On September 9, 1976, Mao Zedong died. The revolutionary leader who brought the Communist Party of China (CPC) to power and founded the People’s Republic of China left a deeply contradictory historical legacy. He shaped the narratives of the revolution, nation-building, and national independence, but also left behind immense social trauma as a result of successive political campaigns and persecutions.
Despite this, 50 years after his death, nostalgia for the egalitarian ideas of the “Great Helmsman” is growing in China, while the memory of his turbulent rule fades and the country struggles with inequality and economic slowdown.
Mao, who led the communist revolution of 1949 against the nationalist government, imposed an era of collective ownership with which he hoped to boost industry and unite the country, but his drastic policies have also been blamed for famines and millions of deaths.
The Chinese Communist Party maintains Mao as a revolutionary hero, although it acknowledged after his death that the devastating Cultural Revolution was a “serious mistake,” AFP notes.
In Nanjie, in the central province of Henan, considered the “last Maoist village in China,” his image appears everywhere on murals. Its inhabitants live under Maoist principles of collective ownership, while the rest of the country abandoned that model. “I still revere him a lot,” said Xie Kaiyue, a local 22-year-old student. “I think the young people in the village, including myself, don’t have the strong spirit of the past (…) People were purer,” she added.
About 500 kilometers to the north, in the mountainous village of Dazhai, which Mao promoted as a national model after the inhabitants transformed their barren hills into irrigated fields, tourists recall when the Great Helmsman dominated politics and social life. “There wasn’t enough to eat or wear,” recalled Li, a 64-year-old tourist from the city of Xi’an, about his childhood.
“But the whole country was full of vigor and there was a spirit of fighting against heaven, earth, and people to change every aspect of China,” he told the news agency.
The Cultural Revolution, established by Mao in 1966, caused intellectuals to be brutally labeled as “class enemies” and schools to be closed, delaying China for years in education and development. Private property and land were collectivized, while economic management pushed the country into the Great Famine, which the government says killed 15 million people, although historians estimate between 20 and 43 million.
“Everything you observe in the public domain (…) is the party line. No one can deviate from this,” said scholar Xu Chenggang, whose father was labeled a “rightist” during the Cultural Revolution.
Fifty years after his death, Mao’s embalmed body remains on display in Tiananmen Square, his huge portrait continues to preside over the Gate of Heavenly Peace, his face appears on the country’s currency, and Chinese schoolchildren are still taught that he was the founding leader who reunified and transformed the nation.
Public debate has been further reduced under current President Xi Jinping, who warns against “historical nihilism” and narratives that contradict that of his party.
“The Communist Party tells people there were mistakes, but what is the meaning of ‘mistake’? No one knows,” Xu said.
“Currently there is a feeling that the Cultural Revolution was a period of idealism, in which society was driven by ideals and not by the relentless pursuit of money and material goods,” said Kerry Brown, head of the Lau China Institute in London and author of a recent book on Mao. “This, of course, is a total falsehood,” he asserted.
Many attribute to Mao the laying of the foundations for China to become a modern and technologically advanced country, according to Mobo Gao, professor of Chinese studies at the University of Adelaide. “They ask where (modern China) came from? It came from the establishment of the PRC (People’s Republic of China),” Gao said, who lived during Mao’s era in the rural province of Jiangxi.
In a column published in 2022 in The New Statesman, Katie Stallard, author of the book Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia and North Korea, referred to “the long shadow of President Mao” as follows: “How should we understand modern China? The most common narrative is also the most reductionist: that, after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, the Communist Party of China (CPC) set out to stabilize the country and embarked on a path of ‘reform and opening up,’ welcoming foreign investment and international trade. This led to the so-called economic miracle, as China integrated into the neoliberal order (joining the World Trade Organization in 2001), built a high-tech empire composed of ‘instant cities,’ special economic zones, high-speed rail networks, innovation centers, and world-reaching infrastructure projects, and achieved regional superpower status.”
“However, the reality was more complex—and more interesting—since Mao’s successors faced the dilemma of how to reconcile the horrors of his dictatorship with the need to preserve the legitimacy of the Communist Party of China. The figure of Hua Guofeng, Mao’s successor, who took over party leadership in 1976 before losing an internal power struggle to Deng Xiaoping in 1978, has been practically erased from popular narrative. Although Hua retained his official positions as party chairman and chairman of the Central Military Commission for three more years, it was Deng who went down in history as the architect of China’s economic rise,” Stallard says.
When Mao died, China was still a poor and relatively isolated communist state. Today, it is the world’s second-largest economy, deeply integrated into global capitalism’s supply and value chains, with a vast private sector, a broad urban middle class, and a highly digitalized society.
