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Ever willing to wait, he told Mao Tse-tung to come to terms with Chiang Kai-shek,. dissolve his army and refrain from making a bid for power in China. But in 1949 Mao drove Chiang Kai-shek out of the Chinese mainland, and proclaimed a People's Republic of China. Then Mao began the familiar technique: purge, consolidate, purge. The addition of China's 400 million to Russia's 200 million was the high tide of world Communism. Stalin's empire occupied a fourth of the world's land surface, claimed a third of its people. It was the largest empire ever put together by any one man, and at his death it was still intact —except that it no longer had Stalin, a man of ceaseless evil and immense success.