Before the Russian Revolution in 1917, there was little to encourage disaffected Chinese intellectuals in Marx’s conviction that the processes of capitalist production must achieve critical mass before a workers’ revolution could succeed. Looking back on the immense changes he had carved out on the Chinese political landscape, Mao would later assert that the Bolshevik uprising struck political thinkers in China like a “thunderbolt.” Events in Russia were now a matter of intense interest because of the perceived similarities between the two backward giants. Traveling to Beijing, Mao became the assistant and protégé of the university librarian Li Dazhao, an early Chinese communist who was studying, holding seminars, and writing about the Russian revolutionary movement.

  Mao took Marxist and Leninist ideas and adapted them to resolve the problem of a workers’ revolution in a land of peasants. Lenin’s theory of imperialism envisioned communism spreading through developing countries and gradually surrounding the capitalist West. Mao believed that countries still mired in feudalism would skip the capitalist stage of development and move straight into full socialism. An elite vanguard party with a higher class “consciousness” would instill revolutionary values and a proletarian identity in the peasantry.

Rice farmers and other peasants handed over their land to cooperatives in a collectivization program that would form a key part of Mao’s drive to reform China’s rural economy.

The excitement generated by the Russian Revolution might have been confined to university discussion groups had it not been for the Western Allies’ heedless betrayal of Chinese interests following World War I. More than 140,000 Chinese laborers had been shipped to France to support the war effort of the Triple Entente —Britain, France, and Russia— with the understanding that, among other things, the German protectorate of Shandong on the northeast coast of China would be returned to Chinese hands after the war. Instead, the Allies gave the territory to Japan at the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919.

Students across China protested against their country’s “spineless” capitulation. City workers and businessmen in Shanghai joined them, and a coalition of diverse groups united as the May Fourth Movement to force the government to accede to their demands. China’s representatives at Versailles refused to sign the peace treaty, but their objections had no effect on the actions of the Allies. The real significance of the May Fourth Movement was that vast numbers of Chinese people began to think about their precarious lives and the vulnerability of their country to threats from the outside world. It was a significant turning point for Chinese political thought, in which Western-style liberal democracy lost much of its appeal, and Marxist-Leninist concepts gained traction.

  Mao was one of the radical intellectuals who came to the fore at this time and went on to organize peasants and workers in the Communist Party. He would never forget the lesson of Shandong: to negotiate from a position of weakness was to lose. The ultimate power in politics is the power of armed force. Mao would be ruthless both in seeking armed power and in his willingness to use it.

  In 1921, Mao attended the First Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in Shanghai, and in 1923 he was elected to the party’s Central Committee. He spent the 1920s organizing labor strikes, studying, and developing his ideas. It became clear to him that in China, it would have to be a rural and not an urban proletariat who would carry out the revolution.

The CPC shared the ideological outlook of Marxist-Leninism with the Kuonmintang (KMT)—China’s nationalist and antimonarchist party founded by Sun Yat-Sen, with links to Soviet Russia—and both had the overall aim of national unification. However, the Communists’ popular movement of peasants and workers was too radical for the KMT, who turned on their CPC allies in 1927, crushing them and suppressing their organizations in the cities. This violent conflict was the crucible from which the doctrine of “Maoism” emerged as a guerrilla-style rural Marxian revolutionary strategy.

In 1934 and 1935, Mao—now the chairman of the Chinese Soviet Republic, a small republic declared in the mountainous region of Jiangxi, southeast China— cemented his position as foremost among Chinese communists during “The Long March.” The first of a series of marches, this 6,000-mile (9,600-km) ordeal, lasting over a year, was ostensibly undertaken to repel Japanese invaders, but it also served as a military retreat by the Communists’ Red Army to evade the Nationalist forces led by Chiang Kaishek. They crossed 18 mountain ranges and 24 major rivers, and only one-tenth of the original force of 80,000 soldiers and workers who set out from Jiangxi in October 1934 survived the march to reach Shanghai a year later. Mao’s supremacy was sealed, and he became leader of the CPC in November 1935. Following Japan’s defeat by the Allies in World War II, the resumption of civil war in China, and the eventual surrender of Nationalist forces, the communist People’s Republic of China was finally established in 1949, with Mao at the helm.

Mao’s cult of personality was relentlessly reinforced by mass demonstrations of crowds carrying posters of their leader and copies of his Little Red Book of quotations.

In 1938, in his concluding remarks to the Sixth Plenary Session of the Sixth Central Committee of the CPC, Mao expounded on his theory of revolution. He maintained that in a China that was still semifeudal, the truly revolutionary class was the peasantry, and only military struggle could achieve revolution; demonstrations, protests, and strikes would never be enough. With the peasant-proletariat armed and powerful, Mao—now known as “The Great Helmsman”—did bring about many changes for the good. Among other measures, he banned arranged marriages and promoted the status of women, doubled school attendance, raised literacy, and created universal housing. However, Mao’s admiration for Stalin and his infatuation with Marxian language and theories of revolution disguised the many thousands of brutal killings that he and his forces committed on the road to power. There were to be many millions more—some from the violent repression of those deemed opponents of China, and some from neglect. In the space of three decades, Mao forced the country to almost complete self-sufficiency, but at an unspeakable cost in human life, comforts, freedoms, and sanity.

The Five Year Plan launched in 1953 achieved spectacular increases in output, and was followed by the “Great Leap Forward” in 1958. By forcing the Chinese economy to attempt to catch up with the West through mass-labor projects in agriculture, industry, and infrastructure, Mao brought about one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known. Between 1958 and 1962, at least 45 million Chinese people —mostly peasants—were tortured, overworked, starved, or beaten to death, a fatality rate only slightly smaller than the entire death toll of World War II.

  The atrocities of this period were carefully cataloged in the now-reopened Communist Party archives. These records show that the “truly revolutionary class”— Mao’s chosen people in the great struggle for social justice—were in fact treated as faceless, expendable objects by Mao and the Party.

  In contrast to Marx’s conviction that socialism would be an inevitable development from the material and cultural achievements of capitalism, Mao correlated the poverty he saw in China with a moral purity that he believed would lead to a socialist Utopia. In 1966, the Cultural Revolution was introduced with the aim of cleansing China of “bourgeois” influences. Millions were “reeducated” through forced labor, and thousands executed.

The politics that for Mao grew “out of the barrel of a gun” turned out to be the totalitarian politics of terror, brutality, fantasy, and deceit. On his death, the CPC declared that his ideas would remain “a guide to action for a long time to come.” However, as society evolves and awareness grows of his horrific crimes, Mao’s influence on Chinese thought may finally be cast off.

Tractors made in China not only increased output but symbolized Mao’s policy of “maintaining independence and relying on our own efforts.”