Republic, Civil War and the People's Republic
The 1911 revolution and Sun Yat-sen, warlords, the May Fourth Movement, the Nationalists and the Communists, the Long March, the Japanese invasion and the Nanjing massacre, the civil war and 1949, land reform, the Great Leap Forward and the famine, the Sino-Soviet split, the Cultural Revolution, and Mao's death in 1976.
Revolution and its costs
Estimates of deaths in the Great Leap famine differ by method and source: demographic reconstructions range from about 15 million to over 30 million, and Frank Dikötter's archival study estimated at least 45 million premature deaths. The Chinese Communist Party's 1981 resolution judged the Cultural Revolution a catastrophe and Mao's later years as serious errors, while upholding his overall legacy.
Jonathan Spence (1990); Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine (2010); Yang Jisheng, Tombstone (2008, English 2012); Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao's Last Revolution (2006); Rana Mitter, China's War with Japan 1937-1945 (2013).