Thinkers Timeline

Mao Zedong was a Chinese revolutionary and political leader. He founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and ruled it until his death in 1976. He was born on 26 December 1893 in Shaoshan, a village in Hunan province. His father was a rural grain dealer who had become relatively well-off. Mao did farm work as a boy, left an arranged marriage, and moved to the provincial capital Changsha to study. China at the time was in crisis. The old imperial system collapsed in 1911. Foreign powers had humiliated the country. Warlords controlled many regions. Millions lived in extreme poverty. Young Mao read widely and met revolutionary ideas. While working at Peking University library in 1918, he was introduced to Marxism. In 1921, he was one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party. A civil war followed between the Communists and the Nationalist Party led by Chiang Kai-shek. In 1934-35 Mao led the Long March, an 8,000-kilometre retreat that saved the Communist Party from destruction. By the end of World War II, his forces had grown strong. He defeated the Nationalists in 1949. On 1 October 1949 he stood atop Tiananmen Gate in Beijing and proclaimed the People's Republic of China. He ruled for twenty-seven years. He launched huge campaigns: land reform, the Great Leap Forward (1958-62), and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Some brought great changes. Others brought disaster. He met US President Nixon in 1972, ending China's isolation from the West. He died in Beijing on 9 September 1976, aged 82.

Tu Youyou is a Chinese medical scientist. In 2015 she won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering artemisinin, a malaria drug that has saved millions of lives. She was born on 30 December 1930 in Ningbo, a city on China's east coast. Her family valued education. As a teenager, Tu caught tuberculosis and had to take two years off school. The experience pushed her toward medicine. When she returned to school, she knew she wanted to help fight disease. She studied at Beijing Medical College and graduated in 1955. She then joined the Institute of Materia Medica at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine. From 1959 to 1962 she took a special course that taught modern-trained scientists about traditional Chinese medicine. This combination shaped the rest of her career. In 1969, at age 39, she was put in charge of a research team on a secret Chinese government project called Project 523. The goal was to find a new malaria treatment. Over the next few years, Tu and her team worked through thousands of traditional herbal remedies. She found her answer in a 1,600-year-old Chinese medical book. The compound she isolated, now called artemisinin, became one of the most important drugs of the twenty-first century. She did this work without a PhD, without any study abroad, and without membership in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Some Chinese call her the 'three-nos professor'. She was promoted to senior researcher in 1980. She is still active at the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences.