Quick questions on Mao's background and rise to prominence: HSC Modern History Personality

Mao Zedong was born on 26 December 1893 in the village of Shaoshan, Xiangtan county, Hunan province. His father Mao Yichang had served briefly in the Qing army and used his savings to accumulate land, making the family relatively prosperous middle peasants. His mother Wen Qimei was a devout Buddhist. Mao later told Edgar Snow (Red Star Over China, 1937) that his father was harsh and that he sided with his mother and the labourers against him, an early account of class consciousness that historians treat with caution.

The Hunan First Normal School was Mao's intellectual formation. Yang Changji introduced him to Western philosophy, Chinese statecraft, and the New Culture Movement journals (notably Chen Duxiu's New Youth). Mao co-founded the New People's Study Society in 1918. He read Liang Qichao, Kang Youwei, Adam Smith, and translations of John Stuart Mill before turning to Marx.

In autumn 1918 Mao moved to Peking, where Yang Changji had been appointed Professor of Ethics. Through Yang, Mao obtained a position as an assistant in the Peking University library under Li Dazhao, the first Chinese intellectual to embrace Bolshevism after October 1917.

In July 1921, Mao travelled to Shanghai as one of two Hunan delegates to the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. The Congress was held in the French Concession at 106 rue Wantz (now 76 Xingye Road); thirteen delegates represented approximately 57 members. Chen Duxiu, in Canton, was elected General Secretary in absentia. Mao took notes and spoke little.

At Comintern direction the CCP entered the First United Front with the Kuomintang (KMT) in 1923. Mao served on the KMT Central Executive Committee and headed the KMT Peasant Movement Training Institute in Guangzhou in 1926.

Before the break, Mao produced the Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan (March 1927). The report described peasant associations sweeping landlord power away in Hunan and argued the peasantry, not the urban proletariat, was the revolutionary class of China. The Comintern and the CCP Central Committee disapproved; Mao was sidelined.

After Chiang's coup, Mao led the Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan in September 1927. It was crushed. Mao retreated with the remnants to the Jinggang Mountains on the Hunan-Jiangxi border, where he joined Zhu De's force in April 1928 to form the Fourth Red Army. The partnership of Mao and Zhu De produced the guerrilla doctrine of "enemy advances, we retreat; enemy halts, we harass; enemy tires, we attack; enemy retreats, we pursue".

In November 1931 the Chinese Soviet Republic was proclaimed at Ruijin in Jiangxi. Mao was elected Chairman of the Central Executive Committee. The Soviet controlled around three million people at its peak. However, the Comintern-backed "28 Bolsheviks", led by Wang Ming and Bo Gu, displaced Mao from military command in 1932, preferring positional warfare under the German Comintern adviser Otto Braun (Li De).

Edgar Snow (Red Star Over China, 1937) produced the foundational interview-based account from Bao'an in 1936. Snow accepted Mao's self-presentation; later scholarship has corrected several of its claims.

Mao's family were prosperous middle peasants and Mao was a normal-school graduate, a member of the educated provincial intelligentsia.

The CCP began as an urban party. Mao's rural turn was unorthodox and contested within the party.

July 1921 in the Shanghai French Concession, not Beijing.