Mao Zedong is still revered as a saint in China today. But his rule was marked by violence, terror and lawlessness. The "Great Chairman" brought the Middle Kingdom to the edge of the abyss.
Poor house of China
When Mao was born in 1893, China was a poor house. The late imperial dynasty that ruled the Middle Kingdom was incompetent and corrupt. The result:nationwide the Chinese population became impoverished.
Badly managed from within and completely bankrupt, China was harassed and enslaved by colonial powers from the outside - by the German Reich, Italy, the USA, but above all by Japan.
The Chinese themselves were exploited at home and treated like second-class citizens. The Japanese, in particular, carried out appalling massacres among the civilian population.
Mao's parents were only farmers, but had a decent income. Mao was not born into impoverished circumstances, he learned to read and write, for example. But like all peasant existences, Mao was also confronted with deprivation, hunger and need.
Mao becomes a communist
Many Chinese, who suffered greatly from the political and social ills of the early 20th century, were drawn to Communism. Communism seemed the only way to reverse the existing unjust conditions and get out of impoverishment.
The social system of capitalism was ideologically occupied by the foreign powers that exploited China. When the October Revolution broke out in Russia in 1918, many Chinese hoped that the Middle Kingdom would also be able to liberate itself from the oppressors through the teachings of Marxism-Leninism.
So the first communists were dissatisfied idealists. So was Mao, a young idealist who wanted to change the existing conditions. But those who became communists in China in the 1920s had little to gain and much to lose. Because the Kuomintang People's Party, which was in power at the time, ruled with all severity under its chairman Chiang Kai-shek, the communists were systematically persecuted.
Anyone who was a communist at the time was one out of genuine conviction. Countless communists were persecuted and executed. Mao managed to escape the brutal waves of persecution. On the "Long March" he was able to take the lead in the communist camp.
An idealistic communist
Mao and the "Long March"
On the run from Chiang Kai-shek's troops, the communists had to withdraw from the south of the country and switch to northern China, suffering heavy losses. The so-called "Long March" of 1934/35, which has become legendary, began, which in reality was a long flight.
The communist escape route stretched over 12,000 kilometers. Of the original 100,000 to 120,000 communists who set off, only around 10,000 survived the hardships and hardships of the odyssey.
In the middle of the "Long March" there were factional fights between the Moscow-loyal communists and the Chinese wing led by Mao. Through roped parties, intrigues and tactical skill, Mao couped his way to the top. Mao made himself number one in the Chinese Communist Party.
During the "Long March" Mao put himself at the head of the communists
China's number 1
The civil war-like clashes between the communists and Chiang Kai-shek's troops lasted until 1949. But the communists got the upper hand, they took over the helm in China.
Mao had reached the top:On October 1, 1949, the "Great Chairman" Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China on "Tiananmen Square" in Beijing. But this people's republic soon showed its true face:that of a communist dictatorship.
At the beginning of the communist takeover, Mao was enthusiastically celebrated by the Chinese people. He knew how to give something crucial back to the Chinese:self-esteem and confidence in the future.
Mao promised the end of oppression and propagated the glorious resurrection of the Middle Kingdom - balm for the battered Chinese soul. And he promised a fairer society, a radical redistribution.
In this way, early in his rule, Mao reestablished Chinese identity and united the country with a new sense of nationalism. In return, Mao allowed himself to be incensed with a monstrous cult of personality that would take on perverse proportions during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
Mao was in power for a quarter of a century
A "communist emperor"
For more than a quarter of a century, Mao ruled his country and imposed his will on the Chinese people. In the beginning, Mao was certainly an inwardly convinced communist. But then he was primarily committed to staying in power. In the years 1949 to 1959, at the height of his power, the "Great Chairman" of the communists saw himself in the tradition of the Chinese emperors.
Mao's role model:Qin Shihuangdi, the first emperor of China and a particularly cruel ruler who united the Middle Kingdom with extreme brutality in 221 AD. Mao - socialized during the war - was an outspoken violent man whose world view was determined by the categories of power, terror and contempt for human beings.
Mao's role model:Qin Shihuangdi - the first emperor of China
Decadent and unforgiving
Mao was not a great theorist, not an intellectual, not a thinker. The theoretical writings of Marxism-Leninism never interested him. Although Mao brought his own literary outpourings to the people by the millions and made them compulsory reading – and earned excellent money from it – he did not go down in literary history as a communist theorist.
Mao's frenetically celebrated phrases such as "The revolutionary must move among the people as in water" testify to a rather modest literary talent. In the meantime, several historians even assume that most of his writings are not even from Mao's own pen.
Furthermore, Mao did not speak Standard Chinese, but only spoke the dialect of his home province of Hunan. Mao enjoyed immense privileges and flouted every morality, compulsion, and privation he imposed on his long-suffering people. The Chinese died by the millions in the great famine at the beginning of the 1960s.
Mao, on the other hand, ate and drank in abundance. He led an excessive sex life and had numerous young girls taken to him, as he firmly believed in the life-prolonging practices of the Taoist tradition. He owned luxury cars, villas and swimming pools, he had enormous sums in special accounts that only he had access to.
1960:While his people are starving, Mao vacations on the beach
Corrupted by the Force
With extreme brutality and contempt for human beings, Mao suppressed all opposition in the country and covered China with a web of terror and mismanagement. He was clever, cunning and sure of his instincts, and especially in later years committed only to himself and his interests, endowed with an absolute will to power.
Mao was resistant to advice and tolerated neither criticism nor other opinions. Corrupted to the core by this unlimited power, a deep distrust eventually determined how he dealt with even those closest to him. In the end, Mao isolated himself from everything and everyone and only trusted himself. He lost touch with reality, with his own people. He died on September 9, 1976, at the age of 82, as a result of his third heart attack.
Cult of personality during the 1969 Cultural Revolution