Maoism

Mao was born into a peasant family at Shaoshan village in Hunan Province on 26 December 1893. During his childhood Mao demonstrated a rebellious and challenge-oriented character, as reflected in his frequently conflicted relationship with his father. In his early education at the village school, he read Confucian classics (which laid the foundation of his life-long habit of using Chinese classics as a reference for strategy and policy making). But he devoted his heart and soul only to the tales of rebelling peasants fighting against the exploitative and corrupt bureaucracy (as in the popular novel Water Margin by Shi Nai-an). At the age of seventeen, he left home to pursue further study in Changsha, Hunan's provincial capital, where he was further exposed to the rebellion-oriented cultural environment of Hunan province. All of this helped shape Mao's belief that "rebellion is by nature legitimate."

Turning to Marxism-Leninism.

When Mao encountered the world beyond his home village, he saw a China that had been sinking into an ever-deepening national crisis in the face of incursions by the Western powers and Japan. Like many of his contemporaries, Mao was eager to find ways to save China and make the country strong. But he was never simply a nationalist. In search of means to save China, he not only pursued insights from China's own rich intellectual tradition, but also exposed himself to knowledge from the West, demonstrating a keen interest in such Western concepts as liberalism, democratic reformism, anarchism, and individualism. With the emergence of the iconoclastic "New Culture Movement" in the mid-1910s, Mao became increasingly critical of the Chinese past, contending that without thoroughly transforming Chinese culture no political and social reform could succeed. Yet he did not view wholesale Westernization as China's salvation. Unlike those of his contemporaries who traveled to Europe and Japan in order to "seek truth," Mao believed firmly that the key to solving the problems facing China must be sought in China itself.

In the wake of the anti-imperialist "May Fourth Movement" and under the influence of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, Mao experienced the decisive intellectual turn toward Marxism-Leninism in 1919–1920. With only a vague understanding of such terms as "class struggle" and "proletarian dictatorship," Mao emphasized the "people's great unity" as a necessary condition for bringing about fundamental transformations "all under heaven." Taking the creation of universal justice and equality as a core mission, Mao envisioned that his revolution would have to be carried out and completed by a "new human being" (xinmin), and that China would have to be transformed at the same time that the rest of the world was being transformed. With those ideas in mind, Mao became a founding member of the CCP in 1921.