Following his graduation, it is believed that Mao traveled with Professor Yang Changji, his college teacher and future father-in-law, to Beijing in 1919. Prior to his death in 1920, Professor Yang held a faculty position at Peking University, and at his recommendation, Mao worked as an assistant librarian at the University Library under the curatorship of Li Dazhao, who would come to greatly influence Mao's future thought. Mao registered as a part-time student at Beijing University and attended a few lectures and seminars by intellectuals, such as Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, and Qian Xuantong. During his stay in Shanghai, he engaged himself as much as possible in reading which introduced him to Communist theories.
He married Yang Kaihui, Professor Yang's daughter and a fellow student, despite an existing marriage with Luo Yixiu arranged by his father at home, which Mao never acknowledged. In October 1930, the Kuomintang (KMT) captured Yang Kaihui as well as her son, Anying[citation needed]. The KMT imprisoned them both, and Anying was later sent to his relatives after the KMT killed his mother[citation needed]. At this time, Mao was living with He Zizhen, a co-worker and 17 year old girl from Yongxing, Jiangxi. Likely due to poor language skills (Mao never learned to speak Mandarin, having lived in a Xiang-speaking community), he turned down an opportunity to study in France.
On July 23, 1921, Mao, age 27, attended the first session of the National Congress of the Communist Party of China in Shanghai. Two years later, he was elected as one of the five commissars of the Central Committee of the Party during the third Congress session. Later that year, Mao returned to Hunan at the instruction of the CPC Central Committee and the Kuomintang Central Committee to organize the Hunan branch of the Kuomintang. In 1924, he was a delegate to the first National Conference of the Kuomintang, where he was elected an Alternate Executive of the Central Committee. In 1924, he became an Executive of the Shanghai branch of the Kuomintang and Secretary of the Organization Department.
For a while, Mao remained in Shanghai, an important city that the CPC emphasized for the Revolution. However, the Party encountered major difficulties organizing labor union movements and building a relationship with its nationalist ally, the KMT. The Party had become poor, and Mao became disillusioned with the revolution and moved back to Shaoshan. During his stay at home, Mao's interest in the revolution was rekindled after hearing of the 1925 uprisings in Shanghai and Guangzhou. His political ambitions returned, and he then went to Guangdong, the base of the Kuomintang, to take part in the preparations for the second session of the National Congress of Kuomintang. In October 1925, Mao became acting Propaganda Director of the Kuomintang.
In 1927, Mao conducted the famous Autumn Harvest Uprising in Changsha, as commander-in-chief. Mao led an army, called the "Revolutionary Army of Workers and Peasants", which was defeated and scattered after fierce battles. Afterwards, the exhausted troops were forced to leave Hunan for Sanwan, Jiangxi, where Mao re-organized the scattered soldiers, rearranging the military division into smaller regiments.
By October 1934, he had them surrounded, prompting them to engage in the "Long March", a retreat from Jiangxi in the southeast to Shaanxi in the northwest of China. It was during this 9,600 kilometer (5,965 mile), year-long journey that Mao emerged as the top Communist leader, aided by the Zunyi Conference and the defection of Zhou Enlai to Mao's side. At this Conference, Mao entered the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China.
1928 - Chiang and the Guomindang now control all of China. Nanking (now Nanjing) is made their capital, and will remain so for the next decade. The CCP now numbers 40,000.
Japan, meanwhile, sends troops to China to obstruct attempts by the Guomindang to unify the country. In June officers in the Kwantung (Guandong) Army, the Japanese Army unit stationed in Manchuria, begin an unauthorised campaign to precipitate a war with China. Both the Japanese high command and the Chinese refuse to take the bait.
1930 - Mao's sister and his second wife, Yang Kaihui, are executed by the nationalist governor of Hunan Province. Later the same year he marries again, to He Zichen, a schoolteacher and communist with whom he had been living since 1928. The couple will have five children. Also late in the year Mao puts down a revolt by soldiers in the small town of Futian in the Jiangxi province. It is reported that 2,000-3,000 officers and men are executed on Mao's orders.
1931 - In September conspirators in Japan's Kwantung Army stage the 'Manchurian Incident', blowing up a section of track on the South Manchuria Railway then blaming Chinese saboteurs.
