ABSTRACT
Mao Tse—tung created a powerful, popular movement that, at a great cost in human lives, unified China and liberated its people from external oppression. In early 1918, Mao traveled to Beijing, where he discovered Marxist communism while serving as a university librarian; in 1921, Mao became a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In the early 1960s, severely criticized because of the Great Leap Forward's failure, Mao sought a power base outside the CCP and turned to provincial leaders, the army, and students through the Cultural Revolution, which became a monstrous attack against entrenched CCP figures and those intellectuals and experts who had survived the Hundred Flowers Movement. Mao often launched programs, such as the 1956–57 Hundred Flowers Movement or the 1965–72 Cultural Revolution, in the name of strengthening China, but covertly used them to root out his ideological opponents.
