Mao Zedong

Terrill aims to the mark of China's political instability and fractured regional warlord regimes that controlled them, as the springboard that Mao needed to complete the recipe for revolution. During 1911 Sun Yat-sen was the leader of the Chinese nationalist party and in control of the south. General Yuan had control of the north. This same year a revolution carried out by Sun led to a treaty between north and south which expelled the current Manchu emperor and placed General Yuan as president of the new Republic of China in 1912. During this time Mao was a young student interested in politics. He joined Sun's nationalist army for a short stint of six months.

Mao then went to college and finally after some strange times there he graduated. He spent a lot of time in Changsha's library where he studied economics and the writings of a revolutionary from the west, Karl Marx's and Communism. There he met other intellectuals of radical communist thought who helped form the Chinese Communist Party. On May 4, 1918 there was a demonstration of people against the western form of government, and for the new radical Marxist Communism. Later referred to as the May fourth incident it set the ball rolling for Mao and the CCP.

Mao soon became a full time Party worker. He wrote several reports on Communism. Most of all he argued that the revolution should come from the people. It was China that belonged to the people, not the people belonging to China. At this time SunYat-sen is dead and Chiang Kai Shek is the new leader of the Nationalist party. The CCP is Russia's baby but they support Chiang as the leader of a united front of Nationalists and the CCP.

Mao at first favored this marriage because they both believed that the proletariat was the key to a successful unifying of China. That union was broken later under the strain of Soviet influence, which was not the ideal of the Nationalists. After the Nationalists waged war on the CCP the party was split on how the revolution was going to be played out. Either from above, (Soviet Union), or from below (peasants of China). The latter was led by Mao and would prove to be the way to victory.