Mao Zedong, also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who was the founder of the People's Republic of China (PRC), which he led as the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from the establishment of the PRC in 1949 until his death in 1976. Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist, his theories, military strategies, and political policies are collectively known as Maoism.
Maoism, officially called Mao Zedong Thought by the Chinese Communist Party, is a variety of Marxism–Leninism that Mao Zedong developed to realise a socialist revolution in the agricultural, pre-industrial society of the Republic of China and later the People's Republic of China. The philosophical difference between Maoism and traditional Marxism–Leninism is that the peasantry is the revolutionary vanguard in pre-industrial societies rather than the proletariat. This updating and adaptation of Marxism–Leninism to Chinese conditions in which revolutionary praxis is primary and ideological orthodoxy is secondary represents urban Marxism–Leninism adapted to pre-industrial China. Later theoreticians expanded on the idea that Mao had adapted Marxism–Leninism to Chinese conditions, arguing that he had in fact updated it fundamentally, and that Maoism could be applied universally throughout the world. This ideology is often referred to as Marxism–Leninism–Maoism to distinguish it from the original ideas of Mao.
Edgar Parks Snow was an American journalist known for his books and articles on Communism in China and the Chinese Communist revolution. He was the first Western journalist to give an account of the history of the Chinese Communist Party following the Long March, and he was also the first Western journalist to interview many of its leaders, including Mao Zedong. He is best known for his book, Red Star Over China (1937), an account of the Chinese Communist movement from its foundation until the late 1930s.
Mao: The Unknown Story is a 2005 biography of the Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong (1893–1976) that was written by the husband-and-wife team of the writer Jung Chang and the historian Jon Halliday, who detail Mao's early life, his introduction to the Chinese Communist Party, and his political career. The book summarizes Mao's transition from a rebel against the autocratic Kuomintang government to the totalitarian dictator over the People's Republic of China. Chang and Halliday heavily cover Mao's role in the planning and the execution of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. In that capacity, they note that Mao is responsible for an unprecedented death toll during peacetime that ranged from 40 to 70 million people.
Steven Westley Mosher is an American social scientist, anti-abortion activist, neoconservative, anti-communist, and president of the Population Research Institute (PRI), which opposes population control and abortion. In the early 1990s, he was the director of the Claremont Institute's Asian Study Center, as well as a member of the US Commission on Broadcasting to China. He is the author of several books concerning China.
Red Star Over China is a 1937 book by Edgar Snow. It is an account of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that was written when it was a guerrilla army and still obscure to Westerners.
The Yan'an Rectification Movement, also known as Zhengfeng or Cheng Feng, was the first ideological mass movement initiated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), going from 1942 to 1945. The movement took place at the communist base at Yan'an, a remote and isolated mountainous area in northern Shaanxi, after the communists' Long March. Though it was during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the CCP was experiencing a time of relative peace when they could focus on internal affairs.
Luo Yixiu, a Han Chinese woman, was the first wife of the later Chinese communist revolutionary and political leader Mao Zedong, to whom she was married from 1908 until her death. Coming from the area around Shaoshan, Hunan, in south central China – the same region as Mao – her family were impoverished local landowners.
Helen Foster Snow was an American journalist who reported from China in the 1930s under the name Nym Wales on the developing Chinese Civil War, the Korean independence movement and the Second Sino-Japanese War.
The Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries was the first political campaign launched by the People's Republic of China designed to eradicate opposition elements, especially former Kuomintang (KMT) functionaries accused of trying to undermine the new Chinese Communist Party government. It began in March 1950 when the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party issued the Directive on elimination of bandits and establishment of revolutionary new order, and ended in 1953.
Benjamin Isadore Schwartz was an American academic, political scientist, and sinologist who wrote on a wide range of topics in Chinese politics and intellectual history.
On Practice is one of Mao Zedong's most important philosophical works. Along with On Contradiction, this essay is a part of lectures Mao gave in 1937. It expresses Mao's support for Marxism and attempts to establish a distinctly Chinese brand of communist philosophy. At the time it was written, the Chinese Communist Party had just endured the Long March and their nationalist foes were still at large. Plus, China was facing a tremendous Japanese threat. Mao hoped to establish himself as the leader of China's communist party in order to unite China and vanquish the Japanese. On Practice was written as a part of this mission, for it gave Mao a more legitimate claim to lead by creating the basis for his communist philosophy, Maoism.
Chinese Shadows is a book written by Simon Leys, which is the pseudonym for Belgian Sinologist Pierre Ryckmans. It was originally published in the French language in 1974 under the title Ombres chinoises, and was then translated into English in 1977. The book is about Leys' six-month stay in China, which he made in 1972. Leys discusses the cultural and political destruction of the People's Republic of China by Mao Zedong, who was the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party at the time. He wrote under a pseudonym since, like other academics and journalists who refrained from criticizing China, he did not want to be barred from future visits to Beijing (Peking).
Journey to the Forbidden China is a book by Steven W. Mosher, an anti-communist author and activist. The book covers his anthropological work in the countryside of South China.
Merle Goldman is an American historian and sinologist of modern China. She is Professor Emerita of History, Boston University, especially known for a series of studies on the role of intellectuals under the rule of Mao Zedong and on the possibilities for democracy and political rights in present-day China.
Archibald Trojan Steele was an American foreign or war correspondent for United Press, The New York Times, the Chicago Daily News and the New York Herald Tribune. He covered China, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa from the early 1930s until his retirement in 1960. He then published several books, and is known for filing reports of the Nanjing Massacre in 1937 that first informed the world of the activities of the Japanese Army.
Gong Peng, born Gong Cisheng and also known as Gong Weihang, was a Chinese wartime spokeswoman for the Chinese Communist Party. After 1949 she was an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China, and was head of the Bureau of Information, the first woman to head a department.
Claude Cadart was a French sinologist and a specialist in the history of contemporary China. Together with his wife Cheng Yingxiang, he translated and published the memoirs of his father-in-law Peng Shuzhi, a dissident Trotskyist early leader of the Communist Party of China. He was one of the first European intellectuals to criticize Mao Zedong's political campaigns.
The Revenge of Heaven, subtitled Journal of a young Chinese, narrates the story of a sixteen/seventeen year old high-school student from Amoy in Southern Fujian, People's Republic of China (PRC), written by two US-American scholars.
How the Red Sun Rose: The Origins and Development of the Yan'an Rectification Movement, 1930–1945 is a book by Gao Hua published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press in 2000. It documents the ascendance of Mao Zedong as the absolute leader of the Chinese Communist Party. The book is banned in mainlaind China.
