Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong’s rule established an extractive political and economic order in China, first mobilizing the country through state command and then leaving a crisis that helped make economic reform possible after his death. His campaigns transformed ownership, agriculture, industry, and public life; the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution caused catastrophic losses, while the political struggle that followed Mao’s death opened a contingent path toward market incentives without ending the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.

Rule and Institutional Transformation

After the Chinese Communist Party overthrew the Nationalists in 1949, Mao dominated the party and government until his death in 1976. The new People’s Republic permitted no rival political organization. Mao’s government nationalized land and industry, eliminated property rights, and effectively abolished the market economy. Landlords and other groups identified as hostile to the regime were executed, while rural residents were gradually organized into communal farms. Money and wages gave way to work points, exchangeable for goods, and internal passports introduced in 1956 restricted travel without authorization.

This transformation concentrated economic decisions in the state and tied production to political command. The Communist Party monopolized sales of produce such as rice and grain, enabling it to extract resources from farmers. Mao’s development strategy likewise relied on state planning, including five-year plans modeled on those of the Soviet Union. The result was not simply a change in who owned farms and factories: the new institutions gave the party extensive control over people’s movement, work, and access to economic activity.

The Great Leap Forward and Famine

After 1958, the second five-year plan became the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to accelerate industrial development through targets that included doubling steel output in a year. Mao promoted small backyard blast furnaces and declared that China would catch up with British steel production within fifteen years. The production goals had no feasible means of fulfillment. In the effort to meet them, people were made to find scrap metal and melt down household pots and pans as well as agricultural tools.

The campaign diverted workers from the fields and destroyed hoes and plows that were needed for cultivation. A calamitous famine followed in the countryside. Scholars debate the contribution of drought alongside Mao’s policies, but the Great Leap Forward is recognized as a central cause of the disaster, in which an estimated twenty to forty million people died. The exact number is unknown because the government did not collect the data that would have documented the scale of the deaths. Per capita income fell by about one-quarter. The campaign’s consequences also altered the political landscape: senior party member Deng Xiaoping, himself a former revolutionary general and a leader of an earlier campaign against alleged enemies of the revolution, came to argue that policy should be judged by whether it increased production and enabled people to eat.

Cultural Revolution and the Fall of Deng

Mao treated practical economic reform as a political threat. On May 16, 1966, he announced the Cultural Revolution, claiming that bourgeois forces were undermining communist society and seeking to restore capitalism. Its program called for struggle against officials deemed to be taking the capitalist road and for transforming education, literature, art, and other parts of society to consolidate socialism.

The campaign mobilized Red Guards, young Communist Party members used to purge opponents. People were killed, arrested, or sent into internal exile, while the economy and human lives were again damaged. Mao defended the violence by invoking Hitler as an example of the supposed revolutionary value of greater ferocity and more killing. His response expressed the campaign’s logic: political struggle was not a temporary cost of development but an instrument for identifying and removing alleged enemies.

Deng was branded the number-two capitalist roader, jailed in 1967, and sent to Jiangxi province in 1969 to work in a rural tractor factory. Rehabilitated in 1974, he returned to senior office after Premier Zhou Enlai persuaded Mao to make him first vice-premier. In 1975, Deng oversaw party documents proposing the revival of higher education, material incentives in agriculture and industry, and the removal of leftists from the party. Mao’s health was deteriorating, however, while power increasingly rested with leftists, including his wife Jiang Qing and her three close associates, the Gang of Four, who supported continuing the Cultural Revolution.

After Zhou Enlai died, a spontaneous commemoration in Tiananmen Square on April 5 became a protest against the government. The Gang of Four blamed Deng, who was stripped of his positions and dismissed again. Mao had appointed Hua Guofeng acting premier instead of Deng, and Hua accumulated personal power during the political uncertainty of 1976. The episode reversed Deng’s attempt to displace leftists: he was removed by the political forces he had sought to weaken.

Succession and a Contingent Turning Point

Mao’s death in September 1976 created a genuine power vacuum. The Gang of Four sought to continue the Cultural Revolution, while Hua wanted to abandon it without disowning the legacy that had helped him rise. In 1977, Hua’s position was captured in the Two Whatevers: he pledged to uphold Mao’s policy decisions and follow Mao’s instructions. Deng, meanwhile, did not seek to abolish Communist Party rule. He and his allies believed that economic growth and some movement toward inclusive economic institutions could coexist with the party’s continuing political control.

Within a month of Mao’s death, Hua used his power to arrest the Gang of Four; Deng was reinstated in March 1977. The subsequent shift was not inevitable. Deng encouraged public criticism of the Cultural Revolution and filled party positions at multiple levels with people who, like him, had suffered during it. Hua’s inability to repudiate the campaign weakened him, as did his relative lack of the personal connections Deng had developed over many years. Deng’s political advantage thus depended not only on the devastation left by Mao’s campaigns but also on the contingent outcome of a struggle among leaders whose aims did not include ending one-party rule.

Under the reformers, incentives were introduced first in the rural economy. By 1984, grain output was one-third higher than in 1978 even though fewer people worked in agriculture. Many had moved into Township Village Enterprises, which were allowed to grow outside state industrial planning after 1979, when new firms were permitted to enter and compete with state-owned firms. Incentives were gradually extended to state-run industry; privatization, however, did not yet follow. Market forces, private ownership, foreign investment, and international trade gained room, while the party’s political monopoly remained.

Legacy and Limits

Mao’s campaigns left both a human and institutional legacy. The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution caused devastation and suffering; in the account of China’s later transition, that experience also generated demand for change. It helped Deng and his allies win a political fight that could have ended differently. Had the Gang of Four retained power, the sustained growth that followed would not have occurred in the same way.

The economic transformation after Mao was radical, but it did not make China politically inclusive. The reformers aimed to strengthen incentives and expand market activity while preserving the Communist Party’s control. Later, the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989 did not produce political opening: the government used tanks against demonstrators, reformers such as Zhao Ziyang were purged, and the party tightened restrictions on civil liberties and the press. Mao’s legacy therefore sits at the center of a sharp distinction: the end of his personal dominance enabled a major change in economic institutions, but the authoritarian political structure created under his rule survived and constrained the extent of that change.