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Mao Zedong originally saw a new China's struggle for security in terms of conventional warfare and in 1946 satirized the atomic bomb as a ’paper tiger’. Mao found it difficult to understand why the imperialists would venture to use nuclear weapons in a war if they wanted to dominate other nations, because a massively destructive weapon would not serve the purpose of acquiring political control, but would instead destroy that which was to be controlled. However, he gradually changed his position, as he understood the deterrent value of the bomb. Frequent US nuclear threats against China, Soviet pressures, and pressures from other Chinese leaders who kept pushing Mao to pay more attention to nuclear‐weapon programmes are the important factors that contributed to his ’nuclear revolution’. Consequently, his thinking on the atomic bomb came to dominate China's defence policy and brought about the policy changes that turned China into a major nuclear power.

This chapter examines the Sino-Soviet split and its implications for the United States' policies in Asia, Europe, and the Americas during the period 1956–1964. Coordination and comity in the communist camp peaked between 1953 and 1957, but alliance between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China (PRC) was relatively short-lived. This was caused by ideological differences, distrust, and jealous rivalries for international leadership between Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Zedong. The chapter explains what caused the strain in Sino-Soviet relations, and especially the collapse of Sino-Soviet military and economic cooperation. It also considers the effects of the Sino-Soviet disputes on third-party communists in Asia, China's foreign policy activism, and the catalytic effect of the Sino-Soviet split on Soviet foreign policy.

During WWII, Stalin’s policy in East Asia aimed at drawing Japan into a quagmire in China so as to avoid fighting a war on two fronts. This meant supporting the Nationalists in China, the only force capable of providing serious resistance to the Japanese. However, the Soviets naturally also maintained relations with the Chinese Communists. Yang Kuisong analyzes how the CCP managed the frequently difficult relationship with the Soviets and how Mao Zedong was able to maintain a delicate balance between preserving the interest of the Chinese Communists and accommodating Soviet wishes.

This chapter examines the Sixty Articles on Agriculture launched by the Chinese government to relieve the famine, establish an incentive system in the commune system, and reinvigorate agriculture. Immediately after the Ninth Plenum, Chairman Mao gave detailed instructions for the immediate organization and dispatch of three seven-man teams to investigate communes in Guangdong, Hunan, and Zhejiang. After receiving the reports on the investigating teams, Mao already appeared to be willing to consider drastic reform of the communes.

This chapter examines Chinese operational art, taking as its point of departure the rise of the Communist movement in the 1920s and the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Drawing on the writings of Sun Tzu, Zhuge Liang, and Mao Zedong, and on contemporary doctrines and experiences from both conventional war and guerrilla warfare, the author identifies the hallmarks of China's operational art as the combination of orthodox and unorthodox elements, a mixture of human factors and technology, and a blend of offensive and defensive priorities, as well as mobile and positional warfare. In addition, Chinese forces sometimes fight for show, sometimes for military victory, and sometimes for both.

This chapter examines the reaction of Mao Zedong to the CCP Central Committee's circulation of a document seeking answers on agricultural policy, particular on the baochan daohu policy of dividing the fields down to the household. It suggests that Mao might have instantly realized upon reading the questionnaire that he could no longer rely upon the man he had placed in the post of General Secretary to ensure the loyalty of the party to himself. It contends that a reversal of opinion on baochan daohu would threaten Mao's whole vision of a collectivist China and had to be resisted. This chapter also discusses Liu Shaoqi's role on the baochan daohu issue.

This chapter demonstrates how some of Mao Zedong's deputies had different ideas about what was, and was not, required for the successful construction of socialism. In fact, years later, in the late 1970s and 1980s, their conceptions of single-party rule would lead China down a path that was much less turbulent than the years of Maoist supremacy. Here, the difference between Mao's view of the party's destiny and a major strand of Marxist thought is not as great as it appears at first glance. At the heart of his thinking, Mao shared with predecessors like Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leon Trotsky the instinctive distrust of all political organizations, the party included. Such human constructs threatened to sap the revolutionary moment's potential. Later, and even more than these iconic figures, Mao extended his animosity beyond the state to the party. But his target was the organizational party, not the idea of the revolutionary group that he had cultivated in Yan'an. Far from abandoning this conviction, he aggressively returned to it again and again after the People's Republic of China's founding.

This chapter examines the increase in Jiang Qing's public exposure during the 1960s. Mao Zedong encouraged Jiang to investigate revisionism in the cultural arena and head of state Liu Shaoqi did the same to his wife Wang Guangmei. Using their wives as trouble-shooters was a high-risk strategy for both men because initiatives by high-ranking spouses with no independent legitimacy arouse hostility and resentment in most political cultures. This chapter discusses the accomplishments of Jiang and Wang.

This chapter examines the political split between Chinese political leaders Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi. It suggests that Mao's decision to purge Liu was part of a strategy to remove members of the CCP who supported capitalism. There are conflicting accounts of whether or not Liu directly opposed Mao's ‘capitalist-roader’ formulation, but Mao had already made his version of the event credible in January 1965.

