Mao’s China · EPILOGUE ·
Death and legacy of Mao Zedong
Chapter 12 of The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976: “Mao’s Death and Legacy”
Mao died in 1976 after twenty-seven years in which his party-state reached every village, unified China and raised life expectancy, but also produced the famine and the Cultural Revolution. Estimated deaths from his campaigns and the famine range from about 17 to 50 million; the Gang of Four fell on 6 October 1976.
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The map above is the world of China, September 1976 — Mao dies.
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SHORT EXPLANATION
For twenty-seven years Mao’s party-state could reach into every village. A party-state places government at every level under one party, much as a company owner appoints every manager. Land reform, farming collectives, the giant communes of 1958 that ran whole districts, and army-backed local governments in 1967–68 brought the Party into village life. Campaigns mobilized people in bursts, like a permanent wartime emergency, and made citizens accuse and police one another. Above the Party stood Mao, backed by the army.
This concentration of power helped unify China, build heavy industry and raise life expectancy dramatically. It also produced famine and the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s 1966 assault on his own party. When the leader made a mistake, nothing within the system could stop it. In 1976, as Mao weakened, mourning became protest and the question of who would succeed him became a struggle for power.
Mao died on 9 September. On 6 October his chosen heir Hua Guofeng and army veteran Ye Jianying had his widow Jiang Qing and her three radical allies, the “Gang of Four”, arrested. The Cultural Revolution was over in all but name. Deng Xiaoping, twice purged by Mao, returned in 1977; reforms beginning in December 1978 dismantled the communes and opened China to foreign trade.
The Party’s 1981 judgment blamed Mao for the Cultural Revolution while declaring that his “merits are primary and his errors secondary”. His portrait stayed on Beijing’s Gate of Heavenly Peace. Historians outside the Party are harsher and differ over the weight of achievement and death. The chart compares campaign deaths, from one to two million in land reform to 15 to 45 million in the famine. Every bar is a range: the regime never fully counted its victims.
The full story
Mao’s government could carry its decisions from the center to the villages. The Party had local organizations; campaigns enlisted citizens to accuse and police one another; and the army was loyal to the leader. This was a party-state, a system in which one party controls government at every level, rather as a company owner appoints every manager. It unified China and raised life expectancy. Yet the same reach carried disastrous decisions downward. Nothing inside the system could stop an error at the top, whether in the famine or in Mao’s assault on his own party, the Cultural Revolution, beginning in 1966.
The cost chart gives ranges for the dead: one to two million in land reform; roughly 700,000 to two million in the campaign against counter-revolutionaries; 15 to 45 million in the famine; and roughly 750,000 to two million in the Cultural Revolution. Together the estimates come to about 17 million to 50 million. The regime never fully counted its victims, so each figure remains a range.
Mao’s personal authority also kept competing factions in balance. After his chosen heir Lin Biao died fleeing China in 1971, Mao managed two camps. The radicals gathered around his wife Jiang Qing; in 1975 he warned her against acting as a “gang of four”. Opposite them stood veteran administrators led by Zhou Enlai and the rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping. Neither camp could settle the succession while Mao held authority over both.
Zhou died in January 1976. At Qingming, the festival for honoring the dead, crowds in Tiananmen Square turned mourning for him into protest against the radicals. It was the largest spontaneous demonstration of the Mao era. Militia cleared the square on 5 April, and the Politburo—the Party’s inner cabinet of about twenty—blamed and dismissed Deng once more. Mao selected the little-known Hua Guofeng as his successor.
When Mao died on 9 September, aged 82, his endorsement gave Hua a claim but no power base. Hua joined Marshal Ye Jianying and Wang Dongxing, commander of the leadership’s guard unit. On 6 October they arrested the Gang of Four. The revolution ended in a palace coup by the security forces: the struggle was decided by control of the instruments of force.
