Chinese Communist Revolution (1949)

Mao Zedong's victory in 1949 reunified China after a century of foreign domination and civil war and established the People's Republic that has grown into the world's second-largest economy. Despite the catastrophic human cost of the Great Leap Forward (1959-1961, ~45 million deaths) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the PRC's economic transformation since 1978 lifted 800 million people out of poverty — the largest poverty reduction in history.