited by Li Ta-chao in Peking. The Hsiang-chiang p'ing-lun, which advocated "democracy and new culture," attained national recognition among young intellectuals as it gained local disfavor among the Changsha authorities. Between 1918 and 1920 Hunan was controlled by Chang Ching-yao, a Peiyang warlord of the Anhwei faction whose brutal tyranny won him the hatred of the Hunanese. Mao strongly opposed Chang and all that he represented in his writings during the summer of 1919. Mao's most influential article of this period, an anti-imperialist and anti-militarist essay entitled "The Great Union of the Popular Masses," appeared in the Hsiangchiang p'ing-lun in July and August. The magazine was banned after its fifth issue, and Mao then began to write for another student journal, the Hsin Hunan [new Hunan], which he also edited. When the Hsin Hunan was banned, he took to writing for the Ta Kung Pao. Although Mao's political views in 1919 were somewhat primitive, his activities among the students and teachers of Changsha constituted a threat to the rule of Chang Ching-yao. After Mao organized a general student strike in December 1919, Chang banned student publications and suppressed the United Students' Association.

Because it was dangerous for him to remain at Changsha, Mao went to Peking in January 1920 at the head of an anti-Chang delegation. He thus had the opportunity to see Yang Ch'ang-chi once again before Yang's death on 17 January, and he renewed his acquaintance with Yang's daughter, Yang K'ai-hui. Mao soon joined the Young China Association, a group formed in mid-1919 by Tseng Ch'i (q.v.), Li Ta-chao, and others to mobilize opposition to the pro-Japanese government of Tuan Ch'i-jui (q.v.). As Li Ta-chao moved leftward in his political thinking, Mao followed him, reading the Communist Manifesto for the first time (the Chinese translation appeared in book form in April 1 920) and exploring the elementary tenets of historical materialism.

In May 1920 Mao went to Shanghai to coordinate the activities of the Hunanese student delegations working to overthrow Chang Chingyao. He supported himself by working as a laundryman, and he spent much of his free time talking with Ch'en Tu-hsiu, then at the center of a cluster of self-styled Marxists, socialists, and anarchists whose youthful enthusiasm often exceeded their political consistency. Mao's conversations with Ch'en were crucial in his movement toward Communism, and he later (1936) stated that these talks "deeply impressed me at what was probably a critical period in my life." Chang Ching-yao finally was forced out of Hunan in June 1920, primarily because of friction between the Chihli and Anhwei factions of the Peiyang warlords. Mao Tse-tung returned to Hunan in June 1920 to seek employment and opportunities for political organization. That autumn, in an attempt to restore the Hunan educational system to its pre-Chang level, T'an Yen-k'ai (q.v.) appointed Yi P'ei-chi (q.v.) to head the First Normal School at Changsha. Yi carried out a thorough reform of the school's faculty, and he invited his former student Mao Tse-tung to teach Chinese literature and to head the primary school attached to the First Normal School. Mao accepted the offer, thus gaining material security for the first time. This post, which he held until the winter of 1921-22, gave him new channels for his political activities and enabled him to consider marriage seriously. Yang K'ai-hui had returned to Changsha, and she and Mao were married in the autumn of 1920.

Mao soon began to distribute materials on Marxism to students through such outlets as the Wen-hua shu-she [culture bookstore], which was established at Changsha in September 1920. "From this time on," he later wrote, "I considered myself a Marxist." When Bertrand Russell, on a visit to Changsha in 1920, excoriated the Bolshevik dictatorship in Russia and advocated an evolutionary approach to socialism through education and economic reform, Mao vigorously opposed his views and argued that political power should be seized by force if necessary. In October 1920 Mao received from Peking the charter of the Socialist Youth Corps, a precursor of the Chinese Communist party, and instructions for the establishment of a branch in Hunan. With Ho Shu-heng (q.v.), who had assumed direction of the Hsinmin hsüeh-hui in the absence of Mao and Ts'ai Ho-sen, he organized a branch of the Socialist Youth Corps at Changsha in January 1921.

The Chinese Communists and the Kuomintang In July 1921 Mao Tse-tung and Ho Shu-heng went to Shanghai, where they represented Hunan at the founding meeting of the Chinese Communist party. The other delegates to the First National Congress were Tung Pi-wu, Ch'en T'an-ch'iu, Li Ta, Li Han-chün, Chang Kuo-t'ao, Liu Jen-ching, Ch'en Kung-po, Chou Fo-hai (qq.v.), Wang Ching-mei, and Teng En-ming. The congress also was attended by two Comintern delegates : Gregory Voitinsky and Maring (Henricus Sneevliet). Upon his return to Changsha, Mao began the arduous task of developing the Hunan branch of the Chinese Communist party. As secretary of this provincial party organ, Mao worked to spread the Marxist message and to organize urban workers and miners in accordance with Comintern directives and Marxist-Leninist doctrine. The activities of the Hsin-min hsueh-hui came to an end, and its radical members joined the Communist party branch. Mao, Ho Shu-heng, and several of their associates who were teachers used the school system as a major propaganda channel. Paradoxically, an important center of Communist activity was the Wang Fu-chih Study Society (Ch'uan-shan hsueh-she), an institute which had been founded at Changsha in the early years of the republic to study the works of Wang Fu-chih (ECCP, II, 817-19), a seventeenth-century Hunanese nationalist and classical scholar whose writings had been used at the beginning of the twentieth century to support the anti-Manchu movement. The society, which was supported by the government and directed by traditionalist scholars, granted Mao permission to use its facilities for the establishment of a Marxist study group and for the dissemination of Marxist literature. In August, Mao established the tzu-hsiu ta-hsueh [self-study university] at the society's headquarters, and many future Chinese Communist leaders were trained there. As Mao's biographer Stuart Schram has pointed out, this and other undertakings of the 1921-23 period illustrate Mao's "genius for exploiting respectable people and institutions for radical ends." After Chao Heng-t'i, the governor of Hunan, ordered the execution of two anarchist labor leaders in January 1922, Li Li-san, Liu Shaoch'i (qq.v.),and Mao Tse-tung organized a series of strikes throughout Hunan. In September, they led the important strike in the Anyuan coal fields and the strike on the Canton-Hankow railroad. These Communist successes led the provincial authorities to order the suppression of labor unions. In November, Mao was elected head of the Hunan branch of the China Trade Union Secretariat. Chao Heng-t'i responded to Mao's continued activity in the labor field by issuing an order for his arrest. Mao made a precipitate departure for Canton in April 1923. During this early period of the Chinese Communist movement, the Soviet Union's China policies were based on the decisions of the Second Comintern Congress of 1920 regarding revolutions in underdeveloped countries, and thus upon the analyses of Lenin, who held that Asian nationalism could be a useful ally of the Western proletariat in the common struggle against imperialism and capitalism. Lenin's theory called for an alliance between the proletarian revolution and the nationalist revolt against imperialism in "the East." The application of this general theory in China resulted in an alliance between the infant Chinese Communist party and the Kuomintang. In the summer of 1922, when approached by Russian agents in Shanghai, Sun Yat-sen agreed to cooperate with the Chinese Communist party to the extent of permitting Communists to join the Kuomintang on an individual basis. This possibility was discussed at the Second National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, held at Shanghai in July. Mao Tse-tung was absent from the congress, allegedly because he could not find the meeting place. In August, a special plenum of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party, meeting at Hangchow under the guidance of Comintern representative Maring, confirmed the party's decision to cooperate with the Kuomintang and stated that "part of the party members" should join the Kuomintang "in their personal capacity." The general terms of the Kuomintang-Communist alliance were set forth in a joint manifesto signed on 26 January 1923. Details of the new alliance, as well as plans for the reorganization of the Kuomintang along Leninist lines, were worked out in discussions between Adolf Joffe and Sun Yat-sen's trusted lieutenant Liao Chung-k'ai (q.v.).

