Mao Zedong was one of the original members of the Chinese Communist Party in the early 1920s. He was therefore a revolutionary leader from his youth. He struggled first against corrupt Chinese leaders and then against Chinese nationalists led by Chiang Kai-Shek in the late 1920s and the early 30s, emerging as the leader of the Communist Party in China during this period.

Along with his rival, Chiang, he struggled against Japanese occupation in World War II, but their cooperation ended as soon as the war did. Soon after the destruction of the Japanese occupiers, civil war broke out between the Communists and the Nationalists, each of whom viewed for control of the nation.

Mao was among the most important leaders of the Communists during the Chinese Civil War, and when his side emerged victorious, Mao, as the General Secretary of the Communist Party, became the leader of what he called the People's Republic of China, driving Chiang from China and killing hundreds of thousands of his followers. His rise to power, complete by 1949, had been long and bloody, and over the following decades he consolidated and expanded it through the "Great Leap Forward" and especially the "Cultural Revolution," each of which cost millions of lives.