Iven was also suspected of being a friend of Mao Zedong and especially Zhou Enlai.

Women have also played key roles in the genre, including such actresses as Kathy Long, Michelle Yeoh, Angela Mao, and Cynthia Rothrock.

Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung, and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao ( December 26, 1893September 9, 1976 ), was a Chinese communist revolutionary, political theorist and politician.

However, during the years when Mao was China's " Great Helmsman ", a range of positive changes also came to China.

Following his mother's example, Mao also became a practising Buddhist from an early age, venerating a bronze statue of the Buddha which was in their home, but abandoned this faith in his mid-teenage years.

His political views of the time were also shaped by popular protests that had erupted following a famine in Changsha, the capital of Hunan ; Mao supported the protester's demands, but the armed forces soon suppressed the dissenters and executed their leaders.

The famine soon spread throughout Hunan, reaching Shaoshan ; here, starving peasants seized some of his father's grain, and while Mao disapproved of their actions as morally wrong, he also claimed a great deal of sympathy for their situation.

Mao also remained active in school politics, in 1915 becoming elected to the position of secretary of the Students Society.

From Peking, Mao moved along to Shanghai, working as a laundryman and meeting with Chen Duxiu, who had been recently freed from prison ; together, they discussed Marxism, which Chen was also beginning to accept.

" In Shanghai, Mao also met with one of his old teachers, Yi Peiji, a revolutionary and member of the Kuomintang, or Chinese Nationalist Party, which at the time was gaining increasing support and influence across China.

Mao soon set up his own branch in Changsha, also establishing a branch of the Socialist Youth Corps.

Mao was also involved in the movement advocating autonomy for the province, a viewpoint shared by figures from a variety of different political persuasions.

Although Mao himself officially declared the Cultural Revolution to have ended in 1969, the power struggles and political instability between 1969 and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976 are now also widely regarded as part of the Revolution.

In 1963, the Chinese Communist Party began to openly denounce the Soviet Union, publishing a series of nine polemics against its Marxist revisionism, with one of them being titled On Khrushchev's Phoney Communism and Historical Lessons for the World, in which Mao charged that Khrushchev was not only a revisionist but also increased the danger of capitalist restoration.

Meanwhile, Mao also sacked Propaganda Department director Lu Dingyi, a Peng Zhen ally.

Mao also restored the function of some formal party institutions, such as the operations of the party's Politburo, which ceased functioning between 1966-8 because the Central Cultural Revolution Group held de facto control of the country.

Mao also inducted several of his supporters to the Central Military Commission, and placed his loyalists in leadership roles of the Beijing Military Region.

Wang Dongxing, a trusted ally of Mao, was also criticized.

They would frequently go back home to visit their parents in the cities, and they had money to spend and wore fashionable clothes .” Gao also claimed that during the Revolution, Mao sent his daughter, Li Na, to work on a farm in Jiangxi.

The origins of Maoism stem not from Marxist writings alone, but also from the modern Chinese intellectual tradition in which Mao was raised.

Yet another international event would have a large impact on not only Mao but also the Chinese intelligensia was the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

Mao also believed strongly in the concept of a unified " people ".

Governor Zhang soon ordered the United Student Association and its associated weekly shut down, but Mao continued publishing his views after assuming editorship of the student magazine New Hunan ( Hsin Hunan ).

Mao, favouring chaos as a means to " cleanse " the leadership ranks, ordered Nie's message to be broadcast nationwide and called it " the first Marxist big-character poster in China.

In addition, policies ordered by Mao for all soldiers to follow, the Eight Points of Attention, instructed the army to avoid harm to or disrespect for the peasants, in spite of the desperate need for food and supplies.

Because of Hu's support of Mao, he was deemed unreliable and ordered to join the Long March so that he could be placed under surveillance.

There are theories, for example, that Mao or Premier Zhou Enlai had ordered the plane to be shot down.

In July 1957, Mao ordered a halt to the campaign.

Zhang first came to prominence as the result of his October 1958 Jiefang (" Liberation ") magazine entitled “ Destroy the Ideas of Bourgeois Legal Ownership .” Mao Zedong ordered the reproduction of the article in Renmin Ribao (" People ’ s Daily "), and personally wrote an accompanying “ Editor ’ s Note ” giving mild approval.

However, Mao himself and Zhou Enlai ordered her not to be touched along with several other communist and non-communist cadres.

Mao ordered Peng to be criticized for forty days for the " failings " of the Hundred Regiments Campaign ( even though Mao had supported it, and afterwards praised its successes ).

After Zhou and Lin negotiated Stalin's approval, Peng attended a conference in Beijing with Mao, Zhou, and Gao Gang on October 18, and they ordered the first wave of Chinese soldiers — in total more than 260, 000 men — to cross into Korea on the night of October 19.

Peng was still in command of China's armed forces when Mao ordered the shelling of Jinmen ( Quemoy ) and Matsu, islands off the coast of Fujian that were still held by the Kuomintang, in the late summer and autumn of 1958.

As part of the Great Leap Forward, Mao ordered the formation of a national militia that was controlled by Party members and independent of the PLA, eventually training and arming tens of millions of civilians.

In July Mao and Lin Biao, cooperating with Jiang Qing's faction, ordered the PLA to form an " investigation group " to determine Peng's " crimes ", so that Peng could be more thoroughly humiliated in future struggle sessions.

For the sake of bargaining with the Kuomintang in peace negotiations, Mao ordered Lin to assemble key armies to defend key cities, which was against the previous strategy of the Red Army.

Other scholars suggested that Mao had ordered the Chinese army to shoot down Lin's plane over Mongolia.

Zhou then ordered all planes in China grounded without the written permission of Mao, himself, and several senior military leaders.

When the Manchus entered Korea, Mao ordered a general retreat of Ming forces.

Nevertheless, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered that the manifesto of the Red Guards be broadcast on national radio and published in the People's Daily newspaper.

In July 1966, Mao ordered the removal of the remaining work teams ( against the wishes of Liu Shaoqi ) and condemned their ' fifty days of White Terror '.

Hoping to pressure the UN into abandoning South Korea, Mao ordered the PVA to attack the UN forces along the 38th parallel.

By his own account, he was within four days of being executed when Mao Zedong arrived on the scene and ordered Xi and his comrades released.

When it inevitably failed Mao ordered that the survivors be executed.

It was reported that Cradock was ordered by the Red Guards to kow-tow to a portrait of Mao Zedong, an act that he firmly refused.