Under increasing pressure from the KMT encirclement campaigns, there was a struggle for power within the Communist leadership. Mao was removed from his important positions and replaced by individuals (including Zhou Enlai) who appeared loyal to the orthodox line advocated by Moscow and represented within the CPC by a group known as the 28 Bolsheviks.
Chiang, who had earlier assumed nominal control of China due in part to the Northern Expedition, was determined to eliminate the Communists.
By October 1934, he had them surrounded, prompting them to engage in the "Long March", a retreat from Jiangxi in the southeast to Shaanxi in the northwest of China. It was during this 9,600 kilometer (5,965 mile), year-long journey that Mao emerged as the top Communist leader, aided by the Zunyi Conference and the defection of Zhou Enlai to Mao's side. At this Conference, Mao entered the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China.
According to the standard Chinese Communist Party line, from his base in Yan'an, Mao led the Communist resistance against the Japanese in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). However, Mao further consolidated power over the Communist Party in 1942 by launching the Shu Fan movement, or "Rectification" campaign against rival CPC members such as Wang Ming, Wang Shiwei, and Ding Ling. Also while in Yan'an, Mao divorced He Zizhen and married the actress Lan Ping, who would become known as Jiang Qing.
1936 - In December Guomindang troops forcibly detain Chiang Kai-shek for several days until he agrees to cease hostilities against the communists and cooperate with them to oppose the Japanese.
Meanwhile, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin invites Mao to send the surviving two sons from his second marriage to Moscow. The two boys remain in the Soviet Union until the 1940s.
1937 - The Second Sino-Japanese War breaks out on 7 July following a skirmish between Chinese and Japanese troops outside Beijing. Chinese forces evacuated Beijing on 28 July. The Japanese overrun Tianjin (100 km southeast of Beijing) on 30 July then attack Shanghai on 13 August. After a three-month siege, Shanghai falls and the Guomindang forces withdraw to the northwest towards their capital Nanking. The Japanese pursue.
1940 - Conflict between the Guomindang and CCP starts to intensify in the areas of China not under Japanese control. Mao begins laying plans for the complete communist takeover China. His teachings become the central tenets of the CCP doctrine known as 'Mao Tse-Tung Thought'. Party membership rapidly expands, from 100,000 in 1937 to 1.2 million by 1945. The growing popularity of the communists also sees the size of the Red Army and the peasant militias increase dramatically.
1942 - Mao launches the first "rectification" campaign. To ensure their ideological purity, new party recruits are ordered to study 'Mao Tse-Tung Thought'. The campaign will come to be seen as the genesis of the Mao Tse-Tung personality cult that will sweep China in subsequent years.
1943 - Mao is formally acknowledged as head of the CCP when he is elected chairman of the CCP Central Committee and the Politburo. He will remain party leader until his death.
During the year Mao suffers another personal lose when his second younger brother is executed by the nationalists.
1945 - 'Mao Tse-Tung Thought' is formally adopted by the CCP at the Seventh Plenum of the Sixth National Party Congress held in Yan'an in April.
The US drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 respectively, killing about 120,000 people outright and fatally injuring over 100,000 more.
In 1948, the People’s Liberation Army starved out the Kuomintang forces occupying the city of Changchun. At least 160,000 civilians are believed to have perished during the siege, which lasted from June until October. PLA lieutenant colonel Zhang Zhenglu, who documented the siege in his book White Snow, Red Blood, compared it to Hiroshima: “The casualties were about the same. Hiroshima took nine seconds; Changchun took five months.”
On January 21, 1949, Kuomintang forces suffered massive losses against Mao's forces. In the early morning of December 10, 1949, PLA troops laid siege to Chengdu, the last KMT-occupied city in mainland China, and Chiang Kai-shek evacuated from the mainland to Taiwan (Formosa) that same day.
1950 - In May Mao agrees to a plan by the leader of North Korea, Kim Il Sung, to force a reunification with South Korea through a preemptive invasion. The Korean War begins on 25 June. It will last for three years and cost about three million lives but ends with no definitive outcome.
International support for the CCP government begins to falter in October when China becomes directly involved in the Korean War in response to a North Korean request for aid. At the same time, Tibet is invaded, bringing to an end almost 40 years of Tibetan self-rule.
Up to 440,000 Chinese "volunteer" troops will die during the Korean War, including Mao's eldest son from his second marriage. The war also ushers a sharp and prolonged deterioration in relations between China and the US.