The Third National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, meeting at Canton in June 1923, voted to relinquish control of the labor movement to the Kuomintang and declared that the Kuomintang "must be the central force in the national revolution and assume the leadership of the revolution." At this congress, Mao Tse-tung was elected to the Central Committee and was named to succeed Chang Kuo-t'ao as director of the organization department. When the reorganized Kuomintang held its First National Congress at Canton in January 1924, three Communists who had become members of the Kuomintang — T'an P'ing-shan (q.v.) Li Ta-chao, and Yü She-te — were elected to the Central Executive Committee. Mao Tse-tung, Lin Po-ch'ü, Yu Fang-chou, Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai, Han Lin-fu, and Chang Kuo-t'ao became alternate members of the Central Executive Committee. Mao also was elected to the committee charged with examining the Kuomintang party constitution. His enthusiasm in cooperating with the Kuomintang led such Communists as Li Li-san to criticize him and to refer to him as "Hu Han-min's secretary" during the time he worked under Hu in the organization department of the Kuomintang. Toward the end of 1924 Mao became ill and returned to Hunan for a rest. Accordingly, he was absent from the Fourth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, held at Shanghai in January 1925. Because he did not attend the congress, he was not reelected to the Central Committee. In the early months of 1925 Mao worked to organize peasant associations in central Hunan. He also helped organize a sympathy strike at Changsha after the May Thirtieth Incident, when police fired on Chinese in the International Settlement at Shanghai. His activities came to the attention of Chao Heng-t'i that summer, and he was forced to flee Hunan. He arrived in Canton in October or November and became secretary, under Wang Ching-wei (q.v.), of the Kuomintang Central Executive Committee's propaganda department. In this post and later as deputy chief of the department, he was its de facto head. He made a report on propaganda at the Second National Congress of the Kuomintang in January 1926. He was reelected to alternate membership on the Central Executive Committee, and he became editor of the political department's weekly magazine, Cheng-chih chou-k'an [political weekly]. Early in 1926 Mao Tse-tung wrote his "Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society," an attack on influential anti-Communist tracts written by Tai Chi-t'ao (q.v.) in 1925. Ch'en Tu-hsiu refused to print the essay in the official Chinese Communist journal on the grounds that it was doctrinally immature. Mao succeeded in having it published in the February 1926 issue of Chung-kuo nung-min [China peasant] at Canton. It later became the first text in the official canon of Mao's Selected Works. Mao Tse-tung's most important post at Canton in 1926 was the directorship of the Peasant Movement Training Institute, a school supervised by the peasant department of the Kuomintang (then headed by the Hunanese Communist Lin Po-ch'u), which had been founded in 1924 to train students from south China to work among the peasants. As the time for launching the Northern Expedition drew near, many of the institute's trainees were sent to the rural areas of Kwangtung, Kwangsi, and other provinces to mobilize peasant support, to organize peasant associations, and to serve as assistants and guides for the National Revolutionary Army. Mao personally directed the training of the institute's sixth class, which was graduated on 5 October. He then went to Shanghai to head the Chinese Communist party's peasant department. By mid-December he had returned to Hunan. In a speech to the First Provincial Peasant Congress at Changsha on 20 December 1926, Mao declared that the peasant problem was the central issue in the national revolution. Unless this problem were solved, he argued, it would not be possible to deal with such matters as imperialism, warlordism, and the backwardness of industry and trade. At the beginning of 1927 Mao Tse-tung was in Hunan surveying conditions in his native Hsiangt'an and the four adjacent hsien of Liling, Changsha, Hengshan, and Hsianghsiang. In February, he wrote a "Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan," in which he predicted that the peasants of China "will rise like a tornado or a tempest — a force so extraordinarily swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to suppress it. They will break through all the trammels that now bind them and push forward along the road to liberation." In assessing the accomplishments of the national revolution, he gave 30 percent of the credit to urban dwellers and the military, and 70 percent to the peasants. He defined the rural revolution as "one in which the peasantry overthrows the authority of the feudal landlord class." In later years, Mao's report evoked acrimonious debate among Western scholars of Chinese Communism about what it revealed of Mao's position with reference to the doctrinal authority of Lenin and to the organizational authority of the Comintern in the world movement. In any event, the type of political revolution that Mao would lead in the rural areas of China, in substantial isolation from the Kremlin, was prefigured in this report. It also contained an appeal to the leaders of the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist party to appreciate that social revolution, though it requires elite leadership, is generated by mass discontent. Mao's emphasis on the revolutionary potential of the peasantry was to become the most salient characteristic of his political style as he rose to leadership in the Chinese Communist party.

In 1927 the Kuomintang split into factions over the question of cooperation with the Communists. Mao participated in the Kuomintang Central Executive Committee's third plenum at Wuhan in March, when Wang Ching-wei (q.v.) was named to head both the Kuomintang and the National Government. On 2 April, Mao was named to the newly established central land committee of the Kuomintang. He presented his report on the Hunan peasant movement to the Fifth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, but his ideas were not accepted. Despite strong personal reservations and despite Chiang Kai-shek's purge of Communists at Shanghai in April, Ch'en Tu-hsiu was attempting to maintain the coalition with the Kuomintang, important elements of which were opposed to any radical program of land redistribution. P'eng Shu-chih (q.v.), Ch'en's personal assistant, reportedly refused to allow the official Chinese Communist journal to publish Mao's report. Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai, who had been elected to succeed Mao as head of the peasant department, thereupon wrote a preface to Mao's report and published it as a pamphlet. About this time, Mao was elected head of the newly established National Peasant Association.

The Chinese Communist party was brought close to annihilation in the summer of 1927. In July, Wang Ching-wei, the head of the Kuomintang faction at Wuhan, broke with the Communists. Arrests and executions followed immediately. After the August 1927 emergency conference which deposed Ch'en Tu-hsiu and installed Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai as general secretary of the Chinese Communist party, Mao was ordered to return to Hunan. There, in what the Communists referred to as the Autumn Harvest Uprising, Mao attempted to mobilize peasant discontent over taxes and exorbitant rents imposed by landlords. Mao later told the American journalist Edgar Snow that the purposes of this uprising were: the organization of a revolutionary army, the confiscation of landlords' property, the establishment of independent Communist power in Hunan, and the formation of Soviets (prohibited by Comintern policy). The uprising began on 9 September with the severing of railroad lines leading to Changsha. On 15 September, faced with superior provincial military troops, Mao called off the siege of Changsha. The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party, meeting in November, punished Mao for his failure by removing him from both the Central Committee and the Hunan provincial committee. Official Chinese Communist histories written after 1949 state that during the decade after "the defeat of the Great Revolution of 1925-27," Mao Tse-tung's principal function was "leading the anti-Kuomintang revolutionary war, with the rural areas as its base." The 1927 debacle in China was largely Moscow's responsibility, for Stalin had assumed that the Kremlin should control the Chinese Communist party and that the Chinese party should concentrate on the cities and proletariat. Mao's reaction to this debacle was a recognition that seizure of urban areas meant little if the rural areas were not secured. Accordingly, he set about building a peasant-based organization which nevertheless called itself the party of the proletariat and which proposed to play the role attributed by Lenin to the Communist party elite, that of a "vanguard of the proletariat" spurring the masses to action. And he began fighting a protracted "revolutionary war," using military action to gain political objectives. The Kiangsi Years After the Autumn Harvest Uprising failed, Mao Tse-tung reorganized his remnant forces as the 1st Division of the Chinese Workers and Peasants Red Army and instituted a system of political representatives. In October, he led his men to the Ching-kang mountains on the Hunan-Kiangsi border. After surviving a difficult winter in this remote area, Mao's forces were bolstered in April 1928 by the arrival of troops under Chu Teh (q.v.) which had fled from Nanchang the previous year and had established a small base area in southern Hunan. The two men combined their military forces to form the Fourth Red Army, with Chu as commander and Mao as political commissar. They remained in the Ching-kang mountain refuge throughout 1928, during which time they evolved the famous tactical slogan: "The enemy advances, we retreat /The enemy camps, we harass /The enemy tires, we attack /The enemy retreats, we pursue." On 14 January 1929 Nationalist military pressure forced them to retreat. Leaving P'eng Te-huai (q.v.) to fight a rearguard action, Chu and Mao made their way across Kiangsi and settled at Juichin, a small jute and hemp center in southeastern Kiangsi. They gradually built what came to be the central Soviet base. In relative isolation from the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party at Shanghai, Mao began to formulate independent theories regarding organization, leadership, territorial bases, and other political-military problems. These theories, the foundation of his method of operation in China after 1935, were set forth in a lengthy report of December 1929 (part of which later was published as "On the Rectification of Incorrect Ideas in the Party") and in a sharply critical letter to Lin Piao (q.v.) of January 1930 (later published as "A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire").

