Mao Zedong was born in Hunan, China, in 1893. Born in a family of rural workers, at thirteen Mao Tse-Tung left school to devote himself to work on the family farm. However, some years later the young Mao could leave home and entered the School of Education in Changsha, where he could have contact with Western thought. In 1918 he graduated from the Hunan First Normal University. He worked at Peking University as a librarian and read, among others, Bakunin and Kropotkin. Based on the theories of Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, Mao developed his own dialectic theory, which helped to carry forward the Chinese socialist revolution. He died in Beijing on September 9, 1976.