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Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong

1893 CE1976 CE · Shaoshan, Hunan, China

Mao Zedong (1893-1976) was the founding leader of the People's Republic of China, which he proclaimed in 1949 after the Communist victory in the civil war, and he served as chairman of the Chinese Communist Party until his death. His rule transformed China through land reform and collectivization, but his Great Leap Forward campaign of 1958-1962 caused an economic catastrophe and a famine in which tens of millions of people died between 1959 and 1961. From 1966 he launched the Cultural Revolution, a decade of political upheaval and persecution that caused further large-scale death and destruction; he remains a deeply consequential and contested figure in Chinese history.

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Stop 1 of 71893Born

Shaoshan, Hunan, China

What they did here

Born on 26 December 1893 in the farming village of Shaoshan in Hunan Province, the son of a moderately prosperous peasant.

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Thinkers, teachers, and rulers whose lives overlapped with Mao Zedong’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

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