Mao Zedong biography timeline

Mao backs Communist participation in negotiations for a coalition government

Mao urges Communist forces to hold Siping as a strategic position in Manchuria

Mao supports the shift from rent reduction toward more radical land reform in Communist-held areas

Mao frames the renewed conflict as a long revolutionary war against the Nationalists

Civil war between Chiang's Nationalists and Mao's Communists resumes after the failure of postwar coalition efforts

China conducts its first nuclear test at Lop Nur and becomes the fifth nuclear-weapon state.

China tests its first atomic bomb using uranium programme infrastructure.

Mao supports a cultural criticism campaign that develops into the Five-Man Group led by Peng Zhen

Mao directs criticism of the February Outline and prepares to overturn Peng Zhen's leadership of the cultural campaign

Mao replaces the old cultural apparatus with the Central Cultural Revolution Group dominated by his allies

Mao authorises the May 16 Notification warning that bourgeois representatives have infiltrated the party

Mao launches the Cultural Revolution through the May 16 Notification against alleged bourgeois elements in the party

Mao approves broadcasting Nie Yuanzi's poster, turning campus criticism into a national movement

Mao writes Bombard the Headquarters, signalling an attack on senior party leaders

The party adopts the Sixteen Points, defining the programme of the Cultural Revolution

Mao wears a Red Guard armband, giving symbolic endorsement to student rebels

Mao receives and addresses a vast Red Guard rally in Tiananmen Square

Mao calls on students and Red Guards to rebel against party and cultural authorities

Red Guards attack old ideas, culture, customs and habits under Mao's revolutionary slogans

Mao calls for educated youth to learn from workers, peasants and soldiers

Political leaders and intellectuals are publicly humiliated as Mao calls for attacks on bourgeois influence

Mao favours replacing the Shanghai Commune with a revolutionary committee model

Mao increasingly relies on the People's Liberation Army to restrain factional violence

Mao promotes revolutionary committees combining cadres, masses and soldiers as new local governments

Mao orders educated youth to go to the countryside and be re-educated by poor and lower-middle peasants

Mao opens the Ninth Party Congress, which declares the Cultural Revolution victorious but does not end its consequences

National Day celebrations are cancelled after the Lin Biao incident shocks the leadership

Mao opens the Tenth Party Congress after the Lin Biao incident and renewed factional tensions

Mao approves Deng Xiaoping's removal from all posts after the Tiananmen Incident

Mao Zedong dies, leaving the Cultural Revolution radicals vulnerable

Death of Mao Zedong