Mao Zedong –His early years.

Mao Zedong stands out as one of the dominant figures of the twentieth century. Guerrilla leader, strategist, conqueror, ruler, poet, and philosopher, he placed his imprint on China, and on the world.
The process of change and upheaval in China, which Mao sought to master, had been going on for roughly a century by the time he was born in 1893. Its origins lay in the incapacity of the old order to cope with the population explo­sion at the end of the eighteenth century, and with other economic and social problems, as well as in the shock administered by the Opium War of 1840 and further European aggression and expansion thereafter.
Mao Zedong was born on 26th December 1893, in a peasant family in Shaoshan village of Hunan province. He had his primary education in a private school, and then in the higher primary school of Xiangxiang country and in the middle school at Changsha, the provincial capital. After the 1911 bourgeois Revolution he served for half a year in the insurgent New Army. He joined the Hunan Fourth Provincial Normal school in 1913 and completed his school education by 1918.
Mao's native Hunan Province was crucially involved both in the struggles of the Qing dynasty to maintain its authority, and in the radical ferment which led to successive challenges to the imperial system. Thus on the one hand, the Hunan Army of the great conservative viceroy Zeng Guofan was the main instrument for putting down the Taiping Rebellion and saving the dynasty in the middle of the nineteenth century. But on the other hand, the most radical of the late nine­teenth-century reformers, and the only one to lay down his life in 1898, Tan Sitong, was also a Hunanese, as was Huang Xing, whose contribution to the revolution of 1911 was arguably as great as that of Sun Yatsen.1 In his youth, Mao profoundly admired all three of these men, though they stood for very different things: Zeng for the empire and the Confucian values which sustained it, Tan for defying tradition and seeking inspiration in the West, Huang for Western-style constitutional democracy.

In April 1918, he set up the New Peoples Society in Changsha with the aim of finding out new ways to transform China. By the time of the may 4th movement in 1919 Mao already came in touch with Marxism and began embracing it. In July 1919 he started a magazine called Xiangxiang Review in Hunan to spread revolutionary ideas and the following year he organized a Cultural Reading Society to study and propagate revolutionary ideology. In 1920 he started Communists groups in Changsha. As one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao attended the First national Congress of the CPC as one of its 12 delegates in July 1921.

Mao displayed, in any case, a remarkably acute perception of the realities of Chinese society, and consistently adapted his ideas to those realities, at least during the struggle for power. In the early years after its foundation in 1921, the Chinese Communist Party sought support primarily from the working class in the cities and adopted a strategy based on a "united front" or alliance with Sun Yat Sen's Kuomintang. Mao threw himself into this enterprise with enthusiasm and served first as a labor union organizer in Hunan in 1922, and then as a high official within the Kuomintang organization in 1924. Soon, however, he moved away from this perspective, and even before urban-based revolution was put down in blood by Chiang Kaishek in 1927, he asserted that the real center of gravity of Chinese society was to be found in the countryside. From this fact, he drew the conclusion that the decisive blows against the existing reactionary order must be struck in the countryside by the peasants.

He became the secretary of the Hunan Regional Party Committee and led the workers movement in Changsha and An Yuan. In June 1923, the Third National Congress of the CPC, attended by Mao decided to promote an anti-imperialist, anti-feudal national front in co-operation with the Kuomintang Party led by Sun Yat Sen. and directed its members to join the Kuomintang party as individuals. The first and Second National Congresses of the Kuomintang held in 1924 and 1926 elected Mao as an alternate member of its central executive committee. He worked as Head of the Central Propaganda department of the Kuomintang, edited the Political Weekly and directed the Sixth class at the Peasant movement institute.
By August 1927, Mao had concluded that mobilizing the peasant masses was not enough. A red army was also necessary to serve as the spearhead of revolu­tion, and so he put forward the slogan: "Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun." In the mountain fastness of the Jinggangshan Base Area in Jiangxi Province, to which he retreated at the end of 1927 with the remnants of his forces, he began to elaborate a comprehensive strategy for rural revolution, combining land reform with the tactics of guerrilla warfare. In this he was aided by Zhu De, a professional soldier who had joined the Chinese Communist Party and soon became known as the "commander-in-chief." These tactics rapidly achieved a considerable measure of Success. The "Chinese Soviet Republic," established in 1931 in a larger and more populous area of Jiangxi, survived for several years, though when Chiang Kaishek finally devised the right strategy and mobilized his crack troops against it, the Communists were defeated and forced to embark in 1934 on the Long March.