When is mao zedong birthday

Flashing neon signs declaring "I love China" and "70"; fireworks, fighter jets and floral displays; soldiers, sailors and civilians in a cast of , When China has a birthday, it puts on a huge bash and the nation of 1. It is seven decades to the day, on October, 1 since Mao Zedong, wearing a cap and a buttoned-up jacket now known as a Mao suit , stood before tens of thousands of Chinese people in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and proclaimed the creation of the new People's Republic of China PRC.

This week China's President, Xi Jinping, will stand near the same spot at the square's Gate of Heavenly Peace to watch the achievements of his state paraded to the world. At the celebrations will be the chief executive of Hong Kong, Carrie Lam, who has travelled overland from her home town where protests rage against Beijing's growing control. Around the world it seems inevitable that television images will cut from the colourful parade to more tear gas on the streets of Kowloon and Hong Kong Island.

But on mainland China the government has been at pains to quash this and other counter-narratives in the lead-up to its big day. The internet, often unreliable, has slowed to a trickle. Instead, movies featuring the accomplishments of ordinary Chinese will be screened in mainland cinemas, including My People, My Country , directed by seven of China's best-known filmmakers portraying proud moments in the nation's history.

Where did the People's Republic of China come from? And how has a movement led by a revolutionary come to exert such enormous and growing influence in the world today? Credit: Getty. Although it had been a republic in name since the Qing dynasty was officially ousted in , China had been unstable for decades before that, with warlords battling one another and the economy tanking, says China Matters founding director Linda Jakobson.

Mao's announcement in marked both the end of this period of tumult and the Chinese Communist Party's victory against the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang whose leader, Chiang Kai-shek, decamped to Taiwan.

Japan, which invaded the north-east region of Manchuria and the trading port of Shanghai in the early 30s, was not the only power to have "trampled" on China. The British fought two opium wars against China in the 19th century, with Britain, in essence, trying to force the Qing dynasty to enable a lucrative opium-smuggling operation started by the British East India Company. It was after the first of these opium wars that China was forced to cede Hong Kong to Britain in , one of several "unequal treaties".

The "century of humiliation" that preceded the founding of the PRC still looms large in China's official narrative. The PRC was based on a Chinese version of Marxist-Leninist ideology, with its idea of class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Selected quotes from Mao's "Thought" were published in what is now one of the world's most-read books, The Little Red Book — required reading during the Cultural Revolution. But in the first 10 years of the PRC, action was swift.

Many landlords and wealthy businesspeople were either executed or consigned to the bottom rungs of society, says Jakobson. Mao, an early member of the Chinese Communist Party founded in , sought a powerful ally in the Soviet Union. His image adorns banknotes and his embalmed body attracts hundreds, if not thousands, of visitors a day to Beijing.

While the party has acknowledged he made mistakes, there has yet to be an official accounting for the chaos of the Cultural Revolution or the millions of deaths from starvation during the Great Leap Forward. Xi suffered personally during the Cultural Revolution when his father was jailed.

Xi was sent to the countryside to live with peasants, like millions of other young urban Chinese. Instead, he received a harsh rebuke and was shaken by the intense rejection by the urban intelligentsia. Fearing a loss of control, he ruthlessly crushed any further dissent. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese were labeled "rightists," and thousands were imprisoned. In January , Mao Tse-tung launched the "Great Leap Forward," attempting to increase agricultural and industrial production.

The program established large agricultural communes with as many as 75, people working the fields. Each family received a share of the profits and a small plot of land. Mao had set idealistic, some would say improbable, expectations for both agriculture and industrial production, believing the country could make a century's worth of advancement in a few decades. At first, reports were promising, with accounts of overwhelming advancement. However, three years of floods and bad harvests told a different story.

Agricultural production had not come close to expectations, and reports of massive steel production proved to be false. Within a year, an appalling famine set in and entire villages died of starvation. In the worst manmade famine in human history, an estimated 40 million people died of hunger between and It became clear that Mao knew how to organize a revolution, but was totally inept at running a country. The scale of the disaster was hidden from the nation and the world.

Only high-level Communist Party leaders knew, and Mao's protective inner circle kept many of the famine's details from him. As a result of the Great Leap Forward's failure, in Mao Tse-tung was quietly pushed to the sidelines and his rivals took control of the country. For the first time in 25 years, Mao was not a central figure in leadership.

While he waited for his time to return, an ardent supporter, Lin Biao, compiled some of Mao's writings into a handbook entitled Quotations from Chairman Mao. Known as the "Little Red Book," copies were made available to all Chinese. In , Mao Tse-tung made his political return and launched the Cultural Revolution. Appearing at a gathering at the Yangtze River in May, the year-old Mao swam for several minutes in the river, looking fit and energetic.

The message to his rivals was, "Look, I'm back! He calculated correctly that the young wouldn't remember much about the failure of the Great Leap Forward and the subsequent famine. In a classic autocratic method to gain control, Mao Tse-tung manufactured a crisis that only he could solve. Mao told his followers that bourgeois elements in China were aiming to restore capitalism, and declared these elements must be removed from society.

His youthful followers formed the Red Guards and led a mass purge of the "undesirables. To prevent a repeat of the rejection he received during the Hundred Flowers Campaign, Mao ordered the closure of China's schools, and young intellectuals living in the cities were sent into the countryside to be "re-educated" through hard manual labor.

The Revolution destroyed much of China's traditional cultural heritage as well as creating general economic and social chaos in the country. It was during this time that Mao's cult of personality grew to immense proportions. In , to further solidify his place in Chinese history, Mao Tse-tung met with United States President Richard Nixon , a gesture that eased tensions between the two countries and elevated China's prominence as a world player. During the meetings, it became apparent that Mao's health was deteriorating, and not much was accomplished because Mao was not always clear in his statements or intentions.

Mao Tse-tung died from complications of Parkinson's disease on September 9, , at the age of 82, in Beijing, China. He left a controversial legacy in both China and the West as a genocidal monster and political genius.