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.
The Cultural Revolution, formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement in the People's Republic of China (PRC) launched by Mao Zedong in 1966, and lasting until his death in 1976. Its stated goal was to preserve Chinese communism by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society, and to re-impose Mao Zedong Thought as the dominant ideology in the PRC. The Revolution marked the return of Mao, who was Chairman of the Communist Party of China (CPC), to the central position of power after a period of less radical leadership to recover from the failures of the Great Leap Forward, which caused the Great Chinese Famine (1959–1961). However, the Revolution failed to achieve its main goals.
The Gang of Four was a Maoist political faction composed of four Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. They came to prominence during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and were later charged with a series of treasonous crimes. The gang's leading figure was Jiang Qing. The other members were Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen.
Zhou Shuren, better known by his pen name Lu Xun, was a Chinese writer, essayist, poet, and literary critic. He was a leading figure of modern Chinese literature. Writing in vernacular Chinese and classical Chinese, he was a short story writer, editor, translator, literary critic, essayist, poet, and designer. In the 1930s, he became the titular head of the League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai during republican era China (1912-1949).
Rosamond Soong Ch'ing-ling was a Chinese political figure. As the third wife of Sun Yat-sen, then Premier of the Kuomintang and President of the Republic of China, she was often referred to as Madame Sun Yat-sen. She was a member of the Soong family and, together with her siblings, played a prominent role in China's politics prior to and after 1949.
Kang Sheng was a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official, best known for having overseen the work of the CCP's internal security and intelligence apparatus during the early 1940s and again at the height of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A member of the CCP from the early 1920s, he spent time in Moscow during the early 1930s, where he learned the methods of the NKVD and became a supporter of Wang Ming for leadership of the CCP. After returning to China in the late 1930s, Kang Sheng switched his allegiance to Mao Zedong and became a close associate of Mao during the Anti-Japanese War, the Chinese Civil War and after. He remained at or near the pinnacle of power in the People's Republic of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1975. After the death of Chairman Mao and the subsequent arrest of the Gang of Four, Kang Sheng was accused of sharing responsibility with the Gang for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and in 1980 he was expelled posthumously from the CCP.
Zhang Guotao, or Chang Kuo-tao, was a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and rival to Mao Zedong. During the 1920s he studied in the Soviet Union and became a key contact with the Comintern, organizing the CCP labor movement in the United Front with the Kuomintang. In 1931, after the Party had been driven from the cities, he established the E-Yu-Wan Soviet. When his armies were driven from the region, he joined the Long March but lost a contentious struggle for party leadership to Mao Zedong. Zhang's armies then took a different route from Mao's and were badly beaten by local forces in Gansu. When his depleted forces finally arrived to join Mao in Yan'an, Zhang continued his losing challenge to Mao, and left the party in 1938. Zhang eventually retired to Canada, in 1968. He became a Christian shortly before his death in Toronto, Ontario in 1979. His memoirs provide valuable and vivid information on his life and party history.
The 28 Bolsheviks (二十八个半布尔什维克) were a group of Chinese students who studied at the Moscow Sun Yat-sen University from the late 1920s until early 1935, also known as the "Returned Students". The university was founded in 1925 as a result of Kuomintang's founder Sun Yat-Sen's policy of alliance with the Soviet Union, and was named after him. The university had an important influence on modern Chinese history by educating many prominent Chinese political figures. The most famous of these were collectively called the 28 Bolsheviks.
Big-character posters are handwritten posters with large characters, usually mounted on walls in public spaces such as universities, factories, government departments, and sometimes directly on the streets. They were used as a means of protest, propaganda, and popular communication. A form of popular political writing, big-character posters did not have a fixed format or style, and could appear in the form of letter, slogan, poem, commentary, etc. Though many different political parties around the world have used slogans and posters as propaganda, the most intense, extensive, and varied use of big-character posters was in China in various political campaigns associated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Big-character posters were first used extensively in the Hundred Flowers Campaign, and they played an instrumental role in almost all the subsequent political campaigns, culminating in the Cultural Revolution. Though the right to write big-character posters was deleted from the Constitution of the People's Republic of China in 1980, people still occasionally write big-character posters to express their personal and political opinions.
Mao Anying was the eldest son of Mao Zedong and Yang Kaihui.
Dazhai is a village and former commune of several hundred farmers in Xiyang County in eastern Shanxi province, chiefly known for Mao Zedong's directive, "Learn from Dazhai in agriculture", which set up Dazhai as the model for agricultural production throughout China during the 1960s and 1970s, amid the Cultural Revolution.
Yu Dongyue was born in Liuyang, a city in Hunan province of China on December 4, 1967. He is the former arts editor of Liuyang Daily. In the Tiananmen protests of 1989, following a plan made by his friend Yu Zhijian, he and Lu Decheng threw eggshells full of paint at a portrait of China’s political figure Mao Zedong. Yu Dongyue was given a 20-year prison sentence for "sabotage" and "counter-revolutionary propaganda”. He had become badly disturbed psychologically. He was also criticized for his "very avant-garde views on art." He also had been subjected to various physical tortures because of “reactionary statements” he and his friends made about officials.
Tao Zhu was a member of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
Ten Tigers from Kwangtung is a 1980 Hong Kong martial arts film directed by Chang Cheh and produced by Mona Fong. It is one of Chang Cheh’s tales of Shaolin’s historic rivalries with the Qing Dynasty and the Canton Tigers. Along with the Brave Archer series, Ten Tigers had an all-star cast of Shaw martial artists.
Nie Yuanzi was a Chinese academic administrator at Peking University, known for writing a big-character poster criticising the university for being controlled by the bourgeoisie, which is considered to have been the opening shot of the Cultural Revolution. She became a top leader of the Red Guards in Beijing, and was sentenced to 17 years in prison after the end of the Cultural Revolution.
During the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the portrait of Mao Zedong at Tiananmen was defaced. At 2:00pm, May 23, 1989, three young protesters from Liuyang, Hunan, posted banners on the wall of the Tiananmen gate's passway. The slogans on the banners read, Time to End the Five Thousand Years of Autocracy and Time to End the Cult of Personality. Shortly after, they threw eggs filled with pigment to the Portrait of Mao Zedong on the Tiananmen Gate. They were immediately caught by members of the Beijing Students' Autonomous Federation. At 5:00pm, they were forced to appear in a press conference and admitted that their activities were totally irrelevant with the movement. At 7:00pm, they were handed to Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau. On a TV program broadcast the same day, members of the Movement claim that they had nothing to do with the three youths, and criticized them. At 10:00pm, the defaced portrait of Mao Zedong was taken down and replaced by a spare.
Events in the year 1955 in China. The country had an estimated population of 605 million people.
Lü Houmin was a Chinese photographer who gained national and international recognition for taking official photographs of Chinese leaders, most notably Mao Zedong, from 1950 to 1964. Lü started out as a teacher, and later switched to photography. He was called Mao's private photographer because many of his photographs were different from the official ones, showing Mao in a more relaxed and personal manner.
Events from the year 1868 in China.
Mao Zedong's cult of personality was a prominent part of Chairman Mao Zedong's rule over the People's Republic of China from his rise in 1949 until his death in 1976. Mass media, propaganda and a series of other techniques were used by the state to elevate Mao Zedong's status to that of an infallible heroic leader, who could stand up against The West, and guide China to become a beacon of Communism. Mao himself, however, publicly criticized the personality cult which was formed around him.
