Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong is presented as the political figure associated with the Communist victory that brought China under Communist rule in 1949. The account does not develop his personal history or depict him directly; instead, it establishes his significance through the scale and consequences of the forces identified with him, and through the American expectations that their advance overturned.

Identity and Place in the Account

The narrative names Mao as the leader associated with the Communist forces in China, but keeps its attention on events and their international implications rather than on his character or individual decisions. His presence is therefore indirect: the reader encounters him through the military advance attributed to his forces and the new state that followed.

The Communist Advance

By April 1949, a Communist army of a million men had crossed the Yangtze River and entered the last provinces still loyal to Chiang Kai-shek. The account describes the resulting Communist takeover as virtually certain by that spring, an outcome already implicit in George Marshall’s report after his unsuccessful year in China in 1946. The scale of the advance makes Mao’s significance in the narrative inseparable from the collapse of the Nationalist position.

Founding of the People’s Republic of China

On October 1, 1949, the People’s Republic of China was officially inaugurated in Peking. The account emphasizes the new state’s immense scale: it contained more than 500 million people, one fifth of humanity. Mao’s importance is thus conveyed not through a personal scene but through the establishment of a Communist government in one of the world’s most populous countries.

American Expectations and Significance

The victory contrasts with Harry S. Truman’s earlier optimism. Truman had believed Stalin’s prediction that the people of North China would never become Communists and imagined that China might benefit from a development program modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority. The Communist victory and the new republic sharply unsettled those hopes. Within the account, Mao stands at the center of a political transformation that intensified American alarm about Communist expansion in Asia and redirected debate over the United States’ China policy.