Mao Tze-Tung was a Chinese Marxist theorist, soldier, and statesman who led China's communist revolution after decades of foreign occupation and civil war in the 20th century. Following the Communist Party of China’s military victory over the nationalist Kuomintang in the Chinese Civil War, Mao announced the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949 in the culturally-significant Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

Mao pursued the ideal of strong and prosperous China, endeavoring to build a modern, industrialized nation and relieve the poverty of peasants that constituted the majority of China's population. Until his death, Mao maintained control of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China through both political acumen and a cult of personality.

Chinese Communist leader. A member of a noted Mandarin family, he was educated in China at an American-supported school and a university in Japan. His involvement in radical movements led to several months imprisonment. After his release he studied (1920–22) in France. A founder of the Chinese Communist party, he established (1922) the Paris-based Chinese Communist Youth Group. After a few months in England, he studied in Germany. Zhou returned (1924) to China and joined Sun Yat-sen, who was then cooperating with the Communists. He served (1924–26) as deputy director of the political department at the Whampoa Military Academy, of which Chiang Kai-shek was commandant. After the Northern Expedition began, he worked as a labor organizer. In 1927 he directed a general strike in Shanghai, opening the city to Chiang's Nationalist forces. When Chiang broke with the Communists, executing many of his former allies, Zhou became a fugitive from the Kuomintang. Later, holding prominent military and political posts in the Communist party, he participated in the long march (1934–35) to NW China. During the partial Communist-Kuomintang rapprochement (1936–46) he was the chief Communist liaison officer. In 1949, with the establishment of the People's Republic of China at Beijing, Zhou became premier and foreign minister. He headed the Chinese Communist delegation to the Geneva Conference of 1954 and to the Bandung Conference (1955). In 1958 he relinquished the foreign ministry but retained the premiership. A practical-minded administrator, Zhou maintained his position through all of Communist China's ideological upheavals, including the Great Leap Forward (1958) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Initially supportive of the latter, he was periodically attacked by Red Guards for attempting to shelter its victims. He was largely responsible for China's reestablishing contacts with the West in the early 1970s before becoming ill. He died Jan., 1976.

Zhang worked as a writer in Shanghai in the 1930s. After the Yan'an conference in 1938, he joined the Communist Party of China. With the creation of the People's Republic of China, he became a prominent journalist in Shanghai in charge of the Liberation Daily (Jiefang Ribao). He met Jiang Qing in Shanghai and helped to launch the Cultural Revolution.

In February 1967 he organized the Shanghai Commune. In April 1969 he joined the Politburo of the Central Committee and in 1973 he was promoted to the Permanent Committee of the Politburo. In January 1975 he became second deputy Prime Minister. His attempt to promote himself higher in the party's hierarchy ended when he was arrested in October 1976. He was sentenced to death, together with Jiang Qing, in 1981, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Jiang died in 1991 in captivity.

He was released for medical reasons in August 2002 and was arranged to live in obscurity back in Shanghai.

Among those calling themselves Maoist outside China, a large perhaps majority portion still uphold the theories of Zhang Chun-Qiao. His most widely respected article is "On Exercising All-Round Dictatorship over the Bourgeoisie," in which he explained the bases and extent of the problem of the bourgeoisie in China and what would have to be done to prevent capitalist restoration

Wang took part in the Korean War in the early 1950s. After the war he was sent to Shanghai to work in a factory, where he met Zhang Chun-Qiao and became involved in a Red Guards group. He organized the Shanghai Commune in January 1967, and in 1969 he was elected to the Central Committee. He joined the Permanent Committee and became deputy-president of the Party in 1973.

He was arrested for his participation in the Gang of Four in October 1976 and received the death sentence, but had it commuted to life imprisonment. He died of liver cancer in a Beijing hospital in 1992.

Yao began his career in Shanghai as a literary critic. After meeting Zhang Chun-Qiao, he devoted himself to critical campaigns against counter-revolutionary writers. His article "On the New Historical Beijing Opera 'Hai Rui Dismissed from Office'", which he wrote at the behest of Zhang Chung-Qiao and Jiang Qing, launched the Cultural Revolution on November 10, 1965.

In April 1969 he joined the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, working on official propaganda. A member of "Proletarian Writers for Purity" he was the editor of "Liberation Daily" Shanghai's main newspaper. He joined the state's efforts to rid China's writers union of the famous pro-imperialist writer Hu Feng.

