Mao was a product of traditional Chinese and modern Western style education. Mao was born in 1894, to a well-to-do peasant family in Shaoshan, Hunan Province, in central China, where his father was both a grain farmer and a grain merchant. Years of confrontation with his father cultivated his rebellious spirit, and from early on he developed a strong sense of justice and sympathy for the poor despite his family background. Formal schooling came to Mao very late, when he was sixteen, because attending modern western style schools was not quite the norm in his hometown yet, and he had to go to a big city in his province to do so. But for a long time before that, Mao had studied classical Chinese in a traditional style tutorial setting, which explains his liking for classical Chinese and classical Chinese style poetry, which he never stopped composing throughout his life. His education at a modern style school first in Hsiang Hsiang, and later in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, was an eye-opening experience for this peasant boy, who had prior been primarily subject to an education in classical Chinese and Buddhism. In both places he was able to read many liberal/revolutionary magazines published in Beijing and Shanghai, such as the New Tide and New Youth. Indeed, Mao would fall neatly into the category of a "May Fourth Youth," who thirsted for knowledge to save China, and searched for such knowledge from the West.

Although one of the organizers of the work-study movement to Europe in the 1920s, Mao never went to Europe himself. Instead, he organized reading groups and new culture societies in his home province Hunan. When the Nationalists and Communists started their cooperation in 1923, Mao had dual party membership and worked for the propaganda bureau for the Nationalist party branch in Hunan. There, he witnessed the tremendous enthusiasm of Chinese peasants when they were freed from their traditional bondages to their landlords. The Nationalists and Communists experimented with land redistribution in some Chinese provinces, including Hunan. Mao marveled at the peasants' activism in organizing peasant associations and protecting the new land they acquired from former landlords. This and similar experiences led Mao to the belief that peasants, not industrial workers, were the chief force the Communists should rely on. This was a refutation of classical Marxist theory that the industrial working class should be the leadership in a socialist/Communist state. Eventually, the situation of China (over 90% peasants, and only a small percentage of Chinese were industrial workers) proved Mao to be right. But for a long time, he  was pushed to the margin in the Communist leadership because of his unorthodox views.

Although he was a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, the latter was initially dominated by the better educated in the party, such as Chen Tu-hsiu, once dean of the Humanities at Peking University and founder of the journal New Youth. Other leaders of the Party included Li Ta-chao, professor of history at Peking University, Wang Ming and Li Lisan, the latter two both trained at Moscow and faithfully followed Moscow's orders to start the revolution from the cities. There was also Mikhail Borodin, the adviser from the Third Communist International. They followed the policies of Leon Trotsky, one of the top leaders in the Soviet Communist Party and the Third Communist International. Trotsky, whose followers were called the Trotskyites, called for international revolution to overthrow the conservative governments that represented the bourgeois class of factory owners and large businessmen. He visualized industrial workers' leadership in the socialist states to be established, hence the revolutions were to first take place in the cities. In China, the legacy of Trotsky was the many industrial workers' strikes in the cities, which were quickly suppressed by the warlords. The revolution from the cities policy continued even after the split of the Nationalists and Communists, when the Nationalists started to ruthlessly massacre the Communists in the cities. Mao and several other branches within the Communist Party shifted their focus to underground guerrilla warfare after 1927 and built the first Chinese Soviet base in Jinggangshan, a mountainous area in Jiangxi Province in southeastern China. Even there, however, Mao's call for a peasant focused revolution was ignored, until the Communist Party was badly defeated by the Nationalists in the early 1930s and had to take a long retreat to northwest China where they would align with an existent red base there to fight against the Japanese and keep close to the Soviet Union. It was right on the Long March, name given to this long migration of the Red Army to northwestern China, that Mao Tse-tung was made leader of the Chinese Communist Party in 1935, and his peasant based instead of city based revolutionary policy was recognized as the official party policy.

 The Long March is arguably the longest large scale migration in modern history (around 6,000 miles). A few years ago, an American journalist Harrison Salisbury went to China and traced the route of the Long March (by train, bus, etc.) and wrote the best seller The Long March. Its difficulty and the heavy losses suffered by the Red Army during the march helped to make it a legend. Mao Tse-tung immortalized the march in a poem he wrote after arriving at Yanan in Oct.1935.

The Long March by Mao TseTung October 1935 The Red Army fears not the trials of the Long March, Holding light ten thousand crags and torrents. The Five Ridges wind like gentle ripples And the majestic Wumeng roll by, globules of clay. Warm the steep cliffs lapped by the waters of Golden Sand, Cold the iron chains spanning the Tatu River. Minshan's thousand li of snow joyously crossed, The three Armies march on, each face glowing.

After 1935, Chinese Communism primarily focused on the countryside and the mobilization of the peasants through land reform, and had little to do with the Soviet Union (by then, Trotsky was already purged out of the Soviet Communist Party by Joseph Stalin, and one of Trotsky's "crimes" was his strategic mistakes that led to the defeat of Chinese Communists by the Nationalists in the 1920s). Stalin had not always got along with Trotsky. Where Stalin wanted the Chinese Communists to work with the Nationalists (Stalin was never enthusiastic about the Chinese Communists because he looked down upon the leadership of the CCP: instead of industrial workers they were primarily from the countryside, and did not fit the Marxist vision for socialist or Communist leaders.), Trotsky would want the Communists to go alone.  Stalin remained doubtful of the Chinese Communists till the end.  As late as 1948, when civil war again raged on, the Communists were winning against the Nationalists, and Stalin suggested the two parties divide up China along the Yangtze River--with the Nationalists occupying the part of China south of the Yangtze.  Mao rejected the idea and "carried the revolution to the end" (in Mao's own words).