1950s CHINESE LEADER CHAIRMAN MAO MEMORIAL PIN

1950s CHINESE LEADER CHAIRMAN MAO MEMORIAL PIN. Brass. Very good condition.
Mao Zedong or Mao Tse-tung; (1893-1976) Chinese Marxist theorist, soldier, and statesman who led China's communist revolution and served as chairman of the People's Republic of China (1949-59) and chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (1931-76). The son of a peasant, Mao joined the revolutionary army that overthrew the Qing dynasty but after six months as a soldier left to acquire more education. At Beijing University he met Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, founders of the Chinese Communist Party, and in 1921 he committed himself to Marxism. At that time, Marxist thought held that revolution lay in the hands of urban workers, but in 1925 Mao concluded that in China it was the peasantry, not the urban proletariat, that had to be mobilized. He became chairman of a Chinese Soviet Republic formed in rural Jiangxi; its Red Army withstood repeated attacks from Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist army but at last undertook the Long March to a more secure position in northwestern China. Here Mao became the undisputed head of the Communist Party. Guerrilla-warfare tactics, appeals to the local population's nationalist sentiments, and Mao's agrarian policies gained the party military advantages against their Nationalist and Japanese enemies and broad support among the peasantry. Mao's agrarian Marxism did not sit well with the Soviet Union, but when the Communists succeeded in taking power in 1949, the Soviet Union agreed to provide the new communist state with technical assistance. It took Mao's Great Leap Forward and his criticism of "new bourgeois elements" in the Soviet Union and China to alienate the Soviet Union irrevocably. Soviet aid was withdrawn in 1960. Mao clung to his vision, following the failed Great Leap Forward with the equally disastrous Cultural Revolution, but more moderate forces helped mitigate their effects. After Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping introduced social and economic reforms and the cult of Mao was greatly diminished.