Although Mao Tse-tung was elected in absentia to the Central Committee when the Chinese Communist party held its Sixth National Congress at Moscow in the summer of 1928, he was not an important figure in the central party structure. During the period from 1928 to 1931, when Li Li-san and Ch'en Shao-yü (qq.v.) dominated the party, it enjoyed Moscow's support in continuing attempts to base the revolution in China on the urban proletariat and on the capture of cities. In contravention of this policy, Mao and his associates created the territorial base in Kiangsi province that eventually became a refuge for the remnants of the Central Committee at Shanghai.

In 1929-30 Mao Tse-tung participated in campaigns and peasant agitation in western Fukien and along the Kan River in southern Kiangsi. In mid- 1930 Li Li-san called for frontal attacks on cities in central China with the purpose of gaining control over the strategically important Yangtze Valley. The Chu-Mao forces attacked Nanchang, but soon abandoned their efforts; P'eng Te-huai's attack on Changsha in July was repulsed quickly. When it became apparent

that a joint attack on Changsha in September would fail, Mao and Chu ignored party orders and returned to their base, thus withdrawing their support of the Li Li-san group in Shanghai. Soon afterwards, Yang K'ai-hui, who had remained in Hunan when Mao fled to the Ching-kang mountain area in 1927, was arrested and executed by the order of Ho Chien. In December, Mao suppressed a local rebellion against his authority at Fut'ien, Kiangsi. The Fut'ien incident resulted in one of the most extensive purges in the pre- 1949 history of the Chinese Communist party.

On 7 November 1931, the fourteenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Chinese Communists convened the first All-China Congress of Soviets at Juichin. The congress elected a central executive committee which, in turn, elected a council of people's commissars, with Mao as council chairman and Hsiang Ying (q.v.) and Chang Kuo-t'ao as vice chairmen. Although Mao headed the government in the most important Communist base in China—an area with an estimated population of 4,000,000 in 1934—he did not have control of the party apparatus. Li Li-san had fallen from power in November 1930, and the group associated with Comintern representative Pavel Mif had gained control of the central party organs in January 1931 and had appointed Ch'en Shao-yü general secretary. The political situation within the Chinese Communist party in 1931-33 is unclear; after 1949 it was said at Peking that an erroneous leftist line dominated the party during that period. In the autumn of 1932 Ch'en Shao-yü went to Moscow as Chinese representative to the Comintern, and another of the so-called 28 Bolsheviks, Ch'in Pang-hsien (q.v.), succeeded him as general secretary.

As Communist strength in the rural areas of south-central China grew, the Kuomintang, having completed the Northern Expedition and having established a new National Government at Nanking in October 1928, worked to achieve the political unification of China under its aegis. High on Chiang Kai-shek's agenda was the task of crushing the Communists by force of arms. Beginning in the winter of 1930, Chiang undertook five successive campaigns in an effort to annihilate the Communists. Even when confronted with Japanese aggression in Manchuria beginning in September 1931, Chiang continued to allocate most of his military resources to the anti-Communist campaigns. Although numerically inferior to the Nationalist forces, the Communist troops survived these attacks by using tactical maneuvers that combined carefully calculated withdrawals and counterattacks. Chiang Kai-shek's problems increased when the Fukien revolt was launched at Foochow in November 1933 by a number of senior Kuomintang officials, with military support from the Nineteenth Route Army (for details, see Ch'en Ming-shu). The Communist leadership in Kiangsi, divided over policy toward the anti-Chiang revolt in Fukien, agreed to aid the rebels but took no practical steps in that direction. When the dissident regime at Foochow collapsed in January 1934, Mao Tsetung denounced the Communist failure to unite with the Fukien rebels. Throughout the 1931-33 period, Mao Tsetung's power was limited by his superiors and by the competition among factions for leadership of the Chinese Communist party. His authority over the Red Army also was weakened in May 1933, when Chou En-lai (who then supported the 28 Bolsheviks) was appointed political commissar of Chu Teh's First Front Army. Mao did secure reelection as chairman of the central soviet government when the Second All-China Congress of Soviets met at Juichin in January 1934, but the Nationalists encircled the base area later that year and forced him and his associates to begin a year-long forced march for survival. In October 1934 the central soviet government at Juichin dissolved as the Long March began.

The Long March

When the Chinese Communists left their Kiangsi base at the beginning of the Long March, they knew only that they were marching westward to establish a new soviet. An early plan, which called for joining forces with Ho Lung (q.v.) in northwestern Hunan, involved crossing the Hsiang River in northern Kwangsi. This measure resulted in the loss of nearly twothirds of the 100,000 troops that had begun the march. At Mao Tse-tung's urging, the Hunan plan was abandoned and the First Front Red Army moved westward into Kweichow, where it crossed the Wu River at year's end. In January 1935 they took the city of Tsunyi. Immediately afterwards, at an enlarged conference of the Political Bureau, military policies were changed so that henceforth a strategy based on mobile and guerrilla warfare would be used. Chang Wen-t'ien (q.v.) replaced Ch'in Pang-hsien as the party's general secretary. The party line of Pavel Mifand the 28 Bolsheviks thus was discarded as Mao became the first, and for many years the only, leader of a major Communist party to achieve his position without investiture by Moscow.

At the Tsunyi conference, the Chinese Communist leadership also decided to join the Fourth Front Army of Chang Kuo-t'ao and Hsu Hsiang-ch'ien (q.v.) in Szechwan, a province that was not under the direct control of the National Government. Unfortunately for the Communists, this course of action also seemed logical to Chiang Kai-shek, who sent troops to attack both the First Front Army and the Fourth Front Army. After a successful engagement at Loushan pass, Mao decided to go by way of Yunnan and Sikang to western Szechwan. The First Front Army crossed the Wu River and marched toward Chiang Kaishek's headquarters at Kweiyang. When he called for reinforcements from Yunnan, the Communist columns suddenly turned west and marched into Yunnan toward Kunming. Changing direction again, they crossed the Chinsha River and moved northward. The last great obstacle that faced them was the Tatu River. In an extremely difficult and hazardous operation, a small band of soldiers captured the Luting suspension bridge at the end of May. On 12 July, the First Front Army, having struggled through the Chiachin mountains, reached Maokung hsien in Szechwan, the base area of the Fourth Front Army. Mao and Chang Kuo-t'ao then joined forces and marched northward to Mao-erh-kai.

Although Mao Tse-tung had gained control of the central apparatus of the Chinese Communist party, his position was not yet beyond challenge by such other leaders as Chang Kuot'ao. The two men came into conflict in the summer of 1935, the basic issues being control of the Communist military forces and delineation of future political strategy. Chang Kuo-t'ao proposed moving west to establish a new base in Sikang; Mao Tse-tung proposed moving north to Shensi, where a Communist base under Kao Kang and Liu Chih-tan (qq.v.) already existed. As a result of this controversy, the Communist forces split. Chu Teh and Liu Po-ch'eng accompanied Chang on his westward trek, while Mao, P'eng Te-huai (q.v.), Lin Piao, and the First Front Army moved toward Shensi. The last phase of the march was the most dangerous: the non-Chinese minority peoples were hostile, and the boggy region known as the Grasslands was nearly impassable. Having braved these dangers, the First Front Army headed eastwards to the Latsek'ou pass, moved northward over the Minshan mountains, traversed the Liu-p'an mountains, and reached Shensi. They arrived at the remote village of Wa-yao-pao, just south of the Great Wall, in October 1935. In assessing the significance of the Long March, Mao Tse-tung later stated that: "The Long March is a manifesto. It proclaims to the world that the Red Army is an army of heroes .... The Long March is also an agitation corps. It declares to the approximately two hundred million people of eleven provinces that only the road of the Red Army leads to their liberation .... The Long March is also a seeding machine. It has sown many seeds in eleven provinces, which will sprout, grow leaves, blossom into flowers, bear fruit, and yield a harvest in the future."

