the Chinese revolution. He founded the People’s Republic of China
(PRC) in 1949 and served as the chairman of the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) and president of the Republic until his death (with the
exception of the period 1959–1968 when Liu Shaoqi was the president
of the Republic).
Mao graduated from the First Provincial Normal School in Chang-sha
(capital of Hunan Province) in 1918 and worked as a librarian at
Beijing University, where he read copiously and was influenced by
such pioneer Communists as Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, who took
leading parts in the May Fourth Movement (1919). Mao became
a Marxist and a founding member of the CCP in 1921. He organized
(1920s) peasant and industrial unions sponsored by the Kuomintang (or
the Nationalist Party) and directed (1926) the Kuomintang’s Peasant
Movement Training Institute. Following the Kuomintang–Communist
split (1927), the failure of Mao’s ‘‘Autumn Harvest Uprising’’ resulted
in his ouster from the central committee of the Communist Party.
From 1928 to 1931, Mao, with the help of Zhu De and later of
Lin Biao, moved from cities to the countryside and established rural
revolutionary bases and the Red Army. He was elected chairman of
the newly established Soviet Republic of China in Jiangxi province
in 1931. Five encirclement and annihilation campaigns by Chiang
Kai-shek against the Communist Party eventually forced the latter
into the Long March (6000 miles/9656 km) from Jiangxi to Yan’an
in northern China for its survival. When Japan invaded China in 1937,
the CCP concentrated its forces against Japan’s invasion. Though
some may claim that there were other forces resisting the Japanese
invasion of China, Mao provided the leadership, in theory and in
practice, for the Communist Party that was the mainstay of resistance
to the Japanese invasion. Mao lost at least five of his family members
and other relatives for the causes of the Chinese revolution and the
anti-Japan war (Han, 1987 ). In 1945, China won the war against
the Japanese, and the Kuomintang and the CCP began to engage in
a civil war for control of China. The CCP drove Chiang Kai-shek’s
Kuomintang to Taiwan from mainland China in 1949 and established
the PRC.
Mao initially followed the Soviet model of economic development
and social change until the Sino-USSR split in 1958. In the same year,
Mao launched the Great Leap Forward in an attempt to rejuvenate
China’s economy after the USSR’s withdrawal of its aid to China.
Leadership theories and practices of Mao and Deng 207