Mao Zedong (1893 -1976) came from a moderately well-to-do peasant family and, as a result, received a very good education, as compared to the vast majority of the Chinese. Mao was one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, but his views on the need to switch from an orthodox Marxist strategy, which called for the party to seek roots among the urban working class, to a rural strategy centered on the exploited peasants were spurned by the leadership of the CCP and its sponsors in Moscow.
Later, it became evident that the CCP could not flourish in the Nationalist-controlled cities, as time and again the KMT quashed the idealistic but militarily weak CCP Mao appeared to be right: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
The Communists' retreat to Yanan on the Long March was not only for the purpose of survival but also for regrouping and forming a stronger "Red Army." There the followers of the Chinese Communist Party were taught Mao's ideas about guerrilla warfare, the importance of winning the support of the people, principles of party leadership, and socialist values. Mao consolidated his control over the leadership of the CCP during the Yanan period and led it to victory over the Nationalists in 1949.
From that time onward, Mao became a symbol of the new Chinese government, of national unity, and of the strength of China against foreign humiliation. In later years, although his real power was eclipsed, the party maintained the illusion that Mao was the undisputed leader of China.
In his declining years, Mao waged a struggle, in the form of the "Cultural Revolution," against those who followed policies antagonistic to his own, a struggle that brought the country to the brink of civil war and turned the Chinese against one another. The symbol of Mao as China's "great leader" and "great teacher" was used by those who hoped to seize power after him: first the minister of defense, Lin Biao, and then the "Gang of Four," which included Mao's wife.
Mao's death in 1976 ended the control of policy by the Gang of Four. Within a few years, questions were being raised about the legacy that Mao had left China. By the 1980s, it was broadly accepted throughout China that Mao had been responsible for a full 20 years of misguided policies. Since the Tiananmen protests of 1989, however, there has been a resurgence of nostalgia for Mao. This nostalgia is captured in such aspects of popular culture as a tape of songs about Mao entitled "The Red Sun'"-an all-time best-selling tape in China, at 5 million copies-that encapsulates the Mao cult and Mao mania of the Cultural Revolution; and in a small portrait of Mao that virtually all car owners and taxi drivers hang over their rear-view mirrors for "good luck." Many Chinese long for the "good old days" of Mao's rule, when crime and corruption were at far lower levels than today and when there was a sense of collective commitment to China's future. But they do not long for a return to the mass terror of the Cultural Revolution, for which Mao also bears responsibility.