People of the Revolution and the USSR

People’s Republic of China Chinese communism 1893–1976 ○ Natural causes

He rewrote the grammar of revolution for a peasant country

In a letter of 5 January 1930 to Lin Biao, he answered pessimism about the Red Army's prospects by invoking the old Chinese saying that 'a single spark can start a prairie fire.'

Born to a peasant family near Shaoshan, Hunan, he studied in Changsha and was shaped by the 1911 Revolution and by nationalist and anti-imperialist currents. Introduced to Marxism while working as a librarian at Peking University, he took part in the May Fourth Movement of 1919 and in July 1921 attended the Chinese Communist Party's First National Congress in Shanghai as one of thirteen delegates, becoming a founding member. He developed rural base areas, guerrilla warfare and protracted people's war; elected to the leadership at Zunyi in January 1935, he became Chairman of the Military Commission in November 1935 and took the party chairmanship only in 1943. He led land redistribution and industrialisation, intervened in the Korean War in October 1950, suppressed opponents, and presided over the Great Leap Forward of 1958–1962 and the Cultural Revolution launched in 1966.

Communist Party of China Chinese communism 1893–1981 ○ Natural causes

Sun Yat-sen’s widow who stayed with the Kuomintang left and became a vice-chair of the People’s Republic

At the 1922 mutiny she stayed behind to cover Sun Yat-sen's escape, saying 'China can do without me; it cannot do without you.' On 16 May 1981, weeks before her death, she was admitted to the CCP and named honorary chairman of the PRC.

The second of the three Soong sisters of a wealthy Christian Shanghai family, she married Sun Yat-sen in 1915. Opposing Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-Communist coup in 1927 she became the symbol of the Kuomintang left, went to Moscow, and in the 1930s led the China League for Civil Rights in Shanghai. During the war with Japan she organised the China Defence League in Hong Kong to supply the Communist base areas. In 1949 she became a vice-chair of the Central People’s Government; shortly before her death in 1981 she joined the Communist Party and was named honorary president. Her younger sister Soong Mei-ling was Chiang Kai-shek’s wife.

Communist Party of China Chinese communism 1897–1979 ↓ Removed 1938 · natural causes

Chair of the founding congress who split with Mao on the Long March and defected to the Nationalists

At the 1935 Long March reunion he insisted on turning south to Sichuan rather than north to Shaanxi. Losing over 75% of his 80,000 troops discredited him in his army and Comintern.

A Peking University student leader in May Fourth, he chaired the party’s founding congress in 1921. After years of labour organising he went to the Eyuwan Soviet in 1931 and became political leader of the Fourth Front Army, which met Mao’s Central Red Army in Sichuan on the Long March in 1935. Clashing with Mao over marching north or west, he set up a rival “centre” and turned south, lost much of his army, and rejoined at Yan’an in 1936. Criticised in 1937, he fled to the Nationalist zone in 1938 and was expelled; he later wrote his memoirs in Hong Kong and Canada and died in Toronto.

People’s Republic of China Chinese communism 1897–1986 ○ Natural causes

From Whampoa instructor to marshal, the soldier who organised the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976 and ended the Cultural Revolution

On 6 October 1976 he led the Party elders and generals who ordered the arrest of the Gang of Four, ending the Cultural Revolution.

A Hakka from Guangdong, he taught at the Whampoa Military Academy, joined the party in 1927 and took part in the Guangzhou Uprising. As chief of staff on the Long March he warned Mao of Zhang Guotao’s split, and he was chief of staff through the war with Japan and the civil war and took over Beiping in 1949. Made a marshal in 1955, he was criticised in the “February Countercurrent” of 1967 but survived to run the army after Lin Biao’s death. In October 1976, after Mao died, he decided and executed the arrest of the Gang of Four with Hua Guofeng and Wang Dongxing, and in 1978 backed Deng Xiaoping’s return. As chairman of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee (1978–1983) he acted as head of state.

People’s Republic of China Chinese communism 1898–1976 ○ Natural causes

The PRC's first premier and an architect of its foreign policy

His 1971 secret talks with Kissinger opened the way for Nixon's arrival in Beijing on 21 February 1972, and the Shanghai Communiqué of 28 February 1972 reordered the Cold War triangle.

A Chinese statesman born in Huai'an, Jiangsu in 1898 and died in Beijing in 1976. One of the CCP's earliest leaders, he joined a Chinese communist cell in Paris, served in the Political Department of the Whampoa Military Academy, and acted as the Party's chief negotiator through the Xi'an Incident and the Chongqing negotiations. Appointed premier (of the Government Administration Council, later the State Council) with the founding of the PRC in October 1949, he served until his death in 1976, and concurrently as foreign minister from 1949 to 1958, becoming an architect of early PRC foreign policy. After the Zunyi Conference he was subordinate to Mao, and amid the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution he kept the state running and managed the balance of power.