Few men have placed their stamp on an era as Mao Zedong did on 20th-century China. Few destinies are more ambiguous. Welcomed by many in 1949 as a liberator from the corrupt, oppressive, and ineffectual government of the Kuomintang, and as the protagonist of a great revolution in the countryside, he came to be seen as a harsher tyrant than ever Chiang Kai-shek had been, and the bringer not of liberation but of slavery and starvation to the peasantry.
