As every Chinese schoolboy knows, Mao Zedong (Mao Tse- tung) was born into a poor peasant family and grew up amid the hunger and degradation of daily existence in late imperial China. Though he never went to a university, he became head- master of an elementary school in provincial Changsha in 1920, and a major political force in his native Hunan province. From there, he went on to become the supreme ruler of a quarter of mankind for a quarter of a century, an unprecedented feat in human history.
Mao...