Possum TV

Mao Zedong died fifty years ago today, on 9 September 1976. Half a century on, the standard way of dismissing the achievements of Chinese socialism is still to invoke Mao as a monster – a tyrant with tens of millions of deaths to his name. That story doesn’t get a warm reception in China itself, where people understand the achievements of the Mao period perfectly well. In the 27 years between the founding of the People’s Republic and Mao’s death, life expectancy in China rose by 31 years – more than a year gained for every year of Mao’s leadership. Literacy went from under 20 percent to around 93 percent. The population, static between 400 and 500 million for a century, reached 900 million. Land was irrigated, universal healthcare established, feudalism dismantled, land given to those who worked it, and a path to women’s liberation opened up. After a hundred years of foreign domination, China was unified, sovereign and able to defend itself. There were unquestionably mistakes and excesses, but these were part not of some megalomaniacal scheming (as Cold War historians would have it) but the unforeseen outcomes of trying to solve genuine and unprecedented problems: how a poor peasant country escapes underdevelopment on its own resources, and how a ruling communist party avoids the ideological decay that eventually destroyed the Soviet Union. The party’s own verdict is that Mao’s errors were “the errors of a great proletarian revolutionary”. Which is why Deng Xiaoping, himself purged and humiliated during the Cultural Revolution, could still say that without Mao’s leadership the Chinese Revolution would not have triumphed, and that for the party and the people he remains “a very precious treasure”. socialistchina.org/2023/12/2…