Mao Zedong was born in the village of Shaoshan in Hunan province, the son of a relatively prosperous peasant farmer. He would go on to co-found the Chinese Communist Party, lead the Long March, defeat the Nationalists in China's civil war, and rule the People's Republic of China from 1949 until his death in 1976, reshaping the country through campaigns including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
Mao's father was a strict disciplinarian and grain merchant who wanted his son to follow him into farming and trade; Mao instead gravitated toward books, reading forbidden novels by candlelight and clashing repeatedly with his father's authority. That early defiance, he later suggested, shaped his lifelong instinct for rebellion against established order.
He left Hunan for Beijing and Shanghai as a young man, working briefly as a library assistant and absorbing the revolutionary currents sweeping China after the fall of the Qing dynasty. By the 1920s he had helped found the Chinese Communist Party, and through the 1930s and 1940s he outmaneuvered rivals within the party and led the Communists through the grueling Long March and the civil war against Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists.
Mao proclaimed the People's Republic of China in October 1949 and ruled it for 27 years. His policies produced staggering, contradictory legacies: land reform and literacy campaigns alongside the famine of the Great Leap Forward, which killed tens of millions, and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Few individuals in the twentieth century shaped the fate of as many people as the farmer's son born in Shaoshan on this day.