When Mao Tse-tung and his 7,000 or so remaining troops arrived in the loesslands of Shensi, they represented a relatively minor force in the national politics of China. Nevertheless, by surviving the Nationalist encirclement campaigns and the Long March, they gave rise to a belief in their indestructibility. This legend was to be useful to the Chinese Communists in the next few years, as was the political and military experience they had gained in the Kiangsi soviet. Even the remote location of the Shensi base was to prove advantageous, for it provided a geographical base from which the Communists could extend their influence and authority into the traditionally conservative but highly important north China plain. However, the development of the Shensi base proceeded slowly, and the last of the Long March forces did not reach there until the spring of 1937.

Mao Tse-tung at Yenan

The career of Mao Tse-tung from 1935 to 1949 is inseparable from the rise to power of the Chinese Communists. During these years Mao came to be the supreme planner and director of what the Communists termed the "revolutionary war," an unorthodox type of conflict which utilized the crisis created by the Japanese invasion and the discontent of the peasantry to project the Chinese Communist party as the most effective spokesman for China. The Japanese invasion, and the violence and social disorganization that it created, challenged both the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist party, raising the basic political question ofwhich party was the most responsible leader of the Chinese nation in its efforts to resist Japanese aggression. The Kuomintang, which had the advantage of controlling the National Government, in effect evaded that challenge and sought the aid of allies outside China to bolster its political power. The Chinese Communist party, as an insurgent force, blended flexibility, pragmatism, and increasingly skillful coordination of political and military measures in meeting the challenge. Mao Tse-tung's major political achievement during the Sino-Japanese war was the astoundingly rapid expansion of a competing administrative system behind the Japanese lines that showed itself to be more effective and more efficient than the National Government.

The Seventh Congress of the Comintern, meeting at Moscow in the summer of 1935, elected Mao Tse-tung in absentia to its central committee at the same time that it called for Communist parties throughout the world to pursue a united-front program in domestic politics. However, the key to Communist victory in China was not furnished by the Comintern, but by the Japanese, whose troop movements in north China created a wave of opposition to the continuance of the Kuomintang-Communist conflict. The Chinese Communists were quick to exploit this shift in public opinion. On 25 December 1935 the Political Bureau, meeting at Wa-yao-pao, called for the creation of an "Anti-Japanese National United Front." At a meeting of party activists two days later, Mao Tse-tung gave a report, "On the Tactics of Fighting Japanese Imperialism," in which he analyzed the political situation in class terms, stating that the Japanese "want to change the whole of China from a semicolony shared among several imperialist powers into a colony monopolized by Japan" and that the basic task facing the Chinese Communist party was "none other than to form a broad national revolutionary united front."

Political programs had to be integrated with military measures if full use were to be made of the Japanese threat as a catalytic agent of social change which could benefit the Communists. Mao Tse-tung's military doctrine was essentially pragmatic, influenced directly by his experience in the Kiangsi campaigns and indirectly by his knowledge of Chinese history and of such traditional Chinese military works as the Sun-tzu ping-fa (for further information, see Kuo Hua-jo). His first major statement in this field was Strategic Problems of China's Revolutionary War, a series of lectures given at the Red Army Academy in December 1935 and published in 1936. In this work, Mao declared that: "a vast semicolonial country that is unevenly developed politically and economically and that has gone through a great revolution; a powerful enemy [the Kuomintang] ; a weak and small Red Army; and the agrarian revolution—these are the four principal characteristics of China's revolutionary war." With these as a basis, he analyzed the strategy (primarily defensive) and the tactics required to combat Nationalist military operations. To adapt themselves to the new situation created by the Japanese threat, the Communists had only to modify the details of Mao's analysis, making Japan the "powerful enemy." The resulting doctrine was simple and direct : because Japan was the national enemy of China, all responsible Chinese were duty-bound to support the "anti- Japanese national salvation movement." Guerrilla and mobile warfare techniques would permit the Chinese Communists to avoid positional engagements unless they chose to undertake such battles.

On 10 February 1937, less than two months after the Sian Incident {see Chiang Kai-shek) the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party set forth the terms under which it would agree to cooperate with the Kuomintang in opposing the Japanese. Because party members had reservations about this policy, a national conference was held at Yenan in May 1937 to discuss the matter of collaboration. Mao Tse-tung delivered a report entitled "The Tasks of the Chinese Communist Party in the Period of Resistance to Japan," in which he affirmed that the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist party could find a basis for cooperation. After the Sino-Japanese war began in July 1937, Mao began to stress differences of -policy between the Chinese Communist party and the Kuomintang in responding to the national emergency. On 25 August 1937 the Political Bureau, meeting at Loch'uan, Shensi, endorsed a ten-point program intended to ensure that "the Communist party give leadership to the people throughout the country to win the anti-Japanese war and to oppose the Kuomintang's anti-popular policy." Although final agreement on terms of cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist party was not reached until 22 September 1937, by mid-August the Chinese Communist forces in north China had become the Eighth Route Army, with Chu Teh as its commander and P'eng Te-huai as his deputy. In January 1938 the National Government designated this force the Eighteenth Army Group. Communist forces in central China were reorganized as the New Fourth Army, with Yeh T'ing (q.v.) as commander and Hsiang Ying (q.v.) as deputy commander and political commissar. The Kuomintang-Communist alliance, though an uneasy one, lasted until January 1941, when units of the New Fourth Army came into conflict with Nationalist forces at Maolin in southern Anhwei. The battle, which lasted from 6 to 14 January and which resulted in an almost total rout of the Communists, is known as the New Fourth Army Incident.

Mao Tse-tung issued several major pronouncements on military doctrine in 1938. Basic Tactics, a collection of lectures on the dayto-day conduct of guerrilla warfare given at the Anti-Japanese Military and Political University, was published in book form in March. Another series of lectures, "On the Protracted War," appeared in Chieh-fang [liberation] in July. In it, Mao stated that "in the course of the prolonged, ruthless war, guerrilla warfare should not remain its old self but must develop into mobile warfare." On 7 July, the first anniversary of the war, the Society for the Study of the Anti- Japanese War published K'ang-Jih yu-chi chancheng ti i-pan wen-Ci [on all the problems of the anti-Japanese guerrilla warfare] . Its seventh and final chapter was Mao Tse-tung's "Questions of Strategy in the Anti-Japanese Guerrilla War," which stated that the war would be a three-phase conflict: strategic defense, strategic stalemate, and a Chinese offensive in which guerrilla tactics would be abandoned in favor of large-scale mobile warfare. Implicit in Mao's analysis was the assumption of ultimate victory over both the immediate foreign enemy, Japan, and the long-term domestic foe, the Kuomintang. That assumption was based on Mao's perception of the interaction of military and political factors in revolutionary war. He never lost sight of the practical objective of destroying the enemy's armed forces, but he viewed the political mobilization of the Chinese population as a matter of equal importance. Civil-military relations and the extension of territorial control were highly significant. To Mao, military conflict was a function of politics, and military victory was but a precondition of the radical transformation of a society.

During this period, Mao met his first Westerners. In the summer of 1936 the American journalist Edgar Snow made his way to the Communist headquarters at Paoan, interviewed Mao and other Chinese Communist leaders, and wrote a report on Mao's pre- 1936 career that remains an important source ofinformation. According to Snow, Mao was then a tall, pale figure, still gaunt from the strains of the Long March, with "large, searching eyes, wide, thick lips, and a strong chin with a prominent mole. His black hair was thick and long, on a head for which the Generalissimo was offering 250,000 silver dollars." In Mao, the earthiness and lively sense of humor of the peasant blended with the aloof and introspective qualities of the intellectual. He was an omniverous reader, an able writer, a man of boundless energy, a military and political planner of "considerable genius," and a man who was careless in personal habits and appearance but meticulous about details of duty. The American reporter Agnes Smedley, who first met Mao at night in his Yenan cave in 1937, offered another view: "The tall, forbidding figure lumbered toward us and a high-pitched voice greeted us. Then two hands grasped mine; they were as long and sensitive as a woman's .... His dark inscrutable face was long, the forehead broad and high, the mouth feminine. Whatever else he might be, he was an aesthete .... Despite that feminine quality in him he was as stubborn as a mule and a steel rod of pride and determination ran through his nature. I had the impression that he would wait and watch for years but eventually have his way .... His humor was often sardonic and grim as if it sprang from deep caverns of spiritual seclusion." The publication and translation into Chinese of the writings of these and other Western journalists had a strong impact on public opinion, strengthening Mao's image as a patriotic and a highly moral man.

