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The eldest son of four children of a moderately prosperous peasant farmer, Mao Zedong was born in the village of Shaoshan in Xiangtan County (湘潭縣), Hunan province. His ancestors had migrated from Jiangxi province during the Ming Dynasty and had pursued farming for generations.
During the 1911 Revolution he served in the Hunan provincial army. In the 1910s, Mao returned to school, where he became an advocate of physical fitness and collective action.
After graduation from Hunan Normal School in 1918, Mao travelled with his high-school teacher and future father-in-law, Professor Yang Changji (杨昌济), to Beijing during the May Fourth Movement, when Yang lectured at Peking University. From Yang's recommendations, he worked under Li Dazhao, the head of the university library and attended speeches by Chen Duxiu. While working for the Peking University library, Mao acquired a taste for books, something he was to retain in later years. Also in Beijing, he married his first wife, Yang Kaihui, a Peking University student and the daughter of Mao's high-school teacher. (When Mao was 14, his father had arranged a marriage for him with a fellow villager, Luo Shi [羅氏], but Mao never recognized this marriage.) (See section 6 Family )
Instead of going abroad like many of his radical compatriots, Mao spent the early 1920s traveling in China, and finally returned to Hunan, where he took the lead in promoting collective action and labor rights.
At age 27, Mao attended the First Congress of the Communist Party of China in Shanghai in July 1921. Two years later he was elected to the Central Committee of the party at the Third Congress.
During the first KMT-CPC united front, Mao served as the director of the Kuomintang's (KMT) (or Nationalist Party) Peasant Training Institute , and in early 1927 he was dispatched to Hunan Province to report on the recent peasant uprisings in the wake of the Northern Expedition. The report that Mao produced from this investigation is considered the first important work of Maoist theory.
Main article: Maoism
During this time, Mao developed many of his political theories. In the field of philosophy, Mao's ideas are considered more culturally significant than original; still, his ideas have had a monumental impact on generations of Chinese and have significantly affected the rest of the world.
One significant idea was his view of peasants as the source of revolution. Traditional Marxist-Leninist theory had seen the urban workers as the driving force behind the revolution, whereas Mao argued that in China's case, it was the peasantry from which the revolution would develop. Since China had no significant urban working-class population but had many dissatisfied peasants, this idea was necessary for the argument that communism was applicable to China.
Mao also built on the theories of Hegel and Marx to create a new theory of materialist dialectics. First by applying the theory of the dialectic to real-world conflicts, then by asserting that only the empirical reality of the conflict mattered, Mao developed a type of dialectic theory that was studied for decades. It is difficult to determine the true validity of this theory, however, since so many analyses of it have been heavily influenced by political biases.
During this time, Mao also developed more practical ideas, such as a three-stage theory of guerilla warfare and the concept of the people's democratic dictatorship.
Mao escaped the white terror in the spring and summer of 1927 and led the ill-fated Autumn Harvest Uprising at Changsha, Hunan, that fall. Mao barely survived this mishap (he escaped his guards on the way to his execution) and he and his rag-tag band of loyal guerillas found refuge in the Jinggang Mountains, in southeastern China. There, from 1931 to 1934, Mao helped established the Chinese Soviet Republic and was elected chairman. It was during this period that Mao married He Zizhen, after Yang Kaihui had been killed by KMT forces.
Mao, with the help of Zhu De, built a modest but effective guerilla army, undertook experiments in rural reform and government, and provided refuge for Communists fleeing the rightist purges in the cities. Under increasing pressure from the KMT encirclement campaigns, there was a struggle for power within the Communist leadership. Mao was removed from his important positions and replaced by individuals (including Zhou Enlai) who appeared loyal to the orthodox line advocated by Moscow and represented within the CPC by a group known as the 28 Bolsheviks.
Chiang Kai-shek, who had earlier assumed nominal control of China due in part to the Northern Expedition, was determined to eliminate the Communists. To evade the KMT forces, the Communists engaged in the " Long March", a retreat from Jiangxi in the southeast to Shaanxi in the northwest of China. It was during this 9600-km, year-long journey that Mao emerged as the top Communist leader, aided by the Zunyi Conference and the defection of Zhou Enlai to Mao's side.From his base in Yan'an, Mao led the Communist resistance against the Japanese in the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945).
Mao further consolidated power over the Communist Party in 1942 by launching a "Rectification" campaign against rival CPC members such as Wang Ming, Wang Shiwei, and Ding Ling. Also while in Yan'an, Mao divorced He Zizhen and married the actress Lan Ping, who would become known as Jiang Qing.
During the Sino-Japanese War, Mao Zedong's strategies were opposed by both Chiang Kai-shek and the United States. The US regarded Chiang as an important ally able to help shorten the war by engaging the Japanese occupiers in China. Chiang, in contrast, sought to build the ROC army for the certain conflict with Mao's communist forces after the end of World War II. This fact was not understood well in the US and precious lend-lease armaments continued to be allocated to the Kuomintang.
After the end of World War II, the US continued to support Chiang Kai-shek, now openly against the communist Red Army led by Mao Zedong in the civil war for control of China as part of its view to contain and defeat "world communism". Likewise, the Soviet Union gave open support to Mao and gave large supplies of arms to the Chinese Communists.
On January 21, 1949, KMT forces suffered massive losses against Mao's Red Army. In the early morning of December 10, 1949, Red Army troops laid siege to Chengdu, the last KMT-occupied city in mainland China, and Chiang Kai-shek evacuated to Taiwan on the same day.
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