Word: mao
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...that time (1910), China's revolution against the tottering Manchu dynasty was in progress. Swept along by the torrent, Mao clipped off his queue as an antimonarchist demonstration. Other students promised to follow his example, but later reneged. This prepared Mao for party discipline-or what Lenin called "democratic centralism." Recalls Mao: "A friend of mine and I therefore assaulted them in secret and forcibly removed their queues, a total of more than ten falling victim to our shears...
...Marxist. The Russian Revolution (1917) shook China with fear and hope. It gave Mao the simple answers he was looking for. Excitedly, he traveled between Changsha, Peking and Shanghai, doing odd jobs and organizing workers and students. In Peking he worked as a librarian and for the first time he sensed himself a proletarian. "I stayed in . . . a little room which held seven other peopie," he said. "I used to have to warn people on each side of me when I wanted to turn over . . ." He read the Communist Manifesto...
When the Chinese Communist Party allied itself with Dr. Sun Yat-sen's nationalist revolutionary movement, Mao worked in the combined executive committees of the Communist Party and the Kuomintang. In this capacity he met a young Kuomintang leader who, like himself, was a country boy with the urge to take a hand in China's destiny. He was Chiang Kaishek...
...Trotskylte. The Communist-Kuomintang alliance did not last long. Chiang was one of the first to realize that cooperation with the Communists is possible only by surrendering to them. Chiang preferred not to surrender. By 1927, the Chinese Communists were once more on their own. In his native Hunan, Mao tirelessly tried to organize the peasants. But Li Lisan, Mao's noncommittal correspondent, was chosen by Moscow to head the Chinese party. In orthodox Marxist fashion, Li Lisan based his hopes on the urban proletariat; he considered China's peasant millions too backward to grasp the new revolutionary...
...city rebellions failed bloodily. Moscow deposed Li as a "half-Trotskyite" and ordered him to Russia for corrective education. "Lilisanism" was declared incorrect by Moscow. Mao Tse-tung meanwhile formulated a simple but fateful strategy: in an industrially backward country whose whole life depended on the peasantry, the Communists must win the peasants first, and give them arms...