Zhang Lun, professor at the University of Cergy-Paris, told Deutsche Welle that Mao left four main political legacies: an authoritarian and highly centralized political system; a governance model based on revolution and political campaigns to solve social problems; populist tendencies marked by anti-elitism and anti-rationalism; and utopian visions of egalitarianism and moralism.
From the perspective of political legacies, Zhang told the German broadcaster that the most fundamental change in China over the past five decades has been “de-Maoization,” while its greatest challenge has been that this process was never fully completed.
Mao helped forge the Communist Party of China, and his insistence on the party’s supremacy over the state and society has remained a fundamental principle over the decades, noted Jean Christopher Mittelstaedt, professor at the University of Zurich.
Veteran journalist and political commentator Chang Ping agrees with this view and adds that what has really endured is the institutional core of the principle that “the party leads everything,” which serves a state vision oriented toward “concentrating resources to carry out great tasks.”
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The CPC, he said, can pursue such goals “at all costs,” implying that the interests of ordinary people may be sacrificed as necessary to preserve the regime.
“Mao left a complex legacy,” says William Wei, a historian at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies modern China, including Mao Zedong’s legacy. “But I stand by my original statement that he was—using the Chinese formula—wrong seven parts and right only three. As a historian, I will not let him evade responsibility for the millions of deaths and all the suffering he caused.”
Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, several political concepts and governance methods associated with Mao’s era—such as ideological unity and the fighting spirit—have regained attention.
Xi’s actions, such as abolishing presidential term limits, strengthening his personal authority, and incorporating his political thought into the party and state constitutions, have prompted comparisons between him and Mao, Deutsche Welle says.
Chang argues that the term “return” is misleading, as elements of Mao’s era have never completely disappeared.
Zhang shares this view. The authoritarian regime, political rigidity, weakness of the rule of law, and lack of effective guarantees for citizens’ rights—not only are important elements of Mao’s political legacy but also some of the most significant continuities between the Maoist era and China’s current political system, he emphasized.
And Xi, who personally suffered during the Cultural Revolution, seems to be moving even closer to Mao-era policies. “What Xi learned from the Cultural Revolution was not the lesson of a victim, but the lesson of power,” Chang told the German media.
The lesson was not that “such a system should never exist again,” but rather that “those who lose power are at the mercy of others,” he added.
Felix Wemheuer, professor of modern China studies at the University of Cologne, shared this view. “The conclusion Xi seems to have drawn from his own experience during the Cultural Revolution was clearly not that Mao’s figure should be completely abandoned,” he told Deutsche Welle, “but rather that, for political reasons, Mao’s historical status as founder of the state, the army, and the party should be preserved.”
Wemheuer considers the current CPC leadership’s approach to Mao to be “fundamentally Machiavellian and pragmatic.” In terms of economic policy, for example, there is no indication of a return to Mao’s era, he noted. Today’s China operates under a highly dynamic state capitalism model, where various forms of ownership coexist and a strong private sector is maintained. There are also no signs that China intends to return to the communist welfare state model of Mao’s time.
The same goes for the idea of “self-sufficiency.” It would hardly be viable for today’s China to withdraw from the global economy and international supply chains.
Experts point out that similarities between Mao and Xi can be seen in aspects such as the emphasis on the CPC’s supremacy, the exaltation of a central leader, and populist elements that emphasize a close bond between the people and the leaders.
But Wemheuer argues that Xi lacks both Mao’s historical authority and his personal charisma. Also, they exercise power in fundamentally different ways. Mao could bypass party institutions, go years without convening a party congress, and mobilize the masses against the party and state apparatus.
Xi, on the other hand, places greater emphasis than Mao on control and top-down governance, consolidating power by strengthening institutions and the party apparatus.
Mittelstaedt also warns against equating Xi with Mao. “After all,” he told Deutsche Welle, “Xi Jinping is still a product of the system Mao created.”
China has also experienced recurring waves of nostalgia for Mao. Some Chinese citizens evoke him on the internet and express longing for what they describe as a time without social inequality, when supposedly everyone had enough to eat, the German broadcaster notes.
Chang argues that what they long for is neither Mao himself nor the true Mao era.
The Mao era itself, Mittelstaedt noted, was marked by rigid hierarchies; among them, the division in residence registration between urban and rural areas, different levels of privileges and supplies for officials, and a system in which family background could determine a person’s fate. In many ways, it was a more unequal time than today’s China, and expressing complaints could be fatal, he says.
The idealized vision of a more egalitarian world thus constitutes a critique of the current situation, characterized by growing inequality, soaring housing prices, and persistently limited social mobility.
Nevertheless, many express their discontent with contemporary reality by resorting to Mao’s image and language.
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