Mao Zedong Quotes
Liupan the Mountain of Six Circles Dazzling sky to the far cirrus clouds. I gaze at wild geese vanishing into the south. If we cannot reach the Long Wall we are not true men. On my fingers I count the twenty thousand li we have already marched. On the summit of Liupan the west wind lazily ripples our red banner. Today we have the long rope in our hands. When will we tie up the gray dragon of the seven stars?
Mao, Zedong. "Mount Liupan." Poems, Foreign Languages Press, 1976, p. 15.
Chaing Kai Chek seemed to have the Red Army on the run with far more guns, planes & men. However while Chaing thought he was chasing the Communists, the Red Army traveled through 11 major Chinese provinces, helping the peasants to harvest their crops, build their homes, care for their sick & get indoctrinated in Communist political philosophy. In comparison, the Chaing forces abused the peasants, corruptly stole from them & brought no improvement in their living standard, sense of hope or fairness. Massive retreat became massive victory as so much of China had a Chance to compare the communists with the Kuomintang & unfortunately chose communism as Chaing and the Kuomingtang was such a poor example of capitalism-corrupt, ineffectual and heartless. At the same time, Mao and the other communist leaders were brilliant in their use of the retreating army to improve the lot of the peasants and left their biggest supporters as they were driven to the next province and repeated the process.
The Communists under Mao won the Civil War easily as the Nationalists were not only corrupt and very unpopular, but they were not very interested in the welfare of the Chinese peasants. Further Chiang was a ruthless dictator. At the time there was great pressure for America to support any faction that was anti Communist regardless of how bad they were themselves. Davies and others who thought that we should have communications with the Communists who would soon control China, were viciously attacked by Senator McCarthy who accused Davies of “loosing China” and the Senator and some other Americans thought that the Nationalists could win the Civil War. We now know that they never had a chance, but at the time they did a very good job of promoting their cause and capability in the United States and especially in Washington. None the less, in the Red Scare, Davies was fired, only to thereafter be awarded the highest civilian award in the nation in recognition of his great and patriotic work.
Many American ideologues assumed that the Chinese Communist Revolution would lead to an economic collapse. They did not realize that historically a competitive business economic system had been operational in the Chinese culture for thousands of years. In reality the economy was however really being suppressed somewhat by the Mau style of communism. When Deng loosened up the economic rules in China, their “Communist” system not only functioned as it had under Mao, but then thrived and China became a world economic power in just a relatively few years.
It was Mao whose brilliant leadership defeated Chiang and forced him give up China and flee to Taiwan. It was not Mao’s military ability, but his understanding of the Chinese people and how to lead and motivate them that enabled him to be victorious. Chiang, the better general and military tactician, was a strategic failure and his only experience with the average Chinese person was to rule, intimidate and command him.
This was just a month after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Anyone at that time, who promised to attack Japan would get a serious hearing, and Chiang Kai-shek and the China Lobby were making extraordinary promises. FDR wanted to give Chiang’s Nationalist government an extraordinary $½ Billion in aid. One interesting aspect of this quotation is the wording. Note that the President used the word “invent”. He realized that there was no existing mechanism whereby they could simply send such a huge block of money to a foreign country on the promise that they would use it for fighting the Japanese. If there were, he would have had the War Department or the State Department to do it. So he asked his most trusted and creative cabinet member to “invent” a way to do it. Morgenthau came through with a very complicated, elaborate scheme that Congress approved the following week. The money was sent, but Chiang Kai-shek did not spend it all for fighting the Japanese—his idea was to let the Chinese Communists under Mao wear themselves down fighting the Japanese, and Chiang could use the American military assets to then wipe out the communists, his only political opponents. See {641676}.
Mao Zedong, also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who was the founder of the People's Republic of China (PRC), which he ruled as the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976. Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist, his theories, military strategies, and political policies are collectively known as Maoism.
