Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 is significant in this account not as a self-contained biographical episode, but as a critical juncture in China’s institutional history. It unsettled an existing political balance and made a different economic path possible, while the outcome depended on conflict among political actors rather than on an inevitable recognition of better economic policy.

A disruption in the existing balance

The book defines a critical juncture as a major event or combination of factors that disrupts the political or economic balance of a society. Mao’s death is its example of a juncture initially specific to one country: unlike the Black Death or the opening of Atlantic trade, which affected many societies, it created a new opening for Communist China.

That opening did not erase the institutions already in place. The book’s broader argument is that inherited arrangements shape the responses available when a disruptive event arrives. Small differences accumulated through institutional drift can become decisive at such moments, but they do not dictate a single outcome. Mao’s death therefore marks a break in the political sequence, not a guarantee of reform.

Contest over China’s direction

The transition that followed is described as a struggle over power and political objectives. Deng Xiaoping and his allies defeated powerful opponents within the Communist Party; their success, rather than a sudden conversion to economic expertise, helped make a different course possible. The account emphasizes that Deng and his allies were not necessarily less self-interested than their rivals. Their interests and aims differed, and those differences mattered because political power determined which policies could be pursued.

The contrast is made explicit through the question of collective ownership. China’s change in direction did not occur because the Communist Party finally understood that collective ownership of agricultural land and industry produced damaging incentives. In this interpretation, policy knowledge alone cannot explain why institutions persist or change: political institutions distribute power and benefits, and those arrangements constrain what rulers will adopt.

A contingent turning point

Mao’s death belongs to a wider account of institutional change in which neither extractive persistence nor inclusive reform is automatic. Extractive political and economic institutions can reinforce one another, creating a vicious circle, but that circle is not absolute. Major change occurs through the interaction of existing institutions with disruptive junctures; the same kind of disruption may lead societies in different directions according to their starting arrangements and political conflicts.

The episode thus helps explain how China could move away from policies associated with poverty and mass starvation toward policies more conducive to economic growth, without reducing the transition to improved advice or a change in leaders’ self-interest. The significance of Mao’s death lies in the political opening it created and in the struggle that determined how that opening would be used. The account identifies this turning point, while leaving its immediate circumstances and the particulars of the death outside its discussion.