Views of Gandhi & Mao on Violence & Imperialism

The public lives of Mao Tse-tung and Mohandas K. Gandhi were roughly contemporary as far as achievement of their respective goals of political revolution are concerned. The elder contemporary, Gandhi, was assassinated at the age of 80 in 1948, following the achievement of India's absolute independence from British rule and about one year before Mao's communist revolution succeeded on the Chinese mainland. The public lives of Gandhi and Mao were circumscribed by an apparently absolute commitment to radical social transformation in the modern period. In China and India, respectively, Mao and Gandhi were positioned in the vanguard of political, social, and economic change. Indeed, Merriam says that both leaders' charisma took on the character of near deification among their most loyal followers.

The popular historical record readily confirms their success in achieving measurable transformation of their societies and

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demonstrators who approached the gates were clubbed. In contrast to Gandhi's view of the structure of political revolution, Mao's conception of violence in political action in general and revolution in particular appears to have been instrumental. As Gross explains, "Mao advanced further strategy and tactics of direct action by combining political and military strategy and war and revolutionary means. . . . [His] long-range strategy, outlined in his essay On Contradictions, is based on . . . a general proposition that change is determined by contradictions and conflicts." Of particular interest in this regard is Mao's utilization of the Chinese peasantry and the People's Liberation Army in accomplishing the Communist revolutionary victory in China and in structuring post-revolutionary society. The long-term connection of Mao with the peasantry has been noted by a number of commentators. Initially an urban revolutionary, Mao "grasped the peasants' revolutionary possibilities" in the mid-1920s. Solomon quotes Mao's view of the central role of the peasantry in revolutionary theory: Formerly I had not fully realized the degree of class struggle among the peasantry, but after the May 30 [1925] Incident, and during the great wave of
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