Totalitarianism, Maos China Essay Example For Students

Totalitarianism, Maos China Essay Mao turned China into a complete Totalitarianism state. It was the Communist ideology that ran the country. All social, political, economic, Cultural and intellectual activities were in some way controlled by Mao. Mao set many rules by which the people were to live by making China at the time, a totalitarianism state. At the time of Maos birth, Emperor Yuan ruled China in the Qing dynasty. The Qing dynasty had been controlling China since 1644 and had never been popular. Members of the Qing dynasty were called Manchus. Many Chinese by no means accept rule from the Manchus and many illegal secret societies were formed to try and weaken the government. A major conflict between these societies and the government was the ?Taiping rebellion led by Hung Hsiu-Chuan. Tens of millions of peasants joined the Taiping armies. They took over most of Southern China and the capital, Nan king (now Nanjing). They would have defeated the government, but the west intervened and supplied the Government forces with arms and soldiers. They did not want China to become strong. The forces beat the Taiping very quickly in one of the largest mass slaughters in History. The Chinese had become convinced that the West was now invincible. China had lost a large amount of national self-confidence. During Maos youth it was time for people to look for new ways to overcome these problems. Mao Zedong (1893-1976), also known as Mao Tse-Tung was born on December 26th 1893, in the small village of Shaoshan in the Hunan province. He came from a peasant family whose father had prospered from hard work. In Maos seventh year in his village school there was a large attempt to drive out all foreigners, which was defeated by an international force of 2100 men. Violence was beginning to move closer Mao. SanYat-Sen, the leader of the Chinese nationalists party (called the Kuomintang) believed that a change within the government system was not possible. He believed that China must not only get rid of all the Manchus, but also the emperors. In 1911 he organized a revolution in the aim of establishing a republican government. In October Mao joined the republican army for six months. Although this is only a short time it showed his determination by enlisting as a private in the regular army rather than a member of a student militia like most men with his education would do. The majority of southern China was now under control of the control of the republican armies. However, Yuan Shihkai, the former commander of the emperors, forces continued to maintain control of northern china. Sun Yat-Sen and Yuan made a deal whereby Yuan would be named the president of the new Republic of China if he persuaded the emperor to step down. On February the 14th, 1912, General Yuan Shihkai was elected the first president of the Republic of ChinaChina was very close to Chaos when Mao graduated from College in 1918. He went on to study Western philosophy and economics at Changshas public library. He was influenced greatly on Marxism based on the theories of German Karl Marx. This saw history in terms of the struggle of workers against Capitalists. It was the philosophy of the revolutionaries, which had recently taken control of vast land in Russia. It is known as Communism. Communism meant the end of power from the rich and privileged; it meant the communal ownership of all property. It would mean an end to the traditional ways of governing and recent experiments of Western style republicanism and democratic thinking. Mao became an assistant librarian at Peking University, the countries leading intellectual centre. Here, he met Chen Duxiu, a literary scholar who had moved from Peking to Shanghai, and Li Dazhao, the university librarian. More than any others, they were responsible for the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. On May 4th 1918 in Peking, Mao witnessed a large student demonstration now known as the May fourth incident. It symbolized the rejection of liberal and moderate western models of development in favour of the radical Marxist-Communist approach. Two months later, Mao wrote, ?The world is ours, the nation is ours, society is ours. If we do not speak, who will speak? If we do not act, who will act While being chased up by the military government of Hunan, Mao was forced to flee where he moved to Canton, the main base of the Kuomintang. There, he became the acting head of the propaganda department and server in the peasant movement institute where they wanted the peasants to rise up the government. He was now fully committed to Marxist Communism: ?Once I had accepted it as the correct interpretation of history, I did not afterward waver? The Chinese Kuomintang, allowed the Communist party to join them after advise from the Soviets to reorganize the Kuomintang and its feeble army. The now allied Kuomintang and Communist parties joined against Feuding local warlords in an attempt to push them out and rule China, it was then Mao became a full-time party worker. Leadership, Citizenship, Commu EssayMao stated ?This army is powerful because all its members have a conscious