... life Mao Tse-tung was the son of a rich peasant, he was born in Xiangtan in Hunan province on 26 December 1893. During his early years, the old imperial Chinese order was rapidly changing, the radical reformist and revolutionary movements were rising, and Western ideas and ideologies were introduced to undermine faith in traditional values and beliefs. Although the young Mao was affected by the traditional Chinese culture especially on poems and novels, he soon joined in the radical political and iconoclastic intellectual movements that swept Chinese cities. Mao published his first article in New Youth in 1917, A Study of Physical Culture, which is an attack on the Confucian It was a uniquely modern Chinese combination of nationalism and cultural iconoclasm that very much reflected the radical spirit of the times and one that was to remain a prominent feature of the Maoist vision. (Short 1999:pp19-81) In late 1918, ...

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