It’s some of this and some of that on the 50th anniversary of Mao’s expiration.
On the one hand, “As China grapples with a slowing economy, nostalgia is growing for Mao’s egalitarian ideals…” (Bangkok Post, September 9, 2026).
“Fifty years after his death, diehard fans of the Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong lined up on Wednesday in his hometown to pay homage, holding portraits, flags and huge floral tributes.”
Nostalgia for the egalitarian “ideals” is growing during a slowing economy because of what, exactly? A notion that the Chinese economy was booming during Mao’s conquest of China, or the Great Leap Forward into mass starvation, or the rampaging and slaughter characteristic of Mao’s Cultural Revolution?
On the other hand, “…his drastic policies are also blamed by historians for mass starvation and millions of deaths.”
That sounds bad. If you’re ChinaAnalysis.com though, you are eager to put it all in exculpatory context. The campaigns of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) and Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) reflect “both Mao’s revolutionary ambition and the risks of centralized, personality-driven leadership…. Mao also stressed self-reliance, particularly in response to China’s historical experience with imperialism…. Understanding Mao’s legacy requires recognizing both the historical context in which he governed and the differing perspectives shaped by political, cultural, and academic frameworks.”
Then there’s SocialistChina.org, which urges us to remember that “The excesses and errors associated with the last years of Mao’s life have to be contextualised within this overall picture of unprecedented, transformative progress for the Chinese people.”
If we want to understand Mao better, including his grand vision of how to use power and slogans to indulge his psychotic sadism, is this really what we need to do, search for all possible ways, including making stuff up, to make him seem not so bad?
I don’t see both good and bad in Mao (1893-1976), i.e., both a noble and aspiring, transcendent dialectical part coping as best it could with the sweep of ineluctable historical forces—and, regrettably but sort of almost understandably, considering the historical context, a mass-enslaving and mass-murdering part. Mao was only evil. It doesn’t matter whether he could sometimes be convivial or whatever, or that he had Revolutionary Ambition.
The people traipsing to Mao’s hometown with portraits and flowers in tow need to study volumes probably hard to get within the People’s Republic of China. Honest books like Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday or Frank Dikötter’s trilogy on his annihilative rule, The Tragedy of Liberation, Mao’s Great Famine, and The Cultural Revolution.
Such works report what Mao actually did, doings facilitated but far from determined by “the historical context in which he governed.” An honest and accurate account is what the memory of this monster deserves, not flowers or flowery rationalizations.
