Sydney Ideas

SPEAKER: Professor David Goodman, Professor of Chinese Politics, and Director, Institute of Social Sciences Mao Zedong (1893-1976) is best known as the founder of the People’s Republic of China. He led the Chinese Communist Party from 1935 until his death, and brought it to political power in 1949. Mao is well known as a revolutionary, a guerrilla leader, a political and military strategist and icon for post-modern art. During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that started in the mid-1960s he attacked the establishment of the new party state in China for “succumbing to the sugar coated bullets of the bourgeoisie”, though his motives have always been a matter of controversy inside as well as outside the People’s Republic of China. Mao himself was always anxious to be seen as an ideologist, as well as an active revolutionary. The lecture will introduce the different and often competing strands in his ideology, which remain an important legacy for China today.