aining Kuomintang forces in Yunnan and Xinjiang provinces, though some Kuomintang holdouts survived until much later.
Mao encouraged population growth, and under his leadership the Chinese population almost doubled from around 550 million to over 900 million. However, Mao's Great Leap Forward, a large-scale economic and social reform project, resulted in an estimated 45 million deaths between 1958 and 1961, mostly from starvation. Between 1 and 2 million landlords were executed as "counterrevolutionaries." Mao's rule proved to be disastrous for China:
Somewhere between 20 and 40 million Chinese died of famine in China during Mao's Great Leap Forward because of misguided, stubbornly imposed rural socialist policies. ... When Mao Zedong died in 1976, Chinese sources estimate that 20 percent of the population of China, some 200 million souls, were suffering from chronic malnutrition for no good reason other than the failures of socialist agriculture and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution.
In 1966, Mao and his allies launched the Cultural Revolution, which would last until Mao's death a decade later. The Cultural Revolution, motivated by power struggles within the Party and a fear of the Soviet Union, led to a major upheaval in Chinese society. In October 1971, the PRC replaced the Republic of China in the United Nations, and took its seat as a permanent member of the Security Council. In that same year, for the first time, the number of countries recognizing the PRC surpassed those recognizing the ROC in Taipei as the government of China. In February 1972, at the peak of the Sino-Soviet split, Mao and Zhou Enlai met Richard Nixon in Beijing. However, the U.S. did not officially recognise the PRC as China's sole legitimate government until 1 January 1979.
After Mao's death in 1976 and the arrest of the Gang of Four, who were blamed for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping quickly wrested power from Mao's anointed
