Totalitarianism, Maos China Essays - Chinese Communists, Mao Zedong

Totalitarianism, Maos China 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 Mao's 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 Manchu's. Many Chinese by no means accept rule from the Manchu's 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-Ch'uan. 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 Mao's 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 Mao's 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 Manchu's, 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 emperor's, 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 China China was very close to Chaos when Mao graduated from College in 1918. He went on to study Western philosophy and economics at Changsha's 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