Chairman Mao, as he is known to most of the world, was the leader of the Chinese Communist Party and the Peoples Republic of China, which he ruled from 1949 to 1976. After winning the Chinese Civil War, Mao began a prolonged campaign to encourage the growth of both Chinas economy and population, and under his leadership the Chinese population almost doubled from around 550 million to over 900 million. However, a subsequent large-scale economic and social reform project that Mao dubbed the Great Leap Forward resulted in an estimated 45 million deaths between 1958 and 1961, mostly from starvation. About 2.5 million people are thought to have been beaten or tortured to death as counter-revolutionaries in this period. In 1966, Maos government launched the Cultural Revolution, sparking a period of political recrimination and social upheaval which lasted until his death in 1976. Mao's Cultural Revolution included a range of human rights violations, including the instigation of the One Child Law, restrictions on religious freedoms, and banning any rival political parties. Because most Chinese families prefer male over female children, the One Child Law alone has been blamed for the abandonment and deaths of 100 million infant girls, most of whom are thought to have been abandoned or killed as a means of circumventing the law.