Mao Zedong

By Kaveh Hosseini

Mao Zedong was born in 1893 in Shaoshan, Hunan, the son of a prosperous peasant — and he made the peasantry, which orthodox Marxism dismissed as backward, the engine of the largest revolution in history. A librarian's assistant in Beijing, a young organizer of peasant unions, he broke with Moscow's doctrine that revolution must come from the urban proletariat: in China, he argued, the countryside would surround the cities. The Chinese Communist Party, nearly destroyed by Chiang Kai-shek's massacres of 1927, survived because Mao took it to the mountains — to Jinggangshan, then on the Long March of 1934–35, the 6,000-mile retreat that forged the party's legend and Mao's supremacy within it.

The strategy worked. Through the war against Japan and the civil war that followed, the Communists' land reform, discipline, and nationalist credibility won the countryside; in 1949 the People's Republic of China was proclaimed in Tiananmen Square, and a quarter of humanity changed regimes. The achievement was staggering: within a decade, a shattered, semi-colonial country was unified, its railways rebuilt, its literacy campaigns enrolling hundreds of millions, its industry — Soviet-aided — rising from near nothing. Women were liberated from feudal bondage by law; landlords as a class were destroyed; China stood up, as Mao said, and the "century of humiliation" ended.

Then came the catastrophes, and they bear Mao's personal signature. The Great Leap Forward of 1958–62 — the fantasy of overtaking Britain in steel through backyard furnaces and impossible grain quotas — produced the deadliest famine in human history: some 15 to 45 million dead, the toll of ideology enforced against reality. The Cultural Revolution of 1966–76 — Mao's war against his own party, unleashing Red Guard youth against "capitalist roaders" — shattered schools, temples, families, and a generation's education, while the Chairman watched and steered the chaos. He died in 1976, and within two years Deng Xiaoping had reversed his economics while keeping his state.

Mao is the most consequential and most terrible figure of this list. He unified China, ended foreign domination, industrialized a peasant empire, and doubled its life expectancy — and he caused the deaths of tens of millions through policies he refused to abandon. His thought — people's war, the mass line, continuous revolution — armed insurgencies on every continent, from Vietnam to Peru. The People's Republic endures as the world's second power, built on his unification and despite his economics. History has not yet finished judging him, because China has not finished living with him.

Impact on civilization

Mao unified China after a century of fragmentation and foreign domination, creating the People's Republic that governs a quarter of humanity — the single largest political transformation of the twentieth century. His peasant-based revolutionary strategy rewrote Marxist doctrine and became the manual for insurgencies worldwide: people's war, the mass line, and protracted struggle shaped conflicts from Vietnam to Algeria to Latin America. Domestically, his regime achieved mass literacy, basic public health, the legal emancipation of women, and the industrial foundation on which China's later economic miracle was built — life expectancy roughly doubled in a generation. The catastrophes are equally historic: the Great Leap Forward caused the deadliest famine in recorded history, and the Cultural Revolution devastated Chinese culture, education, and a generation. Geopolitically, his 1949 victory created the bipolar Cold War's Asian front, and his later break with Moscow split world communism. Modern China — unified, sovereign, industrial — is unthinkable without Mao's revolution and unbearable with his methods; both halves of that sentence are his legacy.