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—— ON THIS DAY ——
SEPTEMBER 9, 1976
Beijing, China
50 years ago
Mao Zedong, founder and leader of the People's Republic of China, who died in Beijing on September 9, 1976, after twenty-seven years in power.
Mao Zedong died shortly after midnight on September 9, 1976, in Beijing, aged eighty-two. He had been in declining health for years, suffering from a progressive neurological disease, and had been largely withdrawn from daily governance. His death was announced to the country that afternoon and produced an extraordinary national response: mass public mourning, days of ceremony, and, beneath the surface, an immediate and ruthless struggle over what would follow.
Mao had led the Chinese Communist Party to victory in the civil war and proclaimed the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949, ending decades of warlordism, foreign occupation, and civil conflict. Under his rule China was unified, industrialized in part, and made a nuclear power. Life expectancy and literacy rose substantially. He was also responsible for policies that killed more people than any other peacetime program of the twentieth century.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The Cultural Revolution, the decade of political upheaval Mao launched in 1966, which closed schools, destroyed cultural heritage, and persecuted millions before ending with his death.
The Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958, was intended to industrialize China at extraordinary speed by collectivizing agriculture and mobilizing rural labor for backyard steel production. Instead it produced the deadliest famine in recorded history. Grain requisition quotas were set on inflated harvest figures that local officials dared not contradict, and food was taken from villages that had none to spare. Estimates of the dead range widely, with many historians putting the figure between fifteen and forty-five million.
In 1966 Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, mobilizing young Red Guards against the party bureaucracy, teachers, intellectuals, and anyone identified with the old order or with insufficient revolutionary commitment. Schools and universities closed. Temples, books, and artworks were destroyed. Millions of people were denounced, beaten, imprisoned, sent to the countryside, or driven to suicide. The upheaval consumed much of the party leadership, including Deng Xiaoping, who was purged twice and returned twice.
Within a month of Mao's death, his widow Jiang Qing and three allies, later called the Gang of Four, were arrested, and the Cultural Revolution was effectively over. Deng Xiaoping emerged as the country's dominant figure by 1978 and launched the economic reforms that opened China to markets and foreign investment, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty over the following decades. The party's official verdict, issued in 1981, judged Mao's contributions primary and his errors secondary. His portrait still hangs at Tiananmen and his body remains on display in a mausoleum in the square.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
He founded the state that governs a fifth of humanity. The People's Republic he proclaimed in 1949 ended a century of fragmentation and foreign domination and created the political structure that still governs China today, with the Communist Party at its center.
His policies caused deaths on a scale with few parallels. The famine that followed the Great Leap Forward and the persecution of the Cultural Revolution killed tens of millions of people, making his rule one of the deadliest of the twentieth century outside of war.
His death made China's economic transformation possible. Within two years of his funeral, Deng Xiaoping had begun the reforms that opened China to markets and foreign capital, a shift that would have been unthinkable while Mao lived and that reshaped the global economy.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
Mao Zedong died on September 9, 1976, after twenty-seven years in power. He unified a fractured country and made it a nuclear state, and his Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution killed tens of millions. His widow was arrested within a month, and the reforms that followed transformed China into an economic power he would not have recognized.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“The revolution is not a dinner party.”
— Mao Zedong, from his 1927 report on the peasant movement in Hunan
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about Mao Zedong, the founding of the People's Republic, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the changes that followed his death?