The victors kept the party-state while abandoning Mao’s campaigns. Deng returned in 1977, outmaneuvered Hua and launched reforms in December 1978. Peasants at Xiaogang in Anhui had already begun dividing collective land among households. By 1984 the communes, giant collective farms created in 1958 that ran whole districts like company towns, had disappeared. The sent-down youth—urban young people sent to villages after 1968 in a kind of labor conscription—returned home along the arrows reversing their earlier journeys.
In its 1981 Resolution the Party condemned the Cultural Revolution, praised Mao’s leadership before 1957 and treated the famine as one error among others. His portrait remained on the gate and his body in its mausoleum. The state Mao built had survived him, but its leaders had abandoned much of what he believed.
FULL EXPLANATION
The Party’s verdict of 1981
The June 1981 Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party gave the Communist Party an official judgment on Mao and provided a political settlement for his successors. Deng Xiaoping supervised its drafting. The Party’s legitimacy rested on Mao, so his contributions had to remain primary; Deng and his allies had also suffered in the Cultural Revolution, so that campaign had to be condemned. The Resolution places chief responsibility on Mao and calls the Cultural Revolution responsible for “the most severe setback and the heaviest losses” since 1949. It treats the Great Leap more briefly, attributing blame to errors, natural calamities and Soviet perfidy together, without giving a famine death toll. Deng often repeated a formula Mao had used for Stalin and, by his own wish, for himself: seven parts achievement, three parts error. Later leaders, including Xi Jinping in a 2021 resolution, reaffirmed it. The settlement let reformers reject Mao’s late policies while retaining the Party he founded. That accommodation remains the price of keeping him as founder.
How historians judge Mao
The differences among historians concern methods as well as judgments. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s The Unknown Story depicts Mao as driven by power and cruelty and attributes some 70 million peacetime deaths to him. In a collection edited by Gregor Benton and Lin Chun, many specialists accepted its research into his ruthlessness but criticized its selective use of sources. Frank Dikötter’s trilogy draws on provincial archives to emphasize the human cost of each campaign. Andrew Walder’s China Under Mao asks how a Leninist party-state was organized: in his account its structure turned errors at the top into disasters below. Gail Hershatter and Ralph Thaxton, among other social historians, reconstruct the experience of villagers and women and the small ways they resisted. Maurice Meisner and Philip Short give greater weight to industrialization, literacy and health; some Chinese writers, including Mobo Gao, defend Mao’s egalitarian aims. A sound assessment must hold achievement and cost together.
Measuring achievement against cost
Mao’s China changed substantially between 1949 and 1976. Its population grew from about 540 million to over 930 million, life expectancy rose from perhaps 35–40 years to the mid-60s, and literacy spread widely. Heavy industry, railways and nuclear weapons formed a new base of national power. The other side of the record is the campaign and famine death toll: over 17 million on low estimates, about 50 million on high ones. Tens of millions more suffered persecution, and a generation lost its education. How should such different outcomes be weighed? In 1989 Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen compared China with India over the same decades. They argued that China’s health achievements meant India’s higher ordinary death rate cost roughly as many lives every eight years as China’s famine. They also argued that India’s free press and elections prevented famines that China’s system could not. They credited public action for China’s health record and blamed the lack of a free press and opposition for its famine. This atlas draws a further conclusion: the same concentration of power lay behind both outcomes.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
A succession Mao never settled. Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao had both been chosen as successors and then destroyed by Mao. In his final years he balanced radicals against veterans without allowing either camp to win. He selected Hua Guofeng in 1976 because Hua belonged to neither. But no institution had authority to choose between the factions after Mao died. With no established rule for passing power, control of the guards and army decided the succession.
Zhou Enlai’s death and popular anger. Zhou Enlai stood for moderation and competence to many Chinese. After his death in January 1976, radical attempts to restrict mourning angered millions. At Qingming in April, wreaths and poems in Tiananmen Square praised Zhou and Deng and attacked Jiang Qing. Mourning offered a form of political expression the system could not easily forbid, and the protest showed how many people blamed the radicals for a decade of chaos and wanted it to end.