In October 1976 he was arrested for his participation in the Cultural Revolution and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment.

He was released on 23 October 1996 and spent the remainder of his life writing a book and studying Chinese history. He was living in his hometown of Shanghai and had became the last surviving member of the Gang of Four after the death of Zhang Chun-Qiao in April 2005. According to China's official Xinhua news agency, he died of diabetes on 23 December 2005, aged 74

Kang Sheng, was the head of the People's Republic of China's security and intelligence apparatus until his death in 1975. Kang was the mastermind of the Cultural Revolution and was subsequently accused, along with the Gang of Four, of being responsible for persecutions during that period.

Xie Fu-Zhi was a Chinese radical intellectual who became influential within the Communist Party of China during the Cultural Revolution.

As Minister of Public Security, Xie was sent by President Zhou En-lai to the scene of the Wuhan Mutiny. PLA troops were supporting, with the encouragement of Gen. Chen Zaidao, resistance to Red Guard groups trying to assert local control, and Xie was to reiterate Chou's orders to the general to cease assisting that resistance. On arriving July 16, 1967, he repeated that order, and ordered Ch'en to support the Red Guards' faction, but was rebuffed by the general. Four days later, Xie was badly beaten, and detained for most of a week, by PLA troops in the mutiny, until Ch'en was confronted with much larger PLA forces and surrendered.

Xie died before the denunciation of the Gang of Four in 1976, but he was one of two people named as members of that group beyond the surviving four put on trial for "anti-party activities".

Born into a rich peasant family in Yinshan, Hunan province (near Mao's Shaoshan), Liu attended the same school as Mao Zedong in Changsha, and then went to the Soviet Union and received his university education at the University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. In 1921 he joined the newly formed CPC. He went back to China in 1922, and led several railway workers' strikes. During the period of 1925 to 1926, he led many political campaigns and strikes in Hubei and Shanghai. In 1927 he was elected to the Party's Central Committee.

In 1932 Liu became the Party Secretary in Fujian Province. Two years later he joined the Long March and was one of the supporters of Mao Zedong during the Zunyi Conference. In 1936 he was Party Secretary in North China, leading the anti-Japanese movements in that area. He was elected as the CPC General Secretary in 1943 (this was a secondary position under the Party Chairman, Mao Zedong). During the Civil War, Liu was the Deputy Chairman of the Party.

After the establishment of the People's Republic of China, Liu worked mainly in economic areas. An orthodox Soviet-style Communist, he favoured state planning and the development of heavy industry. He was therefore skeptical about Mao's Great Leap Forward movement which began in 1958. Alerted by his sister to the developing famine in rural areas in 1960, he became a determined opponent of Mao's policies. In the wake of the Great Leap Forward's catastrophic failure he replaced Mao as Chairman of the People's Republic, and began to be seen as Mao's likely successor. His more moderate economic policies help to lead China from the depths of the Great Leap Forward. Liu Shaoqi favoured the introduction of piece work, greater wage differentials and other measures that sought to undermine collective farms and factories.


Half way through the 1960s, however, Mao rebuilt his position in the Party and in 1966 he launched the Cultural Revolution as a means of destroying his enemies in the Party: Liu and Deng Xiaoping, along with many others, were denounced as "capitalist roaders." Liu was labeled as a "traitor", "scab", "Chinese Khrushchev", "the biggest capitalist roader in the Party". In July 1966 he was displaced as Party Deputy Chairman by Lin Biao. By 1967 Liu and his wife Wang Guangmei were under house arrest in Beijing.

Liu was removed from all his positions and expelled from the Party in October 1968 and disappeared from view. Only after Mao's death in 1976 was it revealed Liu had been confined under terrible conditions in an isolated cell in Kaifeng, which led to his death from "medical neglect" (untreated diabetes and pneumonia) in 1969.

After Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, Liu was politically rehabilitated (in February 1980), with a belated state funeral over a decade after his death.

Deng Xiao-ping was a leader in the Communist Party of China (CPC). Deng never held office as the head of state or the head of government, but served as the de facto ruler of the People's Republic of China from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. He pioneered "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" and Chinese economic reform, also known as the "socialist market economy". Critics and supporters alike have claimed many of his reforms helped bring his country closer to capitalism.

Deng formed the core of the "second generation" CPC leadership. Under his tutelage, China developed one of the fastest growing economies in the world while keeping the Communist Party in tight overall control.