The Hunan farmer's son and library clerk who decided that China's revolution would come from the villages, not the factories; survived purges, encirclement and the Long March; and by 1945 led a party of over a million members and an army behind the Japanese lines.
The fork
1927. Chiang's massacre in Shanghai and the failed city risings that follow wreck the party's plan. Mao, who has just written that the peasants will rise like a hurricane, takes the survivors of his own rising into the mountains instead.
What they wanted
A China rid of landlords, foreign powers and Chiang, with the party at its head and himself at the party's. Marxism, in his hands, bends to the village.
What it cost
Purges that killed thousands of his own comrades in Jiangxi; land reform by execution; and the Rectification campaign of 1942–44 in Yan'an, the rehearsal for campaigns that after 1949 would kill millions.
The fight
Philip Short and Jonathan Spence write a revolutionary of real gifts and terrible methods. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story makes him a monster from the start, and most historians think it overstates its case.