Five decades after his death, Mao Zedong remains the face of modern China, yet CU Boulder historian William Wei argues his rise to power was never inevitable and neither is the verdict on his legacy

Mao Zedong remains one of the most prominent political figures in modern history. Fifty years after his death, his embalmed body still lies in state in Tiananmen Square, his enormous portrait continues to hang 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. 

Mao’s omnipresence can create the impression that his rise to power was inevitable. However, reflecting on Mao’s legacy today—five decades since his death Sept. 9, 1976, at age 82—his place in history was never assured, argues William Wei, a University of Colorado Boulder Department of History professor who is an expert on modern China. 

“One of the things I teach my students is that nothing is historically inevitable—and that is certainly the case with Mao’s rise to power,” he says. “If you study Chinese history, you see that his rise to leadership within the Chinese Communist Party unfolded over about a decade. It was driven by a combination of strategic skill, organization building, ideological innovation and, quite frankly, intra-party struggles that involved the purging of rivals.”

CU Boulder historian William Wei studies modern China, including the legacy of Mao Zedong.

Mao’s rise was never guaranteed

In fact, far from being recognized as leader of the communist movement in China initially, Wei says Mao in the early 1930s was sidelined by rivals known as the “28 Bolsheviks”—communist leaders trained in Moscow who adhered more closely to orthodox Marxist-Leninist doctrine of organizing urban workers to create a revolution.

Wei says the turning point came in 1935 following the Long March—one of the defining episodes in Communist Party history. After anti-communist nationalist forces overran the communist base in Jiangxi Province, Mao led his Red Army soldiers on a grueling 6,000-mile retreat over some of China’s most difficult terrain to escape encirclement and destruction. 

According to Wei, the march was devastating from a military standpoint, with communists losing roughly seven-eighths of their forces. “But they survived, and for the Chinese communists, survival was a form of victory,” he adds.

Even then, Wei says Mao’s emergence was not the result of a sudden triumph but a long process. After communist forces under other leaders lost battles to the country’s nationalist forces, Wei says Mao’s rivals effectively ceded military leadership to him.

Mao also distinguished himself through ideological innovation, Wei says. While orthodox Marxists emphasized that the urban working class would form the revolutionary vanguard, Mao instead argued that China’s overwhelmingly rural population made the peasantry the natural engine for revolution. Wei says Mao’s emphasis on rural peasants as the agents of change helped establish an ideological identity known as “Maoism” that was distinct from both his domestic rivals like the 28 Bolsheviks as well as Soviet orthodoxy. 

War, occupation and revolution

With the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in July 1937, the nationalists and communists largely halted their fighting to focus on combatting the Japanese invaders. While the nationalists tended to engage in pitched battles with the Japanese, Mao’s communists employed hit-and-run tactics associated with guerrilla warfare. 

“This strategy preserved the communist party’s strength, as the nationalists bore the brunt of the fighting,” Wei says. “(Nationalists) fought most of the major battles against the Japanese and consequently suffered most of the defeats as well.” 

A propaganda image of Mao Zedong from 1967.

By emphasizing guerrilla warfare, recruiting peasants and expanding the party organization throughout rural China, Wei says Mao transformed a weakened movement into a formidable political and military force. Between 1937 and 1940, Chinese Communist Party membership grew from 40,000 to 800,000.

When Japan’s defeat ended World War II in August 1945, the nationalists and communists renewed their fighting. Here again, Wei argues that Mao’s success was never guaranteed.

The nationalists initially held several advantages. They possessed larger forces, better equipment and support from the United States. But Wei says the nationalists were also weakened by corruption, declining public support and incompetence in administering the country’s economy.

The communists, in contrast, entered the conflict stronger than they had been at any point since the Long March, and by the late 1940s the balance shifted decisively in Mao’s favor, Wei says. In 1949, Mao proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China, with the communist victory marking one of the most remarkable political reversals of the 20th century, Wei says.

Korea and Mao’s emergence as a global leader

Mao’s stature expanded beyond China’s borders almost immediately after the communist victory. The Korean War became the first major international test of the new regime and played a crucial role in shaping’s Mao’s standing at home and abroad, Wei says.

