On Causes Of Personal Worship Of Mao Zedong

The fanatic personal worship of Mao Zedong is a unique and unprecedented social phenomena. Based on researches by many scholars and distinguished leaders, this dissertation first gives a brief introduction to the manifestation characteristic and historical process of its formation, then it attempts to give a detailed analysis of its complex causes from five aspects. The first aspect discussed is the historical roots including the economic foundation--the vast sea of small-scale peasant economy, the political foundation-the long feudal dictatorship, cultural and ideological foundation-the ideology of utter devotion to the sovereign in the traditional culture, the incomplete eradication of feudal ideologies because of their deep-rootedness, the incompletion of anti-feudal movement, and people's bluntness of human rights and democracy. The second aspect is the social foundation which refers to the limitation of peasants, workers, intellectuals and cadres of all levels. The third aspect is the organism causes: the drawbacks of highly centralized planned economy and of the traditional socialist politics. The fourth aspect is the environmental factor, especially the special social environment in the Cultural Revolution. The last aspect is the personal factors which help form the personal worship of Mao Zedong, including both objective and subjective factors. The objective factors make it easy for people to form their worship and for Mao Zedong to accept the worship, while the subjective factors make it easy for him to connive at worship and exploit it. So Mao Zedong himself had to take part of the responsibilities for the overflow of the personal worship of him.