Mao Zedong

Early life

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.

Related Topics:
Shaoshan - Xiangtan - Hunan - Jiangxi - Ming Dynasty

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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.

Related Topics:
1911 Revolution - 1910s

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After graduation from Hunan First Normal University in 1918, Mao traveled 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 held a faculty position at Peking University. Due to Yang's recommendation, he worked as an assistant in the university library (which was headed by Li Dazhao). At the same time, Mao registered as a part-time student at Peking University and sat in lectures of many leading scholars, such as Chen Duxiu, Hu Shih, and Qian Xuantong. As he was working, he read a lot, which brought him a life-long influence. Also in Beijing, he married his first wife, Yang Kaihui, a Peking University student and Yang Changji’s daughter. (When Mao was 14, his father had arranged a marriage for him with a fellow villager, Luo , but Mao never recognized this marriage.) (See section 7 Family)

Related Topics:
Hunan First Normal University - 1918 - Yang Changji - Beijing - May Fourth Movement - Peking University - Li Dazhao - Chen Duxiu - Hu Shih - Qian Xuantong - Yang Kaihui - Section 7 Family

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Instead of going abroad which was the path of 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.

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At age 27, Mao attended the First Congress of the Communist Party of China in Shanghai on July 23 1921. Two years later he was elected to the Central Committee of the party at the Third Congress. He worked for a while in Shanghai, where the CCP was based at the time, but after the party suffered major setbacks in organizing the labor union movement and problems abounded with the alliance with the Nationalist Party, Kuomintang, (also known as KMT). he got disillusioned with the revolutionary movement and moved back to his home village of Shaoshan, apparently retired from politics. During this time he also developed neurasthenia, a form of depression, which plagued him occasionally for the rest of his life. However, he gained back his interest in the revolution after the violent uprisings in Shanghai and Canton in 1925, which triggered the "Avenge the Shame"-movement in all of China, and moved back into active politics, moving to Canton where the KMT had its strongest base.

Related Topics:
Shanghai - July 23 - 1921 - Kuomintang - Shaoshan - Neurasthenia - Canton - 1925 - Avenge the Shame - China

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During the Chinese Civil War’s first KMT-CCP united front, Mao served as the director of the Peasant Training Institute of the Kuomintang. 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.

Related Topics:
Kuomintang - 1927 - Northern Expedition

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