Mao Zedong — Profile, Rankings & Fame Trend

Summary

Updated 2026-07-17

He founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and ruled it until his death in 1976. The campaigns he ordered — the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution — resulted in tens of millions of deaths, mainly through famine and political persecution. The attention never fades because the scale was vast and the country he remade is still here.

Biography

About

Born to a peasant family in Shaoshan, Hunan, on 26 December 1893, Mao Zedong was introduced to Marxism while working as a librarian at Peking University and became a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. He built the Chinese Red Army during the civil war, led the Long March to Yan'an in 1935, and became party leader. After Japan's surrender in 1945 the civil war resumed; he defeated the Nationalist government, which withdrew to Taiwan in 1949. From 1958 to 1962 he oversaw the Great Leap Forward, which aimed to collectivise agriculture and industrialise the country, followed b…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong

said1968

Racial discrimination in the United States is a product of the colonialist and imperialist system. The contradiction between the Black masses in the United States and the U.S.

— "A New Storm Against Imperialism" (1968)

Mao Zedong

said1965

Imperialism fears China and the Arabs. Israel and Taiwan are bases of operation for Imperialism in Asia. They created Israel for the Arabs and Taiwan for us.

— Official address with a Palestine Liberation Organization delegation, quoted in The Geography of Sino-Israeli Relations. (1965)

Mao Zedong

said1959

All the rest of the world uses the word "electricity." They've borrowed the word from English. But we Chinese have our own word for it!

— in 1959, Quoted in Khrushchev Remembers (1970), p. 474

Mao Zedong

said1956

Stalin made mistakes. He made mistakes towards us, for example, in 1927. He made mistakes towards the Yugoslavs too. One cannot advance without mistakes...

— Said to Enver Hoxha, on his visit to China in 1956, as quoted in Hoxha's (1986) The Artful Albanian, (Chatto & Windus, London),

Mao Zedong

said1949