Before Mao Zedong became the most powerful man in China, he was a lowly library assistant at Peking University — an outsider from rural Hunan whom the intellectual elite barely acknowledged. That experience of humiliation and class resentment shaped the revolutionary who would overthrow the old order, found the People’s Republic, and remake Chinese society through campaigns that killed tens of millions.

This episode traces Mao from his humble library days through the Long March, the communist victory in 1949, and the catastrophic experiments — the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution — that made him both the architect and the destroyer of modern China.

• Mao’s early radicalization as a marginalized library assistant at Peking University
• The Long March and the guerrilla strategy that defeated the Nationalists
• The Great Leap Forward famine that killed tens of millions of Chinese citizens
• The Cultural Revolution and Mao’s cult of personality at its most extreme