Well, if we're going to talk about events that were implemented during Mao's lifetime, the three big events that you're more likely to hear about are the land reform, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Obviously there are other events that occurred that helped make China what it is today, but I'm presuming that you're more interested in what happened during Mao's lifetime.

I'm going to split this into three parts: land reform, the Great Leap Forward (and subsequent Great Famine), and the Cultural Revolution.

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The Land Reform

The land reform was something that was going on in Chinese Communist Party (henceforth known as the CCP) controlled areas during the Chinese civil war. When the CCP finally got into power and the People's Republic of China established in 1949, land reform was expanded to all of China.

Basically, land reform consisted of taking the land away from the landlords and redistributing it to the peasants. But it gets a bit more complicated than that, since the reform was about more than redistributing land. It was also meant to showcase the power of the peasants, and to disrupt the status quo that led to landlords being on top in favor of a new power structure that was led by peasants (and, of course, the CCP).

The rural population was split into the following classes: landlord (who rented out the land but do not work it themselves), rich peasant (who rented out land and work the land themselves as well), middle peasant (who are not exploited and do not exploit others), poor peasant (who are exploited due to being in debt and needing to rent out land or sell their labor or both), and lower peasant (who are also exploited the same way that poor peasants were, and are considered the most oppressed due to their not owning any land). Land from the landlords was to be taken away and redistributed to the peasants. Enough land was to be left behind so that the former landlords can still survive, but the rest of it was redistributed. Each household was granted a number of mu of land (with one mu being about 0.1647 acres according to this converter). Accordingn to John Wong (cited in "China and the Comparative Analysis of Land Reform" by Ben Stavis) this process would transfer 43% of the land in China from the landlords to the peasants. Note that this only affected landlords; the land of rich peasants were not touched during this process.

During this same time, the CCP mounted a campaign to shame landlords and to encourage peasants to take charge in rural politics. Members of the CCP would come to a village and hold meetings to educate the peasants about class issues and to denounce landlords as "traitors" and "despots" (from "On a Slippery Roof: Chinese Farmers and the Complex Agenda of Land Reform" by Gao Wangling and Liu Yang). This was meant to encourage peasants to take part in land reform. Being able to attend these meetings meant that you were not a "class enemy"; as such, it became a sign of political and social status during the reforms. During these meetings, peasants were ordered into the various classes and were encouraged to denounce landlords and "traitors". This would often later lead to public executions of said landlords and "traitors", violence and beatings, or at the very least persecution. This had the intended effect of upturning the power structure, and of getting peasants to start participating in rural politics. After that, peasants would elect a new government for themselves.

Of course, this would have effects. Besides uprooting the previous structure and strengthening CCP's power over the country, this led people to fear for their lives and worry that they would be targeted by the CCP next. Production went down, as grain was wasted or ruined and as many farmers still lacked equipment/other good needed to use the land (e.g. draft animals, seeds, equipment, money). People were afraid of getting rich, because they were not sure how long would they be able to hold on to their new lands.

This would lead to the next big event during Mao's reign: the Great Leap Forward (which would later lead to the Great Famine).

Sources for this section:

"China and the Comparative Analysis of Land Reform"
Author(s): Ben Stavis
Source: Modern China, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Jan., 1978), pp. 63-78
http://www.jstor.org/stable/188966

"On a Slippery Roof: Chinese Farmers and the Complex Agenda of Land Reform"
Author(s): Gao Wangling and Liu Yang
Source: Études rurales, No. 179, D'une illégitimité à l'autre: Dans la Chine ruralecontemporaine (Jan. - Jun., 2007), pp. 19-34
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20122569

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The Great Leap Forward (and the Great Famine)

In 1958, Mao would launch the Great Leap Forward. Hoping to quickly modernize China, it was intended to increase China's industrial production just by working really, really, really hard. Ideally:

In its New Year’s editorial, the People’s Daily—the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party—proclaimed that the GLF would propel China to surpass Great Britain in industrial production in 15 years and the United States in 20 or 30 years.

- "The Great Leap Forward: Anatomy of a Central Planning Disaster" by Wei Li and Dennis Tao Yang

To accomplish their goal of surpassing Great Britain in 15 years, resources were devoted to industry. People were reassigned to work in urban factories. People were encouraged to build their own backyard furnaces, and further encouraged to donate their own pots and pans (and additional scrap metal) to the cause of making their own iron and steel.

In addition, due to the fact that peasants were not producing as much post-land reform, it was believed that collectivization would lead to higher production of agricultural goods. To this end, rural communes were set up. So long as the peasants decided to work and live in the communes, they had access to the communal hall (where they could get free food). Everyone would own the means of production, and everyone was expected to spend at least 14-18 hours a day working on the fields.

These policies did not end so well. The metal produced from the backyard furnaces were brittle and utterly useless. Resources had been diverted from agriculture, which led to less food grown in the first place.Rural communes were in competition with one another to see who could produce more crops and surpass the production targets for agriculture, which led to officials over-inflating the amount of food harvested... which was used by the state to determine how much food they would be able to collect from the peasants. This meant that when the state came knocking to take away their share of the grain, people were left to starve. Estimates of the number of people dead from the subsequent three year famine range from 16 million to over 30 million.

I went into a bit more detail as to why the Great Leap Forward failed here, which includes sources for further reading.

The failure of the Great Leap Forward led to more moderate policies. Mao was embarrassed at the failure, and other members of the CCP would take control of the government, and the economy slowly began to recover.

Sources for this section (not mentioned in the linked post):

"The Great Leap Forward: Anatomy of a Central Planning Disaster"
Author(s): Wei Li and Dennis Tao Yang
Source: Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 113, No. 4 (August 2005), pp. 840-877
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/430804

(continued next post)