Fifty years after his death, the chairman’s most dangerous legacy is the political culture he left behind.
Fifty years after his death, the chairman’s most dangerous legacy is the political culture he left behind.
M ao Zedong — who died 50 years ago today — spent roughly 28 years making a revolution and nearly 27 years ruling the country his revolution created. Yet Mao imagined his reach on an even grander scale, declaring in his youthful poetry: “Confident that my life would last 200 years.” He did not live 200 years. But his influence on China, and perhaps beyond it, may well do so.
The most obvious part of Mao’s legacy is written in blood and suffering. The political campaigns, executions, persecution of “class enemies,” the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Leap Forward, famine, and the Cultural Revolution destroyed tens of millions of lives and subjected hundreds of millions more to hunger, humiliation, fear, dispossession, and political degradation.
But Mao’s deepest damage to China may be harder to count. He poisoned its political culture. Mao did not merely teach generations of Chinese people what to believe. More consequentially, he taught them what kind of person prevails.
The lesson was simple: Life is struggle. Your opponent is not merely wrong; he is an enemy. Rules are useful when they serve you and dispensable when they do not. Cruelty is strength. Mercy toward an opponent is weakness. Loyalty matters more than competence. Repetition can manufacture truth. Mobilized anger can overwhelm institutions. And ultimately, winning vindicates everything. Mao was a master practitioner of this philosophy.
He understood that politics could be conducted not simply through institutions but through the manipulation of fear, resentment, humiliation, and loyalty. Again and again, people who had helped him defeat yesterday’s enemies became tomorrow’s enemies themselves. Allies became “rightists.” Revolutionary veterans became “capitalist roaders.” Intellectuals invited to speak became counter-revolutionaries. The categories changed. The essential rule did not: Mao decided who belonged to “the people” and who became “the enemy.”
Mao famously wrote that “a revolution is not a dinner party,” and that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” His political vocabulary elevated douzheng — struggle — into something far larger than an occasional necessity; struggle became a way of understanding politics itself. Ideology mattered, but it was also extraordinarily adaptable in his hands. What remained constant was power. Yesterday’s orthodoxy could become today’s deviation. The standard was ultimately not consistency with doctrine, but consistency with Mao’s political requirements.
Mao always had the noblest words available to describe the ugliest acts. Everything was done “for the people.” Enemies were destroyed, property confiscated, and families torn apart, all for the people. If Mao embodied the people, his opponents opposed the people. If he alone could save the country, resistance to him became treason. Politics became a moral war between patriots and enemies, and hundreds of millions starved while policies were defended in the name of the people.
The Cultural Revolution was the purest expression of this logic. Mao encouraged people to “bombard the headquarters,” turned young people against teachers and parents, and transformed political accusation into a form of civic participation. The genius — and horror — of the system was that Mao could present himself simultaneously as the supreme authority and the leader of rebellion against authority, the establishment and the insurgent against it at once. Chaos therefore strengthened rather than weakened him. Institutions became suspect; personal loyalty became paramount. Expertise became elitism. Moderation became cowardice. Compromise became betrayal. Politics became theater, and the theater demanded ever more dramatic demonstrations of loyalty.
The Cultural Revolution eventually ended. The political psychology it cultivated did not. Nor was Mao’s corruption of political culture confined to Communist officials; it penetrated society at large. Inherited moral traditions, family obligations, and elementary standards of decency could all be denounced as remnants of the old society. Children were encouraged to expose parents, students to attack teachers, colleagues to inform on colleagues. Suspicion became prudence. Ruthlessness could masquerade as revolutionary virtue.
The damage outlived Maoism as an economic system. When China later embraced markets, an old political habit found a new arena: The principle that no means were too unscrupulous if they served the revolution mutated into the principle that no means were too unscrupulous if they served profit or personal advancement. Market economies did not create Maoism, and Maoism alone cannot explain China’s later corruption, but the moral inheritance mattered. A society repeatedly taught that rules, truth, and human relationships could be sacrificed to a higher objective was poorly prepared to build a culture of honesty.
This helps explain a bleak sentiment still heard often in China: that decency is naïveté, honesty a disadvantage, compassion a weakness, and only the ruthless and unscrupulous ultimately succeed. Mao did not invent these vices. His achievement was demonstrating, at enormous scale, that they could be converted into a philosophy of success.
A country can recover from bad economic policy more quickly than from that kind of moral injury. Deng Xiaoping tried to move China away from permanent revolution; economic development replaced class struggle, expertise returned, pragmatism acquired legitimacy. Yet China never completed the harder task: a moral reckoning with Maoism. Mao’s portrait remained over Tiananmen. His embalmed body remained at the symbolic center of the capital. The Party continued to derive its legitimacy from the revolution he led. That unfinished reckoning helps explain why Mao has returned so easily to Chinese politics.
