Editing Maoism (section)

=== Mao Zedong's intellectual development ===
[[File:抗日游击战争的战略问题03538.jpg|thumb|''Strategic Issues of Anti-Japanese Guerrilla War'' (1938)]]
Mao's intellectual development can be divided into five significant periods, namely:

# the initial Marxist period from 1920 to 1926
# the formative Maoist period from 1927 to 1935
# the mature Maoist period from 1935 to 1940
# the Civil-War period from 1940 to 1949
# the post-1949 period following the revolutionary victory

==== Initial Marxist period (1920–1926) ====
Marxist thinking employs immanent socioeconomic explanations, whereas Mao's reasons were declarations of his enthusiasm. Mao did not believe education alone would transition from [[Capitalist mode of production (Marxist theory)|capitalism]] to [[Communism#Marxist communism|communism]] for three main reasons. (1) the capitalists would not repent and turn towards communism on their own; (2) the rulers must be overthrown by the people; (3) "the proletarians are discontented, and a demand for communism has arisen and had already become a fact."<ref name=":8">{{Cite book |last=Lowe |first=Donald M. |url=https://archive.org/details/functionofchinai0000unse |title=The Function of "China" in Marx, Lenin, and Mao |date=1966 |publisher=[[University of California Press]] |isbn=978-0-520-00771-0 |language=en}}</ref>{{Rp|page=109}}

==== Formative Maoist period (1927–1935) ====
In this period, Mao avoided all theoretical implications in his literature and employed a minimum of Marxist category thought. His writings in this period failed to elaborate on what he meant by the "Marxist method of political and class analysis".<ref name=":8" />{{Rp|page=111}}

==== Mature Maoist period (1935–1940) ====
Intellectually, this was Mao's most fruitful time. The orientation shift was apparent in his pamphlet ''Strategic Problems of China's Revolutionary War'' (December 1936). This pamphlet tried to provide a theoretical veneer for his concern with revolutionary practice.<ref name=":8" />{{Rp|page=113}} Mao started to separate from the Soviet model since it was not automatically applicable to China. China's unique set of historical circumstances demanded a correspondingly unique application of Marxist theory, an application that would have to diverge from the Soviet approach.

In the late 1930s, writings and speeches by Mao and other leaders close to Mao began to emerge as the Communist Party's developing ideology.<ref name=":23">{{Cite book |last=Leese |first=Daniel |title=Mao's Little Red Book: A Global History |date=2013 |publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]] |isbn=978-1-107-05722-7 |editor-last=Cook |editor-first=Alexander C. |location=Cambridge |pages= |chapter=A Single Spark: Origins and Spread of the Little Red Book in China}}</ref>{{Rp|page=27}} This was described as the Sinicization of Marxism.<ref name=":23" />{{Rp|page=27}} Mao's view was that these concepts were not a complete system of thought but were still developing.<ref name=":23" />{{Rp|page=27}} As a result, he decided not to use the term "Maoism" and instead favored characterizing these ideological contributions as Mao Zedong Thought (''Mao Zedong sixiang'').<ref name=":23" />{{Rp|page=27}}

Beginning in the [[Yan'an Soviet|Yan'an]] period, Mao Zedong Thought became the ideological guide for developing revolutionary culture and a long-term social movement.<ref name=":6" />{{Rp|page=53}}

[[File:中国革命战争的战略问题03531.jpg|thumb|''Strategic Issues in the Chinese Revolutionary War'' (1947)]]

==== Civil War period (1940–1949) ====
Unlike the Mature period, this period was intellectually barren. Mao focused more on revolutionary practice and paid less attention to Marxist theory. He continued to emphasise theory as practice-oriented knowledge.<ref name=":8" />{{Rp|page=117}} The most crucial topic of the theory he delved into was in connection with the [[Cheng Feng]] movement of 1942. Here, Mao summarised the correlation between Marxist theory and Chinese practice: "The target is the Chinese revolution, the arrow is Marxism–Leninism. We Chinese communists seek this arrow for no other purpose than to hit the target of the Chinese revolution and the revolution of the east."<ref name=":8" />{{Rp|page=117}} The only new emphasis was Mao's concern with two types of subjectivist deviation: (1) [[dogmatism]], the excessive reliance upon abstract theory; (2) [[empiricism]], excessive dependence on experience.

In 1945, the party's first historical resolution put forward Mao Zedong Thought as the party's unified ideology.<ref name=":22">{{Cite book |last1=Doyon |first1=Jérôme |title=The Chinese Communist Party: A 100-Year Trajectory |last2=Froissart |first2=Chloé |date=2024 |publisher=ANU Press |isbn=9781760466244 |editor-last=Doyon |editor-first=Jérôme |location=Canberra |chapter=Introduction |editor-last2=Froissart |editor-first2=Chloé}}</ref>{{Rp|page=6}} It was also incorporated into the [[Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party|party's constitution]].<ref name=":Li">{{Cite book |last=Li |first=Hongshan |title=Fighting on the Cultural Front: U.S.-China Relations in the Cold War |date=2024 |publisher=[[Columbia University Press]] |isbn=9780231207058 |location=New York, NY |doi=10.7312/li--20704 |jstor=10.7312/li--20704}}</ref>{{Rp|page=23}}

==== Post-Civil War period (1949–1976) ====
To Mao, the victory of 1949 was a confirmation of theory and practice. "Optimism is the keynote to Mao's intellectual orientation in the post-1949 period."<ref name=":8" />{{Rp|page=118}} Mao assertively revised the theory to relate it to the new practice of socialist construction. These revisions are apparent in the 1951 version of ''On Contradiction''. "In the 1930s, when Mao talked about contradiction, he meant the contradiction between subjective thought and objective reality. In ''Dialectal Materialism'' of 1940, he saw idealism and materialism as two possible correlations between subjective thought and objective reality. In the 1940s, he introduced no new elements into his understanding of the subject-object contradiction. In the 1951 version of ''On Contradiction'', he saw contradiction as a universal principle underlying all processes of development, yet with each contradiction possessed of its own particularity."<ref name=":8" />{{Rp|page=119}}

In 1956, Mao first fully theorized his view of continual revolution.<ref name=":Laikwan" />{{Rp|page=92}}