Mao Chinese Leadership Style

I. Introduction

China endured a turbulent period throughout the 20th century as massive transformations took place, most notably, those lead by Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Mao led the foundation of communism in China, establishing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, and established himself as the figurehead of China until his death in 1976. Mao inspired people with his unwavering idealism and revolutionary spirit. His ideas of an ideal egalitarian society shaped his policies and decisions. He and his administration used his influence to spearhead various movements, including the Great Leap Forward, in which he aimed to quickly industrialize China, the Hundred Flowers Campaign, which encouraged people to publicly express their views,

The technique describes the way in which leaders must effectively organize the masses, which are composed of “relatively active, the intermediate, and the relatively backward” groups (“The Mass Line” 417). Mao proposes that a leader should make a “nucleus of leadership” out of the relatively active and “rely on this leading group to raise the level of the intermediate elements”. Without it, he says, a leader cannot make effective a wide call for action. Without this deep link with the masses, Mao says that a “leadership becomes bureaucratic and divorced from the masses”, and, therefore, that leadership will fail to make widespread movements. This line of thought is crucial for understanding Mao’s ability to rally masses of people to accomplish his goals in an organic way, that is, by inspiring people rather than giving orders based only on political authority. It also shows that Mao was very weary of the development of an inefficient bureaucracy under his administration, which later leads him to elicit the Hundred Flowers policy among other political movements. In general, Mao is able to enforce his will because the people rallied after him, supporting and carrying out his policies as well as putting pressure on Mao’s political