He notes that both Mao and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin were initially reluctant to support North Korean leader Kim Il-sung’s plans to militarily reunify the Korean Peninsula. Kim convinced them that he could strike quickly and that America would not intervene. 

However, America did intervene on behalf of South Korea. And once American-led forces under Gen. Douglas MacArthur reversed North Korea’s initial victories and advanced toward the Yalu River—the border separating Korea from China’s industrial heartland in Manchuria—Chinese leaders viewed that as an unacceptable threat, Wei says.

Although Chinese forces were poorly equipped and lacked air support, Wei says that by their sheer numbers (more than 250,000 soldiers) and with the element of surprise, they decimated the U.S. Army contingent and pushed American forces back to the 38th parallel. The war eventually settled into a costly stalemate. 

Politically, however, the war produced significant benefits for Mao, Wei says. He argues that Mao’s reputation was enhanced because China managed to fight the strongest post-World War II power to a standstill. The conflict elevated not only Mao’s prestige but also the People’s Republic by demonstrating that it could not be dismissed as a weak or a subordinate power, Wei says. 

The war also reshaped China’s Cold War relationships. Wei says Stalin’s view of Mao improved after China’s willingness to confront the United States, while the conflict poisoned the country’s relations with Washington for decades, until rapprochement in the 1970s and the normalization of relations in January 1979. 

Building a new China

“Mao left behind a complicated legacy,” says CU Boulder historian William Wei. “But I stand by my original assertion that he was, to use the Chinese formula, seven parts wrong and only three parts right." 

With the victory over the nationalists, Mao was able to impose his stamp on China. Even Wei, who is a critic of Mao, acknowledges his many accomplishments. Mao is remembered for ending what the Chinese call the “Century of Humiliation”—a period during which Western powers and Japan dominated large portions of China. Mao reunified a fragmented country after decades of warlordism, civil conflict and foreign invasion. For millions of Chinese, this achievement alone secured his place in history, Wei says.

The early years of communist rule brought significant social reforms. Perhaps most notably, Wei notes that land redistribution programs transferred land to hundreds of millions of peasants. He also credits the new government with launching a successful industrialization campaign, expanding public health initiatives, increasing access to education and implementing legal reforms designed to improve the status of women. Additionally, the country’s literacy rates improved dramatically, infant mortality declined and new public health programs reached rural communities for the first time. 

At the same time, Wei emphasizes that many of these achievements came at an extraordinary human cost. He notes that land reform redistributed property on a massive scale, but at the cost of upwards of a million landlords as well as others targeted as “class enemies.” Meanwhile, industrialization generated rapid economic growth, yet it unfolded within an authoritarian framework that tolerated little dissent. 

Twin tragedies

The darkest chapters of Mao’s rule came with the Great Leap Forward starting in 1958 and the Cultural Revolution starting in 1966. Wei describes the Great Leap Forward as a man-made catastrophe, as land collectivization policies, unrealistic farm production quotas and widespread falsification of agricultural data combined to create a disaster that by some estimates resulted in 35 million to 45 million deaths—making it one of the deadliest policy failures in human history. 

The Cultural Revolution inflicted a different kind of damage. Initiated after Mao’s standing had been weakened by the failures of the Great Leap Forward, Wei says it was both a political power struggle and an ideological crusade, as Mao sought to eliminate rivals and prevent what he viewed as a drift toward capitalism. 

“One of the things Mao believed was in his theory of continuous revolution,” Wei explains. “Permanent revolution believes the revolution never ends, even when you have a seizure of state power, because the party, in this case the Chinese Communist Party, could itself become a new ruling class.”

Wei says the campaign produced persecution and social chaos, as cultural and religious sites were destroyed, schools and universities were shut down and an entire generation lost years of educational opportunity. 

For that reason, Wei sharply disagrees with the Chinese Communist Party’s official verdict that Mao was “70% right and 30% wrong.” He reverses that formula, arguing Mao was “70% wrong and 30% right.” While recognizing Mao’s role in reunifying China and advancing certain social reforms, he insists that Mao must be held responsible for the immense anguish caused by his policies. 

“Mao left behind a complicated legacy,” Wei says. “But I stand by my original assertion that he was, to use the Chinese formula, seven parts wrong and only three parts right. As a historian, I’m not going to let him escape responsibility for the millions of deaths and all the suffering he caused.”

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