Mao lost much of his influence on account of the catastrophic failure
of the Great Leap Forward movement (Li, 1994 ). In an attempt to
redress the effects of the aforesaid movement, Mao launched the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), which turned into a
‘‘holocaust’’ (Naı ́m, 2005 ). Mao’s death from a prolonged illness in
1976 brought a prompt end to the Cultural Revolution because of the
nation’s strong reaction against the ‘‘cult of personality’’ and the
excessive collectivism and egalitarianism that had emerged during
the Cultural Revolution. A prolific political, military, philosophical,
social, and economic essayist, Mao was also a significant minor poet.
His major works are collected in the five volumes of the Selected
works of Mao Zedong.(For more detailed biographical descriptions
of Mao, see Li, 1994 ;Pye, 1976 ; and Shan, 2005 ).
‘‘Seek truth from facts’’(shi-shi-qiu-shi)
Mao Zedong once inscribed a four-character slogan, ‘‘Seek truth from
facts,’’ for the Central Party School in Yan’an (for many years the
central base of Mao’s Chinese Revolution) as the fundamental principle
for tackling the problems confronting the Chinese Communist Party.
This principle became the fundamental thought in Mao’s leadership
philosophy, the faithful execution of which contributed to his great
successes during the Chinese Revolutionary War (1921–1937), the
Anti-Japan War (1937–1945), and the Chinese Civil War with Chiang
Kai-shek (1945–1949). Mao did not dogmatically adopt Marxism-
Leninism, but ‘‘sinified’’ them to suit the actual conditions in China
(Knight, 2005 ; Shan, 2005 ). Mao’s ‘‘sinification’’ of Marxism according
to Chinese conditions crystallized into what became known as the
‘‘Thoughts of Mao Zedong’’, perceived by scholars (e.g. Gorman,
1982 ) as Mao’s great contribution to orthodox Marxism.
The essence of ‘‘seeking truth from facts’’ is expounded at length
in Mao’s famous essay ‘‘On practice,’’ published in July 1937, later
included in volume I of theSelected works of Mao Zedong(Mao,
1954a). ‘‘Facts,’’ Mao explained, are the totality of things existing in
the external world; ‘‘truth’’ represents the inherent laws, regularities,
and interconnections in the objective reality; and ‘‘seek’’ means to
investigate. Any job must proceed from the actual conditions inside
and outside the country, the province, and the county, exhorted Mao.
Guidelines for actions must derive from intrinsic laws (rather than
208 Xin-an Lu and Jie Lu