Starting in 1951, Mao initiated two successive movements in an effort to rid urban areas of corruption by targeting wealthy capitalists and political opponents, known as the three-anti/five-anti campaigns. A climate of raw terror developed as workers denounced their bosses, wives turned on their husbands, and children informed on their parents; the victims often being humiliated at struggle sessions, a method designed to intimidate and terrify people to the maximum. Mao insisted that minor offenders be criticized and reformed or sent to labor camps, "while the worst among them should be shot." These campaigns took several hundred thousand additional lives, the vast majority via suicide.
1953 - China's "transition to socialism" officially begins with the introduction of the first five-year plan. Emphasis is placed on the development of heavy industry, centralised planning, and the build-up of defence capability, following the model pioneered by the Soviet Union, which provides technical assistance and aid. At the same time, the pace of the collectivisation of the agricultural sector is hastened and banking, industry and trade are nationalised.
Between 1953 and 1957 the national income of China grows at an average rate of 8.9% a year.
1954 - The First National People's Congress, equivalent to the Chinese parliament, adopts a new constitution and formally elects Mao as chairman (president) of the People's Republic. The CCP now introduces measures to recruit intellectuals into the party apparatus. By 1956 intellectuals constitute nearly 12% of the party's 10.8 million members, while peasant membership has fallen to 69%.
1957 - In November Mao makes his second trip to Moscow. He returns disillusioned with the Soviet system of development and determined to set China on an independent course. The trip is also distinguished by Mao's controversial declaration that there is no need to fear nuclear war.
Explaining his view he says, "If the worse came to the worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain, while imperialism would be razed to the ground, and the whole world would become socialist: in a number of years there would be 2.7 billion people again and definitely more."
1958 - Mao launches the 'Great Leap Forward' to accelerate the development of all sectors of the economy at once. Breaking with the development theories practiced in the Soviet Union and applied to China during the first five year plan, the Great Leap Forward seeks to simultaneously develop industry and agriculture by employing surplus rural labour on either vast infrastructure projects or for small-scale, farm-based industries - the so-called "backyard furnaces."
The Great Leap Forward also aims to further entrench communist principles into the structure and functioning of social systems, a goal that is characterised by the development of people's communes in the countryside and selected urban areas. Between April and September 98% of the farm population is organised into communes.
Under the Great Leap Forward, Mao and other party leaders ordered the implementation of a variety of unproven and unscientific new agricultural techniques by the new communes. Combined with the diversion of labor to steel production and infrastructure projects and the reduced personal incentives under a commune system this led to an approximately 15% drop in grain production in 1959 followed by further 10% reduction in 1960 and no recovery in 1961 (Spence, 553).
1962 - Mao returns from the "second line" of decision-making and begins a campaign to purify the party of "capitalists" and "counter-revolutionaries", using his enormous status to hold sway. His 'Socialist Education Movement' seeks to restore ideological purity and intensify the class struggle, calling on the population to "to learn from the People's Liberation Army", which in turn is asked to promote 'Mao Tse-Tung Thought' as the guiding principle for a renewal of the revolution.
The school system is reorganised to accommodate the work schedule of communes and factories. Intellectuals and scholars are "reeducated" to accept that their participation in manual labour is needed to remove "bourgeois" influences. The education movement will become increasingly militant.
1965 - Mao, who has by now regained some control of the CCP, begins a purge of the party that will develop into the 'Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution' of 1966-76. Mao believes that the integrity of the CCP and its gains need to be defended against the emergence of a new elite of bureaucrats by a process of continuous revolution. Among those to be stripped of their party posts is Deng Xiaoping.
1966 - Millions of school and university students are organised into the 'Red Guards' to publicly criticise those in the party who are considered by Mao and his supporters to be "'Left' in form but 'Right' in essence." The Red Guards receive Mao's backing on 5 August when he publishes his article, 'Bombard the Headquarters', endorsing their revolutionary posters and slogans, then presides over their first mass demonstration, held in Tiananmen Square.
1969 - The Cultural Revolution is further curtailed in April at the First Plenum of the CCP's Ninth National Party Congress, where Mao is confirmed as the supreme leader and his supporters are appointed to the senior party posts. The Mao acolyte and leader of the PLA, Lin Biao, becomes vice chairman of the CCP and is named as Mao's successor.