Xi Jinping is not Mao Zedong, and today’s China is not Cultural Revolution China. Xi values order where Mao sometimes deliberately cultivated disorder, and contemporary China possesses a sophisticated economy and bureaucracy unimaginable in Mao’s time.
Yet there is a striking irony in Xi’s rehabilitation of Mao’s political authority. Few Chinese leaders of his generation had more personal reason to resent Mao. Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, a senior revolutionary official, was purged under Mao in 1962 and spent much of the following 16 years under detention and political disgrace; the persecution engulfed the family, and the younger Xi was eventually sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. One might expect such a history to produce a leader determined to distance the Party from Mao. The opposite happened.
Compared with his immediate predecessors, Xi has restored Mao more fully to the center of the Party’s legitimacy, insisting on continuity between the Mao era and the post-Mao era rather than allowing the latter to become an implicit repudiation of the former. Independent investigation of the Cultural Revolution has faced tighter boundaries. This does not require us to imagine personal affection for the man responsible for his family’s suffering. There is a colder explanation.
Xi understands the political utility of Mao’s methods: the identification of enemies, the elevation of struggle, the demand for loyalty, the subordination of institutions to political leadership, the mobilization of nationalism, and the insistence that the Party represents a mission larger than ordinary rules. These remain extraordinarily effective instruments for concentrating authority and disciplining government and society. Xi does not need to reproduce Mao’s chaos to recognize the usefulness of Mao’s political logic, and he appears more prepared than his immediate predecessors to reach for those instruments when he judges circumstances require it.
This is why Xi has revived one of Mao’s most consequential concepts: struggle. Under Xi, “daring to struggle” has again become a celebrated political virtue, elevated in Party doctrine and applied to internal discipline, ideology, and China’s confrontation with perceived external adversaries.
More importantly, Xi shares something deeper with Mao: political ruthlessness combined with tactical flexibility. He can be intensely ideological about ultimate control while highly pragmatic about the means of preserving it. Markets may be encouraged or restrained; entrepreneurs celebrated or disciplined; nationalism, Marxism, tradition, and pragmatism all invoked as circumstances require. There is no contradiction so long as the ultimate objective remains constant: Power must not be contested.
In this sense, Mao’s most durable victory was not communism; China today bears little resemblance to the economic order he tried to create. His more durable victory was cultural. He helped normalize the idea that winning is the ultimate proof of being right. That poison reaches far beyond communist ideology; one does not have to be a communist to become a Maoist in political temperament.
China’s failure to fully confront Mao’s legacy matters, because a society cannot achieve political civilization merely by becoming richer. China has skyscrapers, high-speed trains, artificial intelligence, and spacecraft, yet its political vocabulary can still return effortlessly to struggle, enemies, loyalty, and ideological purification. And political culture does not stop at the walls of government buildings. Once a society rewards humiliation over persuasion, cunning over honesty, tribal loyalty over truth, and victory over rules, those habits migrate outward, shaping families, workplaces, and the way ordinary citizens see one another. Political barbarism can become social barbarism — one reason China’s path toward democracy has proved so difficult.
The anniversary of Mao’s death should not be an occasion for Chinese reflection alone. Imagine what happens when this political poison enters a democratic society: Opponents become enemies, each side regards the other’s victory as illegitimate, truth becomes tribal, restraint is ridiculed as weakness, and institutions are respected only when they deliver the desired result. Citizens no longer merely disagree about how to govern the same country; they begin to doubt whether they still belong to the same one. The immediate result is social fracture. The eventual casualties are democracy and the rule of law; no constitution permanently immunizes a society against the seductions of cruelty, lies, tribal loyalty, and the worship of power.
China offers a stark warning about what a single political leader can do to a nation’s political culture, and how long the habits he legitimizes can endure. Institutions matter enormously — constitutions, courts, elections, a free press. But no institution can indefinitely protect a political civilization whose citizens cease to value the norms that gave those institutions life.
The boundary between political civilization and political barbarism is thinner than prosperous, established societies like to imagine. On one side stand democracy, human rights, the rule of law, tolerance, restraint, and respect for human dignity. On the other stand the law of the jungle, the worship of winning, personal revenge, contempt for restraint, and the conviction that a lie repeated often enough becomes truth. The distance between these two worlds can sometimes be no thicker than a sheet of paper.
The 50th anniversary of Mao’s death should remind all who cherish political civilization that its greatest defenses are not only constitutional. Democracy, human rights, the rule of law, tolerance, and respect for truth survive only when leaders and citizens alike continue to regard them not as impediments to winning, but as limits on what winning is allowed to mean.