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Historical person
1893–1976
Mao Zedong was a Chinese Communist revolutionary who became the principal leader of the People’s Republic of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976. Born in Hunan in 1893, he participated in the early Chinese Communist movement and developed a strategy that placed unusual emphasis on peasant mobilisation and rural guerrilla warfare. During the long conflict with the Nationalists, Mao consolidated control of the Chinese Communist Party, survived the Long March and led the movement from its wartime base at Yan’an.
After Communist victory in 1949, Mao oversaw land redistribution, political campaigns, rapid state-building and China’s entry into the Korean War. His Great Leap Forward of 1958–62 attempted forced industrial and agricultural transformation but contributed to catastrophic famine in which tens of millions died. In 1966 he launched the Cultural Revolution, mobilising Red Guards against alleged enemies and producing widespread persecution, institutional breakdown and violence. Mao also reshaped China’s international position, including the later opening toward the United States. His historical legacy combines revolutionary state formation with immense human and political costs.
In Da Chen’s China’s Son, Mao Zedong’s death and the return of national examinations reopen a path through education. In Da Chen’s Colors of the Mountain: A Memoir, after Mao Zedong’s death, the restoration of competitive education gives Da a route beyond the village. For broader historical treatment of Mao Zedong, see Jung Chang’s Mao, Hourly History’s Mao Zedong, Sir Max Hastings’ The Korean War, and Stephen R. Platt’s The Raider.
Periods
Series
The Shanghai Girls sequence follows sisters Pearl and May from cosmopolitan Shanghai in 1937 to immigrant life in Los Angeles and then into the early People’s Republic of China. In Shanghai Girls, family debt, arranged marriage and the Japanese invasion force the sisters across occupied China and through…
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The Imperial China Trilogy traces the collapse, survival and reinvention of Chinese imperial power across three centuries. Manchu follows a European artilleryman through the fall of the Ming and the Manchu conquest; Mandarin moves to the nineteenth-century crisis of the Qing state; and Dynasty carries a Eurasian Hong…
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The China Trilogy follows connected foreign and Chinese families across the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the revolutionary conflicts of the Republican era and the political campaigns of the People’s Republic. The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure begins amid the Boxer Rebellion in 1899–1900; The Emperor’s Bones moves into…
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Standalone books
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
