of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 he was fully engaged in revolu-
tionary and military activities. He proved a great guerrilla leader and military
tactician, fighting successively the established Chinese authorities, the Japa-
nese, and the nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek. He was Chairman of the CCP
from 1935 until his death in 1976, and became Chinese head of state in 1949.
His most important contribution was the radical rethinking of Marxist-
Leninismto suit the overwhelmingly agricultural and traditionalist societies
of Asia, and his insistence on finding his revolutionary e ́lite from the peasantry
rather than the urban proletariat. This alone, and his success in achieving the
theoretical goal, would have made him a master tactician of Marxism. How-
ever, he went much further in his thought, continually trying to make a
communist regime much less dependent on the bureaucratic e ́lite of the party
than any other leader in power (as opposed to the outsiders like Rosa
Luxemburgor the laterTrotsky). In a series of radical attacks on the
institutionalized ‘cadres’ of the party and state he fought, often alone among
his e ́lite, a battle to keep close contacts with the actual aspirations of Chinese
peasant life. Classically educated himself (he was a poet of considerable
distinction), he tended to express his ideas in the idiom of classical Chinese
tradition rather than the jargon of Marxist-Leninism, and indeedStalin,
among others, felt that he either actually did not know, or did not wish to
know, very much about the ‘scientific socialism’ of the orthodox canon.
Certainly he appears to have used Marxism simply as a handy weapon to fight
the encrusted tradition of Chinese feudalism.
Three of his great campaigns against institutionalized and undemocratic
party e ́litism are characteristic. In 1956, when the communist world was
rocked by the Hungarian uprising, and when its repercussions were met with
extra repression in Eastern Europe, Mao reacted in quite the opposite way.
Launching a campaign he called ‘The Hundred Flowers’, he urged the Chinese
actively to criticize the shortcomings of party leaders, insisting that any
injustices must be brought to light, and that no party that was vulnerable to
such attacks deserved to rule. The campaign was brought to a rapid halt,
demonstrating what was little realized in the West at the time, that Mao had far
from perfect control over his own party leaders, and was often without a
majority in thepolitburo. A few years later he ignored the arguments of
technicians and economists and tried to rush China’s economic development,
to build true communism, in a massive and short term plan. Typical of this (he
called it The Great Leap Forward) was his plan to push Chinese steel
production to 30 million tons a year by urging the building of thousands of
tiny ‘backyard’ steel furnaces. As with most of his economic plans, it was a
disaster, completely ignoring the need for massive capital injection and large
plants with increasing returns to scale. Again it was stopped short, after little
more than a year, by pressure from his fellow leaders.
Mao Zedong