Crowd Behavior

Mao Zedong had a rough childhood, but eventually managed to get away from his father's tyranny (Knigge 255). Mao was born on the day of December 26, 1893. As a little child, Mao lived in a small town called Shaoshan. There a disrespectful father constantly harassed the young Mao and the rest of his family. As soon as an occasion came along, the opportunistic Mao left home and joined the Nationalist army when in 1911 the Revolution began. In a training college located in Changsha, Mao was introduced to the philosophy of Marxism (Hoobler 140). The future leader of China had an enormous amount of intelligence that was going to be used in the next couple of years.

The father of Communism came to command in 1935 as chairman of the Party's Politburo during the Long March. This was achieved because the group "Twenty-eight Bolsheviks", communists who were taught in Moscow, were defeated (Meisner 34). Also, Mao had the support of the farmers, accounting roughly for eighty-five percent of China's population (Knigge 239). Zhu De, leader of a thousand fighters, combined forces with Mao to fight other peasant armies. Starting from 1928 both practiced guerilla warfare located in the base of Jinggangshan (Meisner 31,32).

The following years were ones where Mao's rule was strengthened. A huge disadvantage though, was the attack of nationalists, led by Chiang kai-sjek, both involved in a struggle for power of China. The first were fierce periods with unfortunate losses, in favor of the nationalists. Communist were punished badly, in fact many were slaughtered. This describes the legendary Long March of Mao and his supporters, who traveled from the East to the West for over a year in order to escape the nationalists. Here Mao applied the important tactics learned earlier. Eventually only ten percent of the original 200,000 Chinese made it to their final destination, Jeanine, due to ambushes and starvation (Knigge 239). Mao also lost good friends and relatives (Meisner 33). Several years later, the nationalists were defeated mainly because Kai-sjek was outnumbered, and new western weapons collected when the two rivals fought on the same side against Japan. As a result, in 1949, Kai-shek fled to Taiwan and formed the Republic of China (Spence 30).