Mao’s iconoclasm was a fuller expression of Liang Qichao’s ideas of destructivism, expressed early in his exile to Japan. Mao took these ideas to their limits, creating a Chinese version of Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction.” Many years later, in a 1940 essay, Mao stated this contradiction most clearly in the famous line, “There is no… Read more »
While Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao set off to organize China’s cities along standard communist terms, Mao returned to his focus on Hunan peasants. He continued to articulate his belief that peasants represented the most viable source of revolutionary support and submitted this idea to the Party in his “Report on an Investigation of the… Read more »
Back in Hunan, Mao was one of the first of the first reformers to focus on the political energy locked up in China’s peasants. In 1919, he penned an essay, “The Present State of China’s Great Union of the Popular Masses,” expressing early stirrings of Mao’s irrepressible iconoclasm.