Mao Zedong (PJW)

Mao Zedong was a Chinese communist revolutionary and founder of the People's Republic of China.

On October 1, 1949, Mao declared the foundation of the People's Republic of China, a single party state controlled by Mao's Communist Party. Though initially allies with their fellow communists of the Soviet Union, the two nations split during the 1960s.

Mao's campaign to rapidly industrialize the nation through a program known as the Great Leap Forward. The campaign was incredibly costly and led to one of the largest famines in humanity history, resulting in Mao losing some favor within the party. In an effort to reclaim his power, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, a program to remove all "counter-revolutionary" elements of Chinese society. Many political opponents were purged and Mao's cult of personality grew.

As the Cultural Revolution spiraled out of control, the powers of the General Lin Biao and Chairman Chen Boda of the Cultural Revolution Group increased as well. Mao planned to purge them as well, but the two men struck first. Mao Zedong and his wife were killed when the train they traveling on was destroyed with a bomb in 1969; despite the claims of Lin and Chen that counter-revolutionaries were behind the plot, it is widely suspected that the two were the actual culprits (Boda would later accuse Lin of committing the crime during his own takeover in 1974).