Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China and ruled it as Chairman of the Communist Party from 1949 until his death in 1976, and his rule was among the deadliest in human history. Born in Hunan in 1893, he rose through the Chinese Civil War and the Long March to absolute power, then presided over policies that killed on an almost unimaginable scale: the Great Leap Forward brought the deadliest famine ever recorded, with tens of millions dead, and the Cultural Revolution persecuted and destroyed millions more. Total estimates of deaths under his government range from forty to eighty million.

His Sun sat in Capricorn, the sign of relentless ambition and the slow climb to the highest rung of authority, placed in the fourth house of home and homeland. His Moon in Leo, the sign of the king and the born performer, occupied the eleventh house of the masses, and around him grew one of the twentieth century's most extreme cults of personality. A Virgo Ascendant lent the analytical, controlling mask of the strategist. A chart describes temperament; it never excuses the choices a person makes, and the suffering Mao inflicted was his own doing.