Should Mao be judged by what he built or what it cost?

The short answer

• 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.

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.