However, while the rebuilding of the CCP begins, the ramifications of the militant phase of the Cultural Revolution continue to be felt, with the party splitting into two main factions, the "radicals" led by Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, and the moderates led by Premier Zhou Enlai. The ageing Mao takes the role as elder statesman and intermediary between the two forces.
The Red Guards, meanwhile, are withdrawn from the political equation, with millions being forced to resettle in remote parts of the country, where they will remain until the 1980s.
In foreign affairs, relations with the Soviet Union reach rock bottom during the winter months of 1969 when Chinese and Soviet forces exchange fire across the border at the Ussuri River in China's northeast. The Soviets will subsequently station about a quarter of their combined armed forces along the Chinese frontier.
1971 - The tension between the radical and moderate factions comes to a head in September when Lin Biao stages an abortive coup d'état against Mao. His subsequent death in a plane crash as he attempts to flee the country marks the beginning of the end for the radicals and the ascension of the moderates.
Meanwhile, the CCP government receives international recognition when it takes the China seat at the UN, replacing the government in Taiwan.
1972 - The influence of the moderates and Mao's suspicion of the Soviets is reflected in a shift in China's foreign policies. Rapprochement with the US is confirmed when President Richard M. Nixon visits China in February. In September diplomatic relations are established with Japan.
1973 - The moderates' policies of modernisation are formally adopted by the CCP at the First Plenum of the 10th National Party Congress held in August, a meeting during which Mao makes his last official appearance.
The year is also marked by the rehabilitation of Deng Xiaoping, who is reinstated as a vice premier. Deng's position is further solidified in January 1975 when he is appointed as a vice chairman of the CCP and as a member of the Political Bureau and its Standing Committee, the apex of power in China.
1975 - Conflict between the radicals and moderates reemerges when Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, and her three principal radical associates (the so-called 'Gang of Four') launch a media campaign against Deng.
1976 - The final showdown between the radicals and moderates occurs following the death of Zhou Enlai in January. On 5 April, at a spontaneous mass demonstration held in Tiananmen Square in Beijing to memorialise Zhou, Mao's closest associates are openly criticised. The authorities forcibly suppress the demonstration, which is considered to be vote of support for Deng.
When Mao responds by blaming Deng for the demonstration and ordering that he be dismissed from all his public posts, the radicals appear to be on the ascendancy. However, in June the government announces that the increasingly ailing Mao will no longer receive foreign visitors. The radicals' days are now numbered. Mao dies of a heart attack in Beijing on 9 September. In October the Gang of Four are arrested.
He died at 9 September 1976 (1976-09-09) (aged 82), Beijing, People's Republic of China.
At five o'clock in the afternoon of September 2, 1976, Mao suffered a heart attack, far more severe than his previous two and affecting a much larger area of his heart. X rays indicated that his lung infection had worsened, and his urine output dropped to less than 300 cc a day. Mao was awake and alert throughout the crisis and asked several times whether he was in danger. His condition continued to fluctuate and his life hung in the balance.
Three days later, on September 5, Mao's condition was still critical, and Hua Guofeng called Jiang Qing back from her trip. She spent only a few moments in Building 202 (where Mao was staying) before returning to her own residence in the Spring Lotus Chamber.
On the afternoon of September 7, Mao took a turn for the worse. Jiang Qing went to Building 202 where she learned the news. Mao had just fallen asleep and needed the rest, but she insisted on rubbing his back and moving his limbs, and she sprinkled powder on his body. The medical team protested that the dust from the powder was not good for his lungs, but she instructed the nurses on duty to follow her example later. The next morning, September 8, she went again. She demanded the medical staff to change Mao's sleeping position, claiming that he had been lying too long on his left side. The doctor on duty objected, knowing that he could breathe only on his left side, but she had him moved nonetheless.
Mao's breathing stopped and his face turned blue. Jiang Qing left the room while the medical staff put him on a respirator and performed emergency cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Mao barely revived and Hua Guofeng urged Jiang Qing not to interfere further with the doctors' work, as her actions were detrimental to Mao's health and helped cause his death faster. Mao's organs were failing and he was taken off the life support a few minutes after midnight. September 9 was chosen because it was an easy day to remember. Mao had been in poor health for several years and had declined visibly for at least 6 months prior to his death.
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