Mao Tse-tung's personal life during the 1930's also was interesting to many Chinese. After the execution of Yang K'ai-hui at Changsha in 1930, he had married Ho Tzu-chen, a graduate of the Hunan Normal School and a Communist. After the Long March, which Ho was one of the few women to survive, she and Mao separated. In an action that elicited sharp criticism from some of his colleagues in the Chinese Communist party, Mao sent his wife to Moscow, reportedly for medical treatment, and their separation became permanent. About 1939 he married Chiang Ch'ing, a film actress who had come to Yenan in 1937 from Shanghai, where she had been known as Lan-p'ing. Mao lost two of his siblings in the 1930's: Mao Tse-hung was executed at Changsha in 1930, and Mao Tse-t'an was killed in Kiangsi in 1935. Mao Tse-tung gave considerable thought to the future beyond the Sino-Japanesewar. Nearly a decade before he gained power, he attempted to place Chinese Communism within the framework of modern Chinese political history and to explain the "new democracy" he projected for China's future. He presented his analyses in "The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party" (December 1939) and in "On New Democracy" (January 1940). Writing within the framework of conventional Leninist doctrine, Mao called for a two-stage revolution, first "national-democratic" and then "socialist." Mao recognized that the circumstances of an anti-imperialist revolution in a technologically backward land like China made it both possible and desirable for the Communists to gain the support of several classes. The "new democracy" principle, therefore, called for the Chinese Communists to champion a united front composed of workers, peasants, petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie. These essays proved to be stimulating intellectual fare for many thoughtful Chinese—men who were weary of domestic strife and parochial leadership, frustrated by the rigid structure of political and social controls imposed by the Kuomintang, and anxious for a new sense of national purpose and direction. Mao Tse-tung spoke to them, not as a theorist with a dream but as a political leader in the prime of his career as a professional revolutionary. "The aim of all our efforts," he said, "is the building of a new society and a new nation of the Chinese people." At the Yenan base, the capital of the Shensi- Kansu-Ninghsia Border Region Government, Mao Tse-tung also began to assemble a brain trust, composed of Ch'en Po-ta (q.v.) and others, and to define the intellectual and cultural aspects of the Chinese Communist revolution. Mao's reputation as a Marxist theoretician, much touted after 1949, rests on two essays that were drawn from lectures he delivered in 1937: "On Practice," published in 1950; and "On Contradiction," published in 1952. These essays, both of which reflect Mao's basic lack of interest in systematic Marxist philosophy, are primarily notable in that they contain the seeds of Mao's theory of permanent revolution. Two installments of an essay entitled "Dialectical Materialism" appeared in a Shanghai journal in 1940 before Mao, dissatisfied with it, decided to stop publication. This essay was neither reissued nor referred to in later years by Mao or his adherents.

In both propaganda and program, the Chinese Communist leadership placed strong emphasis on the "cultural front." Mao Tse-tung set forth the party's cultural policy at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art in May 1942. Quoting from Lenin's 1905 statement on "Party Organization and Party Literature," Mao defined the ideological basis of revolutionary literature, saying that literature must be shaped by a clear "party spirit" and must be designed for the masses—specifically for the workers, peasants, soldiers and petty bourgeoisie. Literature should come from the masses and should be consciously native; authors should draw material from China's rich storehouse of "revolutionary tales" and other folk tales which could be interpreted in an appropriately socialist manner. Literary language should be the language of the common people, and writing should reflect everyday Chinese life. Bourgeois themes and subjective inspiration should be rejected. Mao then turned to a consideration of the relationship between literature and politics, arguing that literature exists primarily for "class politics and mass politics," not for entertainment. However, he recognized that literary works had to be artistically effective in order to serve the Chinese Communist party's political ends: "What we demand is unity of politics and art, of content and form, and of revolutionary political content and the highest possible degree of effectiveness in artistic form. Works of art, however politically progressive, are powerless if they lack artistic quality." In large part, Mao's Yenan talks represented a summation of theories which had been discussed in leftist literary circles in the 1930's. His call for linguistic and literary reforms echoed programs advocated by leaders of the League of Left- Wing Writers. His stress on the necessity for "popularization" was as much pragmatic as political, a reflection of the fact that pai-hua [vernacular] literature had become almost as incomprehensible to the average reader as the classical wen-yen. Nor did Mao's ideas go unchallenged, for a small but influential group of left-wing writers and literary critics opposed his dictates throughout the 1940's (see Hu Feng). Moreover, Mao's own attitude toward modern Chinese literature remained ambiguous. Despite his 1942 statements, he continued to use the classical tz'u form when writing poetry, and his political writings contained few references to modern works.

Even while busily planning strategy, exploring Marxist theory, and drawing designs for China's "revolutionary literature," Mao Tse-tung did not lose sight of his primary responsibilities as the leader of a rapidly growing political party. During the Yenan period, the Chinese Communists launched the cheng-feng [rectification] campaign, an ideological remolding movement designed to sharpen discipline in a geographically scattered organization which was becoming increasingly heterogeneous in social background as it recruited students from petty bourgeois families to supplement its predominantlypeasant membership. In launching the campaign on 1 February 1942 with a statement on "Rectification of the Party's Style of Work," Mao said that "for the complete overthrow of the enemy, our ranks must be in order, we must all march in step, our troops must be seasoned, and our weapons fit. Unless these conditions are fulfilled, the enemy will not be overthrown." Thus, he indicated the emphasis on the "new democracy" was not to eclipse the essential role of the party as a professional elite controlling a mass movement. This cheng-feng campaign was not a blood purge on the Stalinist model, though it was aimed in part at members of the party elite who had incurred Mao's displeasure as Moscow-trained "dogmatists." In Mao's opinion, such men as Ch'en Shao-yu lacked sufficient experience in practical politics in China to balance the theoretical knowledge they had gained in the Soviet Union. Basically, however, the cheng-feng campaign involved the intensive indoctrination of all party members and cadres in Marxist-Leninist precepts as selected and interpreted by Mao Tse-tung and other senior leaders at Yenan. In the ensuing 12 months, more than 30,000 Chinese Communists received this training in small study groups. Nominally, the principal aim of the cheng-feng campaign was the unification of doctrinal standards so that directives issued by the party leadership would be understood clearly and implemented effectively at all levels. In practical terms, however, the movement was designed to consolidate the power of Mao Tse-tung as leader of the Chinese Communist party.

As a distinctive mechanism linking organization and ideology, the Chinese Communist party as it developed during the early 1940's was not intended to exist as an end unto itself. The party's main organizational purpose was to serve as a transmission belt, communicating party policies downward to people living in the Communist base areas and relaying their reactions upward to the top command at Yenan. An authoritative statement about the so-called mass line of political operations was Mao Tse-tung's 1943 statement "On Leadership." The key function of political leadership, as outlined by Mao, is to attain a pattern of continuous, organized interaction between party and populace—a pragmatic process aimed at increasing popular support. Though the Communist party in China, as elsewhere in the world, was by definition an authoritarian, hierarchic structure, its operations were based on planned, sustained, and flexible attention to points of direct contact between the party's representatives and the Chinese people.

Although the chronology of Mao's advance to full power over the party structure remains murky, the result is clear. In 1943 and 1944 he was elected chairman (chu-hsi) of the Central Committee and the Political Bureau. Mao also headed the five-man Secretariat of the Central Committee, then the party's top policy-making body. By the spring of 1945, when the Chinese Communist party held its Seventh National Congress at Yenan, party membership estimates had reached 1,200,000, with another 900,000 in the armed forces. This congress, the first to be held in China in nearly 20 years, reviewed wartime developments; elected a new Central Committee and a new Political Bureau, both of which were composed overwhelmingly of men who had proven their ability and their loyalty to Mao during the difficult war years; and adopted a revised party constitution. The preamble to the constitution stated that the Thought of Mao Tse-tung was necessary "to guide the entire work" of the party. A highlight of the meeting was Mao Tse-tung's "On Coalition Government," a statement that summed up Mao's political thought as it had evolved during the Yenan years, and that stated the conditions under which the Chinese Communists would cooperate with the Kuomintang in the postwar period.

