He Zizhen

Chinese Communist revolutionary forces (before 1949) Marxism–Leninism 1910–1984 ○ Died

The "Two-Gunned Girl General", Mao's third wife and a guerrilla who walked the Long March

Born into an impoverished scholar-gentry family in Yongxin, Jiangxi, she joined the Communist Youth League in 1925 and the CCP in 1926. She headed the county Women's Bureau and worked as a travelling propagandist, fought in the Yongxin uprising of 1927 and became a guerrilla, a crack shot nicknamed the "Two-Gunned Girl General". Introduced to Mao at Jinggangshan by Yuan Wencai in spring 1928, she married him that year. She served as Mao's secretary; on the Long March she had to leave a daughter born on the march in February 1935 with a local family, and that year she was badly wounded by shrapnel and carried on a stretcher. Of the six children she bore Mao only their daughter Li Min survived with her. Separating from Mao in 1937, she went to the Soviet Union for treatment, where she lost another child and suffered severe depression.

Also known as: Ho Tzu-chen