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

The short answer

• A succession Mao never settled. Mao had destroyed two chosen successors, Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao, and in his last years he balanced radicals against veterans without letting either win. He chose Hua Guofeng in 1976 because Hua belonged to neither camp. When Mao died, no institution had the authority to decide between the factions, so the succession was decided by whoever controlled the guards and the army. A regime that had no rule for passing power on had to settle the question by force.
• Zhou Enlai’s death and popular anger. Zhou Enlai had become a symbol of moderation and competence, and the radicals’ attempts to limit public mourning for him in January 1976 angered millions. At the Qingming festival in April, wreaths and poems in Tiananmen Square attacked Jiang Qing and praised Zhou and Deng. The protest showed that many people blamed the radicals for a decade of chaos and wanted it to end. Mourning a dead leader was one of the few forms of political expression the system could not easily forbid.
• Veterans who had survived the purges. Many of the officials purged in 1966–68 had returned to work after Lin Biao’s fall, among them Deng Xiaoping, while army elders such as Marshal Ye Jianying, sidelined since 1967, regained influence. They distrusted the radicals, controlled much of the army, and were ready to act once Mao was gone. In 1975 Deng had already shown, in the railways, the steel industry and the army, what restoring order would look like. Their return made a different future possible.
• Exhaustion after a decade of campaigns. A decade of campaigns had worn out the society that was supposed to sustain them. By 1976 output was falling, the universities barely functioned, and the sent-down youth wanted to go home, while the campaigns of the 1970s, such as “Criticise Lin Biao, Criticise Confucius”, mobilised little enthusiasm. A society tired of struggle meetings, the public denunciations that every campaign used, gave the post-Mao leaders broad support when they ended them. Even inside the Party, many officials had been both perpetrators and victims of the campaigns, and they wanted security more than revolution.

What it changed

The communes dismantled. Mao’s successors undid his central rural institution within six years. From 1978, beginning with secret contracts such as Xiaogang’s, households took responsibility for farming plots again, and by 1984 the communes had been abolished. Grain output rose sharply once households could keep what they grew above the quota, and rural incomes rose faster in the early 1980s than in any period of the Mao years. The Party had rediscovered the household farming that Mao rejected in 1962, and the reforms began in the province where the famine had been worst.

Verdicts reversed. The new leaders cleared many of Mao’s victims, selectively. The “rightists” labelled in 1957 were rehabilitated from 1978, Liu Shaoqi was posthumously cleared in 1980, and the Gang of Four were tried on television in 1980–81, with Jiang Qing sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment. The famine’s victims received no such public acknowledgement, and its archives remain restricted. The post-Mao state chose which of the era’s victims it could afford to remember.

A generation comes home. The return of the sent-down youth, the urban young sent to villages after 1968, created a labour problem that helped open the door to private business. Most of those still in the countryside, close to nine million at the end of 1977, came back between 1978 and 1980, and the cities could not employ them all, so the state allowed small private shops and stalls, the first private enterprise since the 1950s. Others passed the restored university examination of 1977 and joined the professions, so the returning generation supplied both the first private traders and the first graduates of the reform era.

Mao still on the gate. The state still honours Mao in its most visible places. His portrait hangs above Tiananmen, his face is on every regular banknote issued since 1999, and his body lies in a mausoleum on the square, while Shaoshan, his birthplace, receives millions of visitors a year. His legacy is official, contested and selective, which is why the history mapped here is still argued over inside and outside China.