Chiang Kai-shek was still the acknowledged national leader of China—the National Government was recognized by both the Western powers and the Soviet Union as the legitimate government of China—but by war's end the Yenan government controlled 19 Communistorganized bases with a population of over 90,000,000. The position in China of Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communists had changed drastically since the executions of 1927 and the exhaustion of 1935; Yenan's resolute anti-Japanese stand, lack of venality, and Spartan way of life had bred new vigor and self-assurance.

The Race to Power

Between 1944 and 1946 the United States government entered Chinese political life directly in an attempt to bridge the gap between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist party. With Communist consent, a United States Army observation group, headed by Colonel David D. Barrett and accompanied by the diplomat John S. Service, went to Yenan in 1944. In pursuit of its principal policy objective in China, the creation of a coalition government, Washington pressed for direct talks between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung. The Chinese Communists issued orders immediately after the announcement of Japan's surrender for troops under their command to "step up the war effort," accept the surrender of Japanese and puppet troops, and take over their arms and other equipment. Two telegrams from the commander of the Eighteenth Army Group to Chiang Kai-shek (13 and 16 August) stated that the Communists were proceeding independently in handling Japanese surrender and take over arrangements. Thus, the race for control of the vitally important regions of Manchuria and north China began. Despite this overt competition for authority, the Americans tried again. Ambassador Patrick J. Hurley flew to Yenan, greeted Mao at the airport with an Indian war whoop, and personally escorted Mao, Chou En-lai, and Wang Jo-fei (q.v.) to Chungking for discussions with Chiang Kai-shek about postwar government in China. The journey from Shensi to Szechwan was Mao's first airplane flight, and at its end he met Chiang Kai-shek for the first time since 1926. Mao and his party remained at Chungking for six weeks, 28 August-10 October, but the meetings held during this period had no practical results. In March 1946 General George C. Marshall, special representative of the President of the United States, flew to Yenan for conferences with Mao and other Chinese Communist leaders, but again the results were negative.

Mao Tse-tung remained in Shensi after the breakdown of American mediation efforts and the outbreak of full-scale civil war in China in the summer of 1946. He had been saddened in April 1946 when Ch'in Pang-hsien, Teng Fa, Yeh T'ing, Wang Jo-fei, and other Communists had been killed in a plane crash between Chungking and Yenan. By this time, he had formulated the famous slogan "all reactionaries are paper tigers," and he had become known as an innovator who had transformed traditional Marxism-Leninism into a practical creed for an underdeveloped Asian country. The English writer Robert Payne, who met Mao at Yenan in 1946, wrote of the elusiveness of the essential Mao : "then Mao came into the room. He came so quietly that we were hardly aware of his presence. He wore a thick brown Sun Yat-sen uniform which seemed to have been woven of goat's hair, and as he stood beside the towering P'eng Te-huai he looked slighter and smaller than I had imagined him .... There is hardly a photograph of him which resembles any other photograph, so strangely and so suddenly does he change. Today, he looked like a surprisingly young student, a candidate for a doctorate, and perhaps he played for his college : the shoulders were very heavy. The hair was very slick and long, the eyes large,. the lips pursed, and he had no mannerisms. There was about him a kind of quietness such as you will find among people who have lived much alone .... He was fifty-three and looked twenty."

The sense of impending victory remained strong in Mao Tse-tung even though a Nationalist drive forced the Communists to evacuate Yenan in March 1947. The Communist top command split into two groups for safety. Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, and Jen Pi-shih (q.v.) remained in northern Shensi, while Liu Shaoch'i, Chu Teh, and an alternate working committee moved to the Communist-controlled Shansi-Chahar-Hopei base. Mao's command post during the winter of 1947 was the small town ofYang-chia-k'ou in Michih hsien. There, at a special meeting of the Central Committee on 25 December 1947, he summarized the methods of the People's Liberation Army in a report entitled "The Present Situation and Our Tasks." The ten principles of operation set forth in this statement included: "To attack dispersed, isolated enemy forces first; to attack concentrated, strong enemy forces later .... To take small and medium cities and extensive rural areas first ; to take big cities later .... To make the wiping out of the enemy's effective strength our main objective .... To wipe out the enemy through mobile warfare, at the same time paying attention to the tactics of positional attack and capturing fortified enemy points and cities .... To make good use of the intervals between campaigns to rest, train, and consolidate our troops." This report, as well as other political and military estimates of the 1947-48 period, provides impressive evidence of Mao's analytic and planning capacities. By early 1949 the top party leaders had been reunited in Hopei, where the North China People's Government under Tung Pi-wu had been established in August 1948 to unify all areas in the north that were under Communist jurisdiction. The seventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party held its second plenum on 7-24 March 1949 at Shih-chiachuang. Meeting after the Communist capture of Tientsin and Peiping, this plenum stated that the center of gravity of the Communist effort in China was shifting from the rural areas to the cities, and announced that, henceforth, national industrialization would be the central objective of Chinese Communist economic policy. On 25 March, the Central Committee and other top party organs moved to Peiping.

In the context of national politics, Mao Tsetung had established his supremacy over the now-vanquished Chiang Kai-shek, and in the context of international communism, he had established his independence from Comintern control. It was hardly surprising that Mao should view the interests of world communism from the standpoint of China, even as Stalin consistently viewed them from the standpoint of the Soviet Union.

The People's Republic of China

In the spring of 1949 Li Tsung-jen (q.v.), then acting President at Nanking, made a final attempt to negotiate a peace settlement. Fighting resumed on 20 April, when the Chinese Communists crossed the Yangtze. By the end of May, both Nanking and Shanghai had fallen to the Communist forces. June saw the formation of a preparatory committee which was called upon by Mao Tse-tung to "convene a Political Consultative Conference, proclaim the founding of the People's Republic of China, and elect a democratic coalition government to represent it." On 30 June, the twenty-eighth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist party, Mao published the celebrated essay "On the People's Democratic Dictatorship," a distillation of much of his earlier thinking about government. He wrote with a new frankness, made possible by the Communist military victory, in stating that the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie, "led by the working class and the Communist party, unite to form their own state and elect their own government; they enforce their dictatorship over the running dogs of imperialism — the landlord classes and the bureaucratbourgeoisie .... The combination of these two aspects, democracy for the people and dictatorship over the reactionaries, is the people's democratic dictatorship." What Mao did not make explicit, however, was as significant as what he did say. The power of the dictatorship in the new regime was to be exercised by the Chinese Communist party elite, a fact that was cloaked but not concealed by the concept of the people's democratic dictatorship. The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, an "organization of the democratic united front of the entire Chinese people," met from 21 to 30 September 1949 and adopted the Common Program, a restatement of the ideas expressed in "On the People's Democratic Dictatorship" and in "On New Democracy," and the Organic Law of 27 September, which set up the Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China. On 27 September, Peiping was redesignated Peking and was named as the capital of the new regime. The Central People's Government was inaugurated on 1 October, with Mao Tse-tung as chairman and (in order of rank) Chu Teh, Liu Shao-ch'i, Soong Ch'ing-ling, Li Chi-shen, Chang Lan, and Kao Kang as vice chairmen. The new regime's highest policy-making body, the Central People's Government Council, was composed of these leaders and 56 other members elected by the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. The council was assigned responsibility for "leadership of the state apparatus at home" and for representation of the People's Republic of China in international affairs. Subordinate to the Government Council was the 20-man Government Administration Council, headed by Chou En-lai. It had jurisdiction over ministries, commissions, and committees. In addition to his government and party posts, Mao Tse-tung served as chairman of the People's Revolutionary Military Council.

