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Mao Zedong and Communist China

Mao Zedong was born in 1893 to a peasant family in a farming village, where he experienced the difficulties that came with being poor in China at the time. He began studying to become a teacher as he grew older. He joined a political party called the Kuomintang, which managed to become rather respectable as a part of the government. However, he heard about communism at the schools where he was learning and decided that it sounded better. Before he could find a job, news of the success of the Bolshevik revolution came in, exciting interest in communism. Mao saw this as his opportunity to start a communist party in China, and by 1925 he had become a significant figure in the party and had grown it to be quite large. However, in 1925 a new leader came to power in China. He was a member of the Kuomintang, and did not have the same feelings about communism as the previous leader. This man decided to wipe out Mao’s party, who fled to a mountainous region of China, where the communists remained until 1934. it was then that another push to kill the commies came, and they were forced out of the mountains. Mao convinced them to run away to a whole different region of China. This was known as the “Long March” (real creative name, I know) as it was an 8,000 mile journey through harsh conditions. It took a year for the journey to be completed, and 70% of the people who started the journey died. Despite this, Mao managed to make himself the undisputed leader through sweet-talking the lower-ranked commies.

The Japanese were expanding their empire at this time, and decided to try their hand at invading china, seeing the conflict that was going on inside their borders, but instead of fighting individually, the Kuomintang and the communist joined forces to fight the Japanese. When WWII ended in 1945 this truce ended, but now the communists had a lot more resources, and were on even footing with the Kuomintang. This led to a brutal 4-year long civil war, in which Mao became leader of China in 1949.

This was the most successful part of Mao’s life, and he managed to increase women’s rights, double the schooling system, and increase healthcare, and all of it was pretty good quality. This was for the rural areas, however, as the well populated areas already had these things, and disapproved of having to pay taxes to help people other than themselves. Mao tried opening a complaint department, where people could complain and make requests on how the government should be run, but after seeing a good deal of complaints he began to fear that he would be overthrown by his people. He closed the complaint departments and began cracking down on the people, executing and imprisoning hundreds of thousands of people. Realizing that this was hurting the people, he began the “Great Leap Forward” (another imaginative name, but at least it was better than the last one). Mao tried organizing workers and regulating farming, in an attempt to make up for the previous crackdowns and to get china’s economy on par with the west’s, which had surpassed China. The great leap forward failed miserably, however, combined with a few years of naturally poor farming years, and caused the worst man-made famine in recorded history, causing the death of 40 million people.

He was quietly removed from power by his fellow communists in 1962, and didn’t expect anything from him, since he was 69 years old. He managed to form a following, unfortunately, in 1966 among the youth of china, who did not remember the great fall back, or the seemingly underwhelming benefits of communism. He managed to get back into position as the head of the country, and this time, made sure he would not be brushed away again. He closed all the schools and executed all of the intellectuals who didn’t openly support him, so that there could be no opposition to him. This was a far more extreme version of the crackdowns before, and much worse. This time period of total dictatorship is what Mao is most known for. He died in 1976, but China remained a communist dictatorship. Chen Yun, personal assistant of Mao once said that “Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have been immortal. Had he died in 1966, he would still have been a great man but flawed. But he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say?”

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The Bolshevik Revolution

The Russian Government had been ruled by Czars, or tsars, (pronounced “Zars”) who were the kings, or emperors, of Russia from 1721 to 1917, when the Russian people overthrew Nicholas II, the last of the Czars. This was known simply as the Russian Revolution of 1917. the Russians set up a provisional government to replace the czar system. However, this new government didn’t satisfy all of the Russians, with some forming their own political parties. The most prominent of these was the Bolsheviks, a socialist party. These people, led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, managed to get elected into the provisional government and began spreading their message among the people, gaining a great amount of support from those who were left unsatisfied by the previous revolution.

The Bolshevik Revolution came to pass on October 25th, 1917 according to the Julian calendar, which was used by the Russians at the time, though the Gregorian calendar dates it to November 7th, 1917, which is used today. It was startlingly bloodless, partly due to the fact that the Russian Revolution just ¾ of a year earlier was one of the most bloody in history, so anyone willing to die over the government had already been killed. The Bolsheviks simply stepped in and took control of all the government buildings, and were hailed as heroes by the people for freeing them from an oppressive government, and giving them freedom through communism. They would quickly realize that communism isn’t a “freeing” sort of government.

Lenin and Trotsky were communists, and derived their philosophy from Karl Marx, who wrote the famous “Communist Manifesto.” The driving idea behind communism was that by eliminating all property rights and dividing all resources among all people evenly, they would eliminate greed, making life better for all. While I’m not going to go into all the reasons communism doesn’t work, it is worth knowing, so I recommend researching it. For now, I’ll just say that instead of communism, every country that tried using it ended up with a dictatorship, and Russia was no exception. Lenin began killing off any opponent political parties, until there were only communists and pro-communists. If anyone spoke out against Lenin or the Bolsheviks, they were not heard from again. This was known as the Red Terror, and caused a third civil war to break out from 1917-1920, as the people realized the Bolsheviks were not saviors, but new masters. This time, the Bolsheviks won again, and Lenin renamed the government the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” also known as the USSR.

Lenin ruled until 1924, when he died of natural causes at age 53. He was succeeded by Joseph Stalin, who would take the power of the Dictatorship even further than Lenin had, entering Russia into the darkest time in it’s history.