Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China and is responsible for more deaths than any other ruler of the twentieth century. Born in 1893 in Shaoshan, Hunan, the son of a prosperous peasant he quarrelled with constantly, he worked as a library assistant at Peking University in 1918 — where he was ignored by the intellectuals whose footnotes he later made a point of remembering — and was among the founders of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. His decisive theoretical break was to locate the revolution in the peasantry rather than the urban proletariat, which was heresy to the Comintern and correct about China. After Chiang Kai-shek's purge of the Communists in 1927 he retreated to the countryside, built the Jiangxi Soviet, and led the Long March in 1934–35 — some 6,000 miles with perhaps a tenth of the force surviving, and the retreat at which he took control of the party. He fought Japan from Yan'an, won the civil war, and proclaimed the republic in October 1949. The record after that divides. Land reform, literacy, life expectancy roughly doubling, and the end of foreign concessions sit against the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward — whose famine of 1959 to 1961 killed somewhere between 15 and 45 million people — and the Cultural Revolution he launched in 1966 to recover the power the famine had cost him. He broke with Moscow, tested a bomb in 1964, and received Nixon in 1972. He died in 1976. The party's own 1981 verdict called him seventy per cent right and thirty per cent wrong.
- Lived: 1893 CE – 1976 CE
- Nationality: Chinese
- Roles: head_of_state, party_leader, military_leader
