Maoism

Mao Zedong Thought (simplified Chinese: 毛泽东思想; traditional Chinese: 毛澤東思想; pinyin: Máo Zédōng Sīxiǎng), or Maoism, is a political theory derived from the teachings of the Chinese political leader Mao Zedong (1893–1976). Its followers are known as Maoists. Developed from the 1950s until the Deng Xiaoping reforms in the 1970s, it was widely applied as the guiding political and military ideology of the Communist Party of China (CPC), and as theory guiding revolutionary movements around the world. The essential difference between Maoism and other forms of Marxism is that Mao claimed that peasants should be the essential revolutionary class in China, because, contrary to their industrial working "comrades", they were more suited to establishing a successful revolution and socialist society in China.

The modern Chinese intellectual tradition of the turn of the twentieth century is defined by two central concepts, iconoclasm and nationalism.

By the turn of the twentieth century, a proportionately small yet socially significant cross-section of China's traditional elite (i.e. landlords and bureaucrats), found themselves increasingly skeptical of the efficacy and even the moral validity of Confucianism. These skeptical iconoclasts formed a new segment of Chinese society, a modern intelligentsia, whose arrival, or as historian of China Maurice Meisner would label it, their defection, heralded the beginning of the destruction of the gentry as a social class in China. The fall of the last Chinese imperial dynasty in 1911 marked the final failure of the Confucian moral order, and did much to make Confucianism synonymous with political and social conservatism in the minds of Chinese intellectuals. It was this association of conservatism and Confucianism which lent to the iconoclastic nature of Chinese intellectual thought during the first decades of the twentieth century.

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