Mao Zedong was a leader in politics.
The Cultural Revolution , formally the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution , was a sociopolitical movement that took place in China from 1966 until 1976 . The Great Leap Forward of the People 's Republic of China ( PRC ) was an economic and social campaign by the Communist Party of China ( CPC ) from 1958 to 1962 . Mao Zedong . In contrast , critics consider him a dictator comparable to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin who damaged traditional Chinese culture , as well as considering him a perpetrator of human rights abuses , and they estimate that Mao was responsible for 40 to 70 million deaths through starvation , prison labour and executions , which would rank his tenure as the top incidence of excess mortality in human history .