The major domestic challenges Mao Tse-tung faced in 1949 were the rehabilitation of a country ravaged by hyper-inflation and war and the consolidation of authority throughout China. As Mao stated in "On the People's Democratic Dictatorship," the "serious problem is the education of the peasantry." The traditional greed for land and the individualism of the peasants needed to be overcome, as did the backwardness of rural areas with reference to modern agricultural methods. Beginning with the Agrarian Reform Law of June 1950, Mao worked to increase production in the rural areas. At the same time, a law of July 1950 was used to suppress potential sources of opposition. The holdings of landlords were confiscated in campaigns that were carried out at great human cost; by Mao's later admission, some 800,000 people lost their lives during the rural upheaval in China. Other suppressive movements of the early 1950's were the Three-Anti Movement, which tightened party control and rid the bureaucracy of former Kuomintang officials so that newly trained Communist cadres could replace them; the Five-Anti Movement, which was directed against urban businessmen; and the "study campaign for ideological reform," which imposed thought reform on intellectuals, reorganized the schools, and worked to create a variety of mass organizations.

The People's Republic of China made its debut in international Communist society near the end of Stalin's life. The Chinese Communist view of the international status of the new regime had been outlined by Mao Tse-tung in his 30 June 1949 essay and by Liu Shao-ch'i in his statement On Internationalism and Nationalism of 1 November 1948. To Stalin, however, Mao Tse-tung and his cohorts were unconventional and unpredictable men who in the past had opposed such Moscow-oriented Communists as Ch'en Shao-yü. In December 1949 Mao made his first trip outside China, traveling to Moscow to hammer out political, security, and economic arrangements with Stalin. His goals were the gaining of maximum Russian support for his country's projected industrialization program and the regaining of Chinese rights that had been compromised by the Sino-Soviet treaty of 1945. Nine weeks of negotiation with the aging but obdurate Stalin resulted in the signing, on 14 February 1950, of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance. This thirty-year alliance provided for Soviet support of China in the event of attack by Japan or allies of Japan and for annual Soviet credits to China of US $60 million for five years. The Russians would remain in Port Arthur and Dairen until 1952, and the Chinese would recognize the independence of the Mongolian People's Republic. Having reached this compromise agreement, Mao left Moscow for China on 17 February.

Mao Tse-tung recognized the superiority of the Soviet Union in "socio-historic development" and technology; and he realized that China's dependence on the Soviet Union for aid in development required that ideas differing from those of the Russians not be expressed publicly. The alliance benefitted Peking during the Korean war (1950-53), providing China with war material and the United Nations forces with a source of deterrent concern. Although the Korean war severely drained China's resources and forced the temporary abandonment of the agricultural reform program, it served Mao Tse-tung's political purposes in Asia because it was regarded there as a conflict between East and West. The war ended with an armistice agreement on 27 July 1953. Peking claimed a psychological victory, saying that the so-called Chinese People's Volunteers, hastening to the aid of their North Korean brethren, had fought the Western world's strongest military and industrial power without being defeated. Within China, the Korean war permitted more rapid consolidation of political control and mobilization of human and material resources. It also allowed Mao to demonstrate to the Chinese people that "American imperialism" was a real and dangerous threat to the perimeters of their nation.

In 1954 the Central People's Government was reorganized according to the provisions of the new constitution. The highest organ of state authority became the National People's Congress, which was to meet every year and which consisted of 1,226 members, who were elected to four-year terms. The First National People's Congress, convoked in September 1954, elected Mao Tse-tung Chairman of the People's Republic of China. The congress theoretically had broad powers, but because it met but once a year, these powers actually were vested in the congress's Standing Committee, headed by Liu Shao-ch'i. The highest administrative organ was the State Council, headed by Chou En-lai. The Council of National Defense, chaired by Mao Tse-tung, was responsible for the direction ofmilitary affairs. Other important organs included the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate. Under the new constitution, Mao Tse-tung had wideranging and undefined powers. The most important administrative change made at this time was the return to a system of provinces, autonomous districts, and municipalities. The regional administration system was abolished, thus removing a source of potential challenge to the leadership of Mao Tse-tung.

The death of Stalin in March 1953 brought greater flexibility to Moscow-Peking relationships. The Soviet Union granted increased financial and technical assistance to China, and Nikita Khrushchev visited Peking in October 1954. In February 1956, however, Khrushchev stunned Chinese and other delegates to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union when he bitterly denounced Joseph Stalin. Disunity in the Communist bloc increased after Soviet military force was used to suppress the Hungarian revolt in the autumn of 1956. Mao Tse-tung, though irritated by Khrushchev's surprise action in February, supported the Moscow leadership. For the first time, he played a part in international affairs that affected European as well as Asian Communism. Mao's public reaction to "destalinization" was expressed in "On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," which appeared as an editorial in the Jen-min jih-pao of 5 April 1956. A second editorial, "More on the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," was published on 29 December 1956. Within the Chinese Communist party, the standard technique for dealing with deviant leftist or rightist influences was the so-called unity-struggle-unity formula. Mao Tse-tung was convinced that nothing similar to the Hungarian revolt could occur in China because the Chinese people understood their freedom and its limits. In 1956 Peking launched the Hundred Flowers Campaign (based on the slogan "let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend"), which ostensibly was designed to mobilize support for the Central People's Government among the intellectuals of China by permitting open criticism of political conditions.

In 1957 Mao Tse-tung produced a new analysis of "contradiction" to explain social relationships and the process of social change. The ideographs used to express this concept (mao-tun) meant spear and shield; they were derived from the traditional Chinese story of the man who boasted that he could supply both spears that could penetrate anything and shields that nothing could pierce. Mao had been fascinated by the concept for many years, and his 1937 essay "On Contradiction" had been published at Peking in the early 1950's. His "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People" of February 1957 reiterated the view that human society develops through a continuous process of creating and resolving contradictions. In analyzing social contradictions in China and the ways in which the Chinese Communist party should seek to resolve them, Mao stated that "non-antagonistic" contradictions among the people should be resolved by education and by discussion aimed at showing deviants the error of their criticism and the validity of Communist policy. Contradictions "between ourselves and our enemies," on the other hand, could only be resolved by drawing a firm line "between ourselves and our enemies." Mao affirmed his belief that contradictions pervade society not only during the stage of transition to socialism but also after the establishment of a socialist system. They could only be resolved by "permanent revolution." Soviet leaders were, of course, reluctant to accept this idea. Mao's statement, though made in February 1957, was not released publicly until June of that year, a delay that gave rise to speculation outside China about the possibility of changes being made in it. By the time of its release, the Hundred Flowers Campaign, which had occasioned a surprising amount of strong criticism of both party and government, had been succeeded by an anti-rightist campaign which marked a return to censorship.

The launching of Sputnik I in 1957 and the gains made by the Russians in developing intercontinental ballistic missiles indicated, in Mao Tse-tung's view, a decisive military and psychological shift in world politics. He concluded that the Communist bloc, with its new military lead over the West, could take advantage of that imbalance to extend its authority in Asia, Africa, and other underdeveloped areas. He also believed that such an effort could help offset economic weaknesses and political tensions then manifesting themselves in China. The increasing importance of China in the Communist bloc was confirmed by the signature in October 1957 of a Sino-Soviet agreement on "New Technology for National Defense" under which the Soviet Union agreed to supply China with a sample atomic bomb and with relevant technological data. When in Moscow for meetings in November 1957 Mao gave strong public support to the Soviet leadership: "the socialist force has surpassed the imperial force. Our socialist camp should have a leader, and this is the Soviet Union. The enemy also has a leader, and this is America. If there is no leader, the strength will be weakened." In a speech to Chinese students at Moscow University on 17 November 1957 Mao said of the Communist bloc's strategic ascendancy that "the east wind prevails over the west wind." Mao Tse-tung's role in the tangled history of Chinese domestic and foreign policies of the years after 1957 is difficult to determine or assess. Generally successful economic performance during the period of the first Five Year Plan (1953-57) generated efforts to launch a new phase of "socialist construction" in China. In the agricultural sector, this phase was marked by the program of drastic acceleration known as the Great Leap Forward, which was initiated by Mao Tse-tung in 1958 in connection with the undertaking of a second Five Year Plan. This program, which involved the mobilization of underemployed rural labor on an unprecedented scale, led to the collectivization of the rural population and the creation of communal farms and public works projects.