Veterans who had survived the purges. The fall of Lin Biao brought officials purged in 1966–68 back to work, including Deng Xiaoping. Army elders such as Marshal Ye Jianying, sidelined since 1967, also regained influence. They distrusted the radicals and controlled much of the army, making them ready to act after Mao’s death. Deng had already demonstrated in 1975 what restoring order might mean in the railways, steel industry and army. These veterans made a different future possible.
Exhaustion after a decade of campaigns. By 1976 output was falling, universities barely functioned, and sent-down youth wanted to return home. A decade of campaigns had exhausted the people expected to sustain them; campaigns of the 1970s such as “Criticise Lin Biao, Criticise Confucius” drew little enthusiasm. Struggle meetings, the public denunciations used in every campaign, had become wearisome. Many Party officials had been both perpetrators and victims, and wanted security more than revolution. Post-Mao leaders had broad support for ending the campaigns.
THE TURNING POINT
6 October 1976. The Gang of Four were detained at a Politburo meeting on 6 October 1976. Hua Guofeng, Ye Jianying and Wang Dongxing used the leadership’s guard unit to make the arrests; the radicals’ Shanghai base stood down within days. No mass movement or shot was needed to end the Maoist project. The coup opened the way for Deng’s return and the reforms of 1978, and showed where power in Mao’s system had always rested: in the army and security forces, whatever the language of mass revolution claimed.
What it changed
The communes dismantled. At Xiaogang and elsewhere, secret contracts from 1978 returned responsibility for plots to individual households. The communes, Mao’s central rural institution, were abolished by 1984. Once households could keep what they grew above the quota, grain output rose sharply; rural incomes grew faster in the early 1980s than in any period under Mao. The Party had returned to household farming that Mao rejected in 1962. Reform began in the province where the famine had been worst.
Verdicts reversed. The new leadership reversed some verdicts against Mao’s victims. The “rightists” labeled in 1957 were rehabilitated from 1978; Liu Shaoqi was cleared posthumously in 1980. The Gang of Four were tried on television in 1980–81, and Jiang Qing’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Famine victims received no comparable public acknowledgment and the archives remain restricted. The state chose which victims it could afford to remember.
A generation comes home. At the end of 1977 close to nine million sent-down youth, urban young people sent to villages after 1968, remained in the countryside. Most returned between 1978 and 1980, but the cities lacked jobs for all of them. The state allowed small private shops and stalls, the first private enterprise since the 1950s. Others passed the university examination restored in 1977 and entered the professions. This generation supplied the reform era’s first private traders and first graduates.
Mao still on the gate. Mao remains prominent in places where the state honors him: his portrait hangs above Tiananmen, his face appears on every regular banknote issued since 1999, and his body lies in a mausoleum on the square. Millions visit his birthplace, Shaoshan, each year. This official remembrance is selective, and his legacy remains contested inside and outside China.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Should Mao’s rule be judged chiefly by what it built or by what it cost?
The achievements are substantial. Mao’s rule left a country unified after a century of division, heavy industry and nuclear weapons, widespread literacy, life expectancy raised by roughly twenty-five years, and a state strong enough to support growth after 1978. The cost was also immense. Campaigns and famine killed about 17 million to 50 million people, most in a famine caused by policy, and persecuted tens of millions more. Dikötter and Chang and Halliday put the cost first; Meisner and Short give achievements more weight. Walder’s account of the party-state and Drèze and Sen’s comparison with India direct attention to the system that produced both gains and deaths. That matters for the judgment. Neither achievement nor death can simply be offered as the price of the other. Many later achievements, from rural health to industry, were attained elsewhere without famine. The regime had real capacity, but lacked the accountability needed to correct its decisions. Power without correction magnified both success and error.
An interesting fact
Each year before National Day on 1 October, the portrait above the Gate of Heavenly Peace is replaced with a freshly painted copy. It is about six metres high and weighs around one and a half tonnes; Ge Xiaoguang has painted the copies since 1977. In 1980 Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci asked Deng Xiaoping whether the portrait would remain, as reformers reconsidered Mao’s record. Deng said it would stay forever: Mao had founded the Party and state, and his mistakes did not cancel that.
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