discipline; they have come together and they fight not for the private interests of a few individuals or a narrow clique, but for the interests of the broad masses and of the whole nation? In 1949 the Nationalists were defeated and the remaining members fled to Formosa now known as Taiwan. They took control of Taiwan and Chiang proclaimed his new capital there. The Communists were not bothered with this. They now held total control of China. Taiwan, Formally FormosaAfter victory over the Nationalists, Mao established the Peoples Republic of China. Mao began to make many changes. Firstly he established Communism by bringing down the power of the rich and privileged and making everyone equal. The government set up mass food distribution. He was bent on changing the traditional ways of China. He allowed Women to own land, making the equal to men and basically abolished the cl ass system. ?In order to build a great socialist society it is of the utmost importance to arouse the broad masses of women to join in productive activity. Men and women must receive equal pay for equal work in production.? He followed the Soviet model of economic development and social change until 1958, then broke with the USSR and launched his Great Leap, which encouraged the establishment of rural industry. The failure of the Great Leap lost him much of his influence, but in 1966 he launched the Cultural Revolution, which lead to widespread terror and chaos. After the failure of the great leap, Mao no longer had as much power as before. He concerned himself, still with the Communist ideology. However, it was the pragmatists, particularly Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping who were setting the overall tone of China. Under the pragmatists, the Communists ideology was not so much being adopted. Factory managers were given wide authority, as their work methods did not have to fit any ideological interpretation as long as they were effective. Mao didnt like this; he came to feel he was forgotten. Factory managers were forgetting ideology and peasants were becoming capitalists and he knew whom to blame. Mao had decided on a world revolution, an attempt to go beyond party rectification plans to eliminate those in leadership who dared to double cross him. In the autumn of 1966 posters began to go around calling people to engage in virtually, another civil war. He labeled the revolt ?Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution?. The idea behind was to return to Maos way of Chinese communism. Mao spoke mainly to the countrys youth, the 300 million Chinese who were too young to experience the first revolution. Young people from around the country were organized, fed, and transported to all the important cities by the PLA, led by Lin Biao. These youths were designated as ?Red Guards and given military uniforms and arms. Mao assured them that ?To rebel is justified? told them they had a license to knock down the old. Before the autumn was over, they were raging all over the country. Wherever they went the carried copies of the little red book waving it almost in a religious sense. They attacked anyone they felt was not fit for Maos thought. Intellectuals were the main to be lashed against, and the pragmatists who had taken power from Mao. By the start of 1967 there was no sign from Mao that he felt restraint was needed. The country was in chaos. All schools and universities were closed. The Red Guard had split into 100s of factions and were soon attacking each other. Before 1967 was over, virtually every official with any prominence with the exception of Mao had been denounced. Late in the year, Mao ordered the Red guards to go home and back to school. He called in the army to restore order. China was being run mainly by the military. There had been no real lasting reorganization of society from the Cultural Revolution. There was a shift in personnel and new leaders. Mao had again emerged in China as the number one man. Mao was beginning to look very old and in September 1976 he died. The pragmatists again held the power, not the radicals who followed Mao. In the summer of 1981 the Communist party central committee officially declared that Mao had been wrong in emphasizing a constant struggle and launching the Cultural Revolution. BibliographyBibliography? Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 99? Encyclopedia Britannica 99? Cheng J, Mao, Beijing, Beijing Press, 1993? Website: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1927/mao.html? Website: http://zhongwen.com/mao.htm? Website: http://csf.colorado.edu/mirrors/marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/? Website: http://gate.cruzio.com/~marx2mao/Mao/Index.html? Website: http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Library/6132/biography.html? Webstie: http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/8/0,5716,114938+8+108483,00.html? Cheng J, China: Communist Revolution, Beijing, Beijing Press, 1991? Poole F, Mao Zedong, USA, Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data, 1982? Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, Peking, Foreign Languages Press, (No other information)History Reports