Radical experimentation in domestic planning was paralleled by commitment to a bolder and more bellicose strategy in foreign affairs. Mao's hostility to Khrushchev's plan to call a summit meeting in the hopes of settling the Middle Eastern crisis caused Khrushchev to make a hasty trip to Peking on 31 July 1958 for talks with Mao. Khrushchev then withdrew his summit offer. Mao increased international tensions in August by shelling the off-shore islands. The Peking Government later (September 1963) charged that at the time of the Sino-Soviet talks the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had made "unreasonable demands designed to bring China under Soviet military control." Soviet reaction to Mao's harder line was indicated in June 1959, when the Soviet Union scrapped the October 1957 nuclear accord with China, seriously retarding Peking's nuclear program.

In December 1958 Mao Tse-tung announced his intention to relinquish his executive responsibilities. Liu Shao-ch'i succeeded him as chief of state and chairman of the National Defense Council in April 1959. At the same time, Chou En-lai replaced Mao as chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, with Mao becoming honorary chairman. Mao retained his top party posts, and he concentrated much of his time and attention on foreign affairs.

In the autumn of 1959, soon after his conversations with President Eisenhower at Camp David, Khrushchev went to Peking for discussions of such matters as the Sino-Indian border conflict that had broken out in August. When he and Mao stood side by side atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace to witness the celebrations on 1 October that marked the anniversary of the foundation of the People's Republic of China, it was clear that the occasion belonged to Mao Tse-tung alone. Mao's position in China was not affected seriously by the economic difficulties by then apparent in China or by the deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations. The Great Leap Forward ground to a halt, but adulation of Mao increased steadily.

Mao Tse-tung's approach to the international situation in the late 1950's and early 1960's was determined by concepts he had developed years before. In the 1927-37 period he had written that "we are to despise all enemies strategically and to take account of all enemies tactically." Strategically, with respect to the general situations of conflict and competition, revolutionaries must "despise the enemy," struggle with him, and dare to seize victory. Tactically, with respect to specific engagements, revolutionaries must take the enemy seriously and prudently select the forms of struggle that will isolate, fragment, and annihilate enemy power. In an August 1946 interview with Anna Louise Strong, Mao made another statement that was to have important effects on Chinese Communist political doctrine: "All reactionaries are paper tigers. In appearance, the reactionaries are terrifying, but in reality they are not so powerful. From a long-term point of view, it is not the reactionaries but the people who are really powerful." In the 1960's Mao stated that "American imperialism" should be despised strategically but respected tactically. The short-term potency of United States military power must be recognized in specific conflict situations. However, the long-term effectiveness of American power is illusory because that power rests on vulnerable political bases. By gaining active or passive support among anti-colonialist new nations of the Third World and by eroding the political bases on which the United States military position in these areas must rest, communism, Mao said, will triumph over the "paper tiger."

Similarly, Mao Tse-tung's attitude toward the Soviet Union continued to be shaped by both nationalistic and ideological considerations. He realized that Russian economic aid and technical advice had been important to China before and during the first Five Year Plan, but he also recognized that after the Soviet decision in 1960 to withdraw technical experts and to suspend shipments of equipment, the People's Republic of China had no prospect of receiving Soviet aid in its effort to alleviate adverse pressures on its economic development programs. Nor would Moscow offer Peking any prospect of direct, sustained assistance in China's efforts to develop nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Impatient with the recalcitrance and "revisionism" of the Soviet leaders, Mao in the early 1960's made increasingly violent verbal attacks on the Soviet leadership, saying that the Chinese Communists were the true revolutionaries and guardians of Leninist orthodoxy and that Soviet polices were inconsistent and even pro-Western. At no point, however, did Mao argue that China was equal to the Soviet Union in industrial, military, or scientific capabilities. He confined his attacks to ideology and policy. The emergence of Peking as an aggressive and articulate center of neo-orthodoxy in the international Communist system made it impossible for the Soviet leadership to maintain the unity and direction that the Kremlin had symbolized for four decades. Such pronouncements and presumptions as those expressed in the Central Committee's highly critical letter to the Soviet party of 14 June 1963 created problems for Communist leaders throughout the world. The replacement of Khrushchev with Breznev and Kosygin in 1964 failed to alleviate Sino-Soviet tensions.

Disunity in the top command of the Chinese Communist party became apparent in the mid-1960's, culminating in the so-called Cultural Revolution of 1966. The summer of that year brought reports of the first mass rally in Peking of the Red Guards, most of whom were young people who were intent on expressing their frenzied adoration of Mao Tse-tung. The new movement seemed to bear the imprint of Mao in that its dominant characteristics were an emphasis on revolutionary voluntarism and an impatience with bureaucratic constraints. The stated aim of the Cultural Revolution was to root out "old" customs, habits, and ways of thought and to rid China of lingering bourgeois and Western influences. Its major targets were those institutions in Chinese society that appeared to hinder "permanent revolution." The Chinese Communist party structure itself became a prime target in the drive to purge so-called revisionist leaders and tendencies. Teng Hsiao-p'ing, P'eng Chen and other senior Communist leaders were vilified as revisionists; Liu Shao-ch'i, for two decades the secondranking party leader and Mao's apparent successor, also was subjected to public condemnation. At the same time, Mao's wife, Chiang Ch'ing, emerged from a quarter-century of seclusion to take a prominent public role as deputy chief of the group directing the Cultural Revolution. Perhaps the most important results of this political disarray and economic disruption were the designation of Lin Piao as Mao's heir apparent and the emergence of the People's Liberation Army, headed by Lin Piao, as a locus of authority in China.

In 1967 Mao Tse-tung made a number of public appearances, received several foreign delegations, and made two tours into the Yangtze valley. To a degree, his public appearances belied reports of his ill health. By the time of Mao's seventy-fourth birthday, in December 1967, the Cultural Revolution seemed to have subsided somewhat, and salvage and reconstruction activities seemed to have begun. Praise of the leadership and wisdom of Mao Tse-tung continued to permeate the mass media, and it was apparent that a major segment of the paper and metal industry was devoted to the production and distribution of materials contributing to the perpetuation of the Cult of Mao Tse-tung. In 1967 alone more than 76,000,000 sets of the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung were published, along with some 47,000,000 copies of Mao's Selected Readings and 57,000,000 copies of his poems. Even more notable was the report that 350,000,000 copies had been produced of the little red booklet entitled Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung. In addition, Mao Tse-tung badges by the hundreds of millions and portraits in all shapes and sizes contributed to the canonization process.

Basic Records of Mao's Career

To understand the Thought of Mao Tse-tung it is necessary to study his writings. Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive, critically edited edition of Mao's published writings available in Chinese. The Peking-published Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung is a bowdlerized series which virtually ignores Mao's pre- 192 7 writings and which provides the reader with notes that often are instructive but rarely are objective. The official Chinese version of the Selected Works was published in four volumes between 1952 and 1960, and an official English translation in four volumes appeared in the early 1960's. A volume of 29 articles, speeches, and directives from the 1928-49 period, Selected Military Writings of Mao Tse-tung, was published in 1963. The following year saw the issuance of a two-volume Selected Readings from Mao Tse-tung's Works. Mao Tse-tung on Art and Literature appeared in 1960. Beginning in 1957, Peking began to issue new editions of Mao Tse-tung's poetry. Most of the 40 or so poems that appeared in the next few years also were translated into English and French.

An important source of information about Mao Tse-tung's early career is Li Jui's authorized biography, Mao Tse-tung Cung-chih ti ch'u-ch'i ko-ming huo-tung, published at Peking in 1957. Mao's autobiography, as told to Edgar Snow in 1936, is contained in Snow's Red Star Over China, published in 1937. One of Snow's later books, The Other Side of the River : Red China Today (1962), contains a section on Mao as Snow saw him at Peking in 1960. The most recent and most comprehensive account of Mao's career is Stuart Schram's Mao Tse-tung, published in England in 1966 and in the United States in 1967. Schram's introduction to his 1963 collection of documents, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, provides a fine introduction to the mind and political personality of Mao. Other full-length studies of Mao are Jerome Ch'en's Mao and the Chinese Revolution, published in 1965, and John E. Rue's work on the Kiangsi period, Mao Tse-tung in Opposition, 1927-1935. Information about Mao Tse-tung appears in virtually every serious book and in most articles dealing with Chinese Communism. Although assessments of his career and interpretations of his thoughts and actions vary, most scholars agree that the career of Mao Tse-tung and the rise of Chinese Communism are aspects of a single subject.