Meet Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong was born in December 1893, in the province of Hunan. His parents were peasants, but Mao didn't start out quite at the bottom. His father was a trader and grain merchant who made a good enough living to get his son a first-rate education.

In 1918, that education led to a job at the Beijing University Library, where Mao came into contact with Marxism. About the same time, Soviet Russia was looking to expand communism's borders. It set up a Chinese Communist Party in 1921, and Vladimir Lenin helpfully revised Marxist theory to allow for revolution in pre-industrialized societies. (Marx would have judged China unready for revolution.) By then, Mao was already a confirmed Marxist--active in the Chinese Communist Party from its inception.

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