12. China’s Chief Communist Was a Classical Poet Who Knew How to Lay on the Charm
China’s main Marxist theorist, Mao Zedong (1893 – 1976), was a guerrilla fighter, soldier, and statesman, who played the key role in his country’s communist revolution. He led the Chinese Communist Party from 1935 until his death, and after the communists won control in 1949, he ruled China until his demise. During his years in power, he was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions Chinese, killed outright by his followers, or starved to death because of his disastrous economic policies.
However, while a monster in many ways, Mao also oozed charisma when he wanted to lay it on, and there was more to him than just the revolutionary and man of action. He had a particular fondness for classical Chinese poetry and literature, and in addition to being a prolific mass murder, he was also a prolific writer and poet. Incongruously, for somebody so politically radical and revolutionary, he liked to compose and pen verses in classical Chinese forms. That would be analogous to a modern American anarchist who liked writing poems in the manner of Chaucer.
Mao’s education, like that of most intellectuals of his era, was based on a foundation of classical Chinese literature. However, while most of Mao’s contemporaries moved on to modern styles and themes, he stuck with the old. From his youth, he composed poetry in the classical style, and his image as a poet played a significant role in shaping his public persona as he rose to power in China.
He was actually considered a good poet, and not just by critics in China, who would have been foolhardy indeed to pan his poetry, but also by literary critics who were outside China and thus beyond his clutches. His poetry tended to be on romantic end of things, rather than the more modern realist genre, and hearkened back to the style of the Tang Dynasty, of the 7th to 9th centuries.