Mao Zedong was born in 1893 to a prosperous Hunanese peasant family, trained briefly as a teacher, and was at the founding meeting of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai in 1921. After Chiang Kai-shek's anti-communist purge of 1927 he led the party's surviving rural cadres into the mountains and developed the doctrine of peasant-based guerrilla revolution. The 1934–35 Long March — six thousand miles, one year, perhaps a tenth of the eighty thousand who set out arriving at Yan'an — established his unchallenged leadership of the party. He fought the Japanese invasion (1937–45), then the resumed civil war against Chiang's Nationalists, and on 1 October 1949 stood on the gate of Tian'anmen and proclaimed the People's Republic of China. Across the next twenty-seven years he transformed China — and tore it apart. Land reform broke the landlord class; the Great Leap Forward of 1958–62 attempted to industrialise overnight and produced the deadliest famine in recorded human history (perhaps 30 to 45 million deaths); the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76 set the young against their elders, the country against itself, and destroyed an unknowable amount of pre-revolutionary Chinese culture. He died in Beijing in September 1976. His successors quietly dismantled most of his economic policies while keeping his portrait above Tian'anmen. He is the most consequential single political figure of twentieth-century Asia.
Lifetime
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