Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

Peking. At the university he came under the influence of two professors, Marxists, who
were later to found the Chinese Communist Party in 1919. One year later, while
principal of the school in Changsha, he founded his own branch of the Chinese
Communist Party, later becoming the general party secretary for the Hunan Province,
and, in 1921, was one of only twelve delegates to the “First Congress.”
Between the years 1920 and 1935, Mao was intimately involved in both the political
and military struggles with General Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) and the Kuomintang
(KMT). Developing his own theories of the potential of his fellow peasants for revolutionary
activity, he and his followers engaged in a violent confrontation with nationalist Chinese
leader Chiang Kai-shek from 1927 through 1934. During 1934–1935, Mao took part
in the legendary “Long March,” (the purpose of which was to evade Chiang’s Nationalist
military forces). The latter resulted in the deaths of more than seventy-five thousand soldiers
and party officials.
By 1943 Mao had become the chairman of the Communist Party and was thereafter
always referred to by the sobriquet “Chairman Mao.” Though the alliance between Chiang’s
and Mao’s forces against their common enemy was a tenuous one during World War
II, the defeat of the Japanese was their first priority.
Open civil war erupted between them after World War II in 1946. By 1949, after a continuously
bloody civil war, Mao had essentially defeated the nationalists (Chiang had
retreated to the island of Formosa—now Taiwan), and the People’s Republic of China
was officially declared on October 1, 1949. Three years later, in 1950, he allied his nation
with the Soviet Union becoming, in the process, a major regional power. Once in power,
Mao and the Communist Party brooked no dissent whatsoever. Estimates of those killed
for opposition in the early years stand at 3 million or higher.
On the domestic front, Mao’s two major initiatives—the “Great Leap Forward” in
the 1950s, and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s—both led to massive repression
and the deaths of many Chinese. As for the Great Leap Forward, it was designed to
address the growing population and the need for increasing technological mastery, but
proved to be of only limited success. In regard to the infamous Cultural Revolution, it
sought to bring dissidents (e.g., “bourgeois professors, bureaucrats, and industrialists”)
into Communist thinking through “reeducation,” but if such were not possible, those
labeled dissidents were executed. Paralleling these difficulties was Mao’s and the
Chinese’s growing separation from Soviet Russia, and their desire to become the Asian
superpower.
Mao died on September 9, 1976, at the age of eighty-two. As a world leader he ruled
over the most populous nation in the world authoritatively and dictatorially, only
momentarily losing his position in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but regaining his hold,
with the support of the Red Army, his long-standing power base. His defeat of the Nationalist
Chinese under Chiang Kai-shek enabled him to translate his vision and program of
social reform into reality for more than a billion people.
Any assessments of his leadership must take into consideration not only the size of the
population of the country itself—more than 1 billion people—but the state of its initial
preindustrialization prior to his assuming the chairmanship of the Communist Party, his
ruthless genocidal destruction of those who opposed his regime, his military tactics against
the KMT, his own Marxist-Leninist philosophy, his shaky relationship with Soviet Russia,
and his relative isolation from other countries. That said, the ruthlessness under which his
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