The founder of the People's Republic of China, theorist of peasant revolution, and leader of the Chinese Communist Party — whose decades of rule produced land reform, industrialization, and national unification alongside the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, two catastrophes that killed tens of millions.
Mao Zedong won a revolution that Marx said was impossible. Marxism held that socialist revolution required an industrial working class. China in 1949 had almost none. Mao's solution — using the peasantry as the revolutionary force, fighting a protracted rural guerrilla war, encircling the cities from the countryside — was a genuine theoretical innovation. So was the catastrophe that followed: a leader who had solved the problem of seizing power turned out to have no reliable method for knowing when to stop using the tools of revolution once power was won.