After the collapse of the Kouminating in the civil war following Japan's surrender to the US in 1945, the People's Republic of China emerged, with Mao Zedong as its leader. Although they were in many ways anti-traditionalist, Mao Zedong and his CCP were, nonetheless, notably influenced by China's long history and classical traditions. Mao appeared to be a staunch anti-Confucian, however, finding his most obvious ancient analogies instead in the totalitarian traditions of Legalist philosophy and the Machiavellian bingjia literature of statecraft. With its curious mix of Marxist-derived class analysis and virtue-centric Sinic moralism in dialectical materialist clothing, Maoism was both nationalist and internationalist. Perhaps the most remarkable development of the post-1949 period was China's initial acceptance of a relationship of subservience to the Soviet Union. Apparently, this was simply a decision of expediency, rooted in Mao's understanding of the fact that a weak and battered China needed assistance to restore its vigor and global stature. However, their relationship would be strained by the growing Chinese discomfort with its subservient role and the Soviet's distrust of Mao. When the Sino-Soviet alliance finally ended, Chinese Communist officials began a highly organized effort to promote the People's Republic of China as the moral and political center of the dawning socialist universe. Using aggressive diplomacy aided by large-scale propaganda and an influencial campaign, China competed with the Soviets for the hearts and minds of revolutionary movements and postcolonial governments around the world, especially in the developing countries of Asia. The CCP began to foster a relationship with the Third World that could be characterized by a sort of tribute system psychology.

This chapter details China's communist experiment with human nature. The idea of a new man, a morally perfect person, served as a model for Chinese society and became embedded in the Chinese culture. The concepts of human malleability and the role of social environment in shaping human nature were not alien to Chinese history either. However, they became part of the discourse of nationalist ideology in the early twentieth century; indeed, in the second half of the century, they became a prime target of the Chinese communist revolution, as Mao Zedong aspired to surpass the Soviet Union in both economic and ideological terms. The idea of new men—or “Mao's good soldiers”—was created to perpetuate the revolution and generate an economic miracle, born from the absolute selflessness and dedication of such new men.

This chapter reveals that, although Mao Zedong would present the communist victory in 1949 as the inevitable result of the class struggle and the death battle with imperialism, his success in establishing his perspective as the predominant conception of political action was not the result of a logical progression from one stage of history to the next. Like Russia's revolutionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he benefited from the misperceptions and missteps of others, friends and foes alike. In fact, had certain events not occurred, it is conceivable that the ideas embedded within the Hunan Report would never have taken concrete form. To understand both the evolution of Mao's thinking and his circuitous path to power, the chapter turns to the circumstances more than a century before his travels to Hunan. These circumstances convinced legions of Chinese radicals like himself that the creation of a fundamentally different type of political order was necessary and achievable.

This chapter analyzes the border clashes between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union in March 1969. It details the development of Chinese leader Mao Zedong's perception of the Soviet Union as a challenge to China's autonomy and the (cultural) revolution, underscoring Mao's failure to understand how the Soviet Union interpreted his actions as a credible threat. Employing his own frame of reference, Mao failed to grasp that the Soviet Union did not see the border conflict as a catalyst for internal mobilization and political control at home and in its satellite states, but as yet another manifestation of the seeming irrationality of Chinese foreign policy. Mao's surprise and feeling of hostile encirclement, as well as the deepening of Soviet distrust, paved the way in turn for China's famous rapprochement with the United States under President Richard Nixon.

The first chapter explores the evolution of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) views of China’s role in what would later come to be known as the Third World. I argue that during these years, despite China’s weak position in international politics, CCP leaders nevertheless believed that their country would ultimately regain its status as a major power by leading a wider revolution of peoples oppressed by colonialism. It also looks at evolving American views of the CCP. It shows how American policies through most of the period served to alienate the CCP leaders from the United States.

This chapter examines the struggle between the so-called ‘redness’ and expertise in the debates generated by the Seventy Articles on Industry in China during the 1960s. Mao Zedong proclaimed the primacy of redness and the importance of expertise. He believed that the significant element of measures to recover from the GLF was to re-enlist the intellectuals in the country's economic enterprises and to recast the education system to produce more well-trained young men and women.

Naval power had a huge impact on the rise of Mao Zedong and the Communists in China from 1926 to 1949. Despite this, scholars have often marginalized its role because Mao himself wrote very little about the topic. This chapter by Francis Gricerebuts the belief that naval power was unimportant by providing an extensive account of the different ways that Mao and the Communists were affected by naval power during three main periods: their early struggles with the Kuomintang and foreign powers, the war against Japan, and the subsequent Civil War. The chapter asserts that Mao paid little heed to naval issues because he lacked strategic vision and because he was determined to provide a "victor" narrative that emphasized the strengths of the Communist movement and marginalized its weaknesses. The chapter links the absence of naval components within Mao's writings with the surprising dearth of attention to maritime issues within modern counter-insurgency literature, including the recent U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Finally, the chapter argues that the omission of naval power from Mao's writings helps to demonstrate that his relevance for later insurgencies was considerably lower than is conventionally assumed.

This chapter provides an overview of the snail-fever campaign from the perspective of top leadership (1949–1976). It discovers why Chairman Mao and the CCP focused on this globally neglected rural disease as one of its first efforts to transform rural public health and how concurrent campaigns influenced the campaign’s trajectory. The CCP chose this disease because snail fever decreased army enlistment and rural productivity, thus negatively impacting military and economic security. The campaign would likely not have occurred without Chairman Mao’s long-term sponsorship. Mao, however, also used the campaign to undermine the professional medical establishment and the Ministry of Public Health. Although this secured party authority over the science in the campaign, his attack on professional science hindered campaign functionality.