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MAO ZEDONG (1893-1976)
To Westerners, whose own association of poetry
and government belongs to a long distant era of
the literate and literary courtier, the fact
that the most powerful revolutionary and
politician of twentieth century China is also
among its finest modern poets may seem stranger
than it does to the Chinese. Mao Zedong was born
in Shaoshan, Hunan province, in 1893 to a family
of well-off peasants. He worked on his father's
farm, attended schools, and was educated in
Zhangsha at the First Provincial Normal School
from 1913-18, where he encountered revolutionary
writings. He worked in Beijing in a library in
the winter of 1918-19, where he was strongly
influenced by Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, who were
to become Communist leaders. Mao was present in
Shanghai in 1921, at the founding of the Chinese
Communist Party, and he was engaged in the 1927
peasant uprisings in Hunan. He spent several
years with the Communist guerrillas in Jiangxi
and other border areas, and after Nationalist
armies forced the Communists to flee on the
disastrous Long March of 1934, Mao became the
supreme leader of the Party. Eventually he led
the Communists to victory, and after the
founding of the People's Republic of China in
1949, he became its Chairman. In spite of
challenges from within and without the Party,
Mao remained China's most important politician
until his death in 1976, after which Party
moderates, under the leadership of Deng
Xiaoping, took over from Mao's political
coterie, the Gang of Four. In his 1942 "Talks at
the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art," Mao
stated that literature is always political, and
that its true purpose should be to fire the
masses with revolutionary fervor, to celebrate
revolution and the people (not the subjective
consciousness of the author), and should be
judged on utilitarian grounds. This was the
basis for the Chinese development of Social
Realist literature, and was the authority upon
which writers who didn't fit the revolutionary
model were criticized, censored, or worse. Mao's
own poetry was written in classical forms,
though he advised his readership not to emulate
him in this. Its content is heroic, visionary,
revolutionary and it dramatizes the historical
events that led to the new Republic.
---Translated by Willis
Barnstone and K'o Ching-p'o
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