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Mao Tse-tung set up the first communist government in China in 1949. Mao was born in 1893 in the village of Shao Shan, in Hunan Province. Mao actually served in Sun Yat-sen’s army helping to fight for the republic in the revolution of 1911. This revolution finally put an end to the dynastic system and the Manchu dynasty. He quit the army when Yuan Shih-kai seized control of the 1911 revolution and became the first president of the republic. Mao first discovered communism at Peking when he read the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. By the summer of 1920 he considered himself a Marxist; a year later he was one of the twelve men to found the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. In 1927, Mao returned to Hunan and launched a revolt known as the Autumn Harvest Uprising with. Joining this revolt were mostly peasants. This badly armed and inexperienced army was defeated easily by Kuomintang troops, who were soldiers that opposed communism and were loyal to Kaishek. Mao, who was nearly beheaded, escaped from his captors. The peasants befriended him and in November 1927, Mao organized the first Chinese soviet in the town of Tsalin in Hunan. Communist units and leaders came from all over China to join him. With the