Fifty Years after Mao: A Legacy for Changing the Current of History

The television series Asking the Vast Earth (问苍茫, 2023) opens with a scene of a young Mao Zedong swimming in the Xiang River, swollen from the heavy rains. A fisherman calls from the bank to the lone swimmer: ‘You fool, you’re asking to die! The river is raging after the storm—there are boats, why are you swimming?’ Mao laughs and calls back: ‘Never mind how fierce the water is. Once you understand its temper, you can handle it. Just like you with your fishing—where the fishing is easy, there are no fish. Where the swimming is easy, there is no joy.’

Created to commemorate the 130th anniversary of Mao’s birth, the series sought to show young audiences ‘not a bronze statue, but a young man their own age trying to figure things out’. Within its first month, it received a Douban rating of 8.8, while related online discussions garnered 4.31 billion views, finding an audience especially among people born long after Mao’s death. During these same years, Mao’s Selected Works rose to first place on Tsinghua University’s library borrowing list in 2019 and has repeatedly returned to that position since; similar patterns of high demand have appeared at several other leading universities. A thread connects the image of the young Mao studying the current as he swims in the river to young Chinese people now studying Mao Zedong Thought.

Half a century has passed since Mao died on 9 September 1976. Most of these readers and viewers were born decades later, after the economic reforms that transformed China into the so-called workshop of the world; some were even born after its historic entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. They cannot remember the society Mao inhabited. They have instead inherited a China whose continuing modernization rests partly upon the political, industrial, and social foundations created during the early decades of socialist construction.

The Revolution Remains Present

It would be inaccurate to say that Mao has returned or been revived, because Mao has always remained a political foundation of the People’s Republic. After his death, the Communist Party of China (CPC) faced a question whose stakes extended far beyond the judgement of one man. How could it draw the necessary lessons from the errors of the Cultural Revolution while preserving the revolution that had unified the country, defeated imperialist domination and founded New China?

The 1981 historical resolution answered that Mao’s ‘merits are primary and his errors secondary’. It condemned the Cultural Revolution, distinguished Mao’s errors from Mao Zedong Thought—understood as the collective theoretical achievement of the Party—and preserved the Chinese Revolution as the ground from which the country could correct its course. His successor Deng Xiaoping, twice purged during that period, stated the political parameter plainly in his 1980 interview with Oriana Fallaci: ‘We will not do to Chairman Mao what Khrushchev did to Stalin.’

Reform and opening up transformed China at a scale few societies have experienced. The principal political emphasis turned towards modernization, development of the productive forces, and learning from the Global North, while Mao appeared in public life above all as the founder of New China. Yet the revolutionary period had left more than a founding image. It had created institutions, social expectations, and forms of political work that continued to move within the society built upon them.

Early in his presidency, Xi Jinping gave this continuity a concise formulation: the periods before and after reform and opening up cannot be used to negate one another. The 2021 Party resolution restated the assessment of 1981 while giving greater weight to the Mao period as the political and institutional foundation for everything that followed. ‘The best way to commemorate Comrade Mao Zedong,’ Xi said at the 130th anniversary of Mao’s birth, ‘is to continue advancing the cause he pioneered’. Not only in the pages of Party documents or speeches, but this shift also took physical form across the country—in restored meeting rooms and village houses, former battlefields and revolutionary base areas, workers’ clubs, martyrs’ cemeteries, and the routes once travelled by the Red Army.

China now has more than 1,600 revolutionary museums and memorial halls, which received over 2.8 billion visits between 2018 and 2023. Children arrive in school groups, Party members in organized delegations and families during national holidays. The Four Histories (四史) programme brought the histories of the Party, New China, reform and opening up, and socialist development into education across society. National plans have funded the protection of revolutionary sites and cultural production have returned repeatedly to the people and history through which the revolution was made.

This immense work of remembrance is consciously organized by the socialist state in an effort to encourage the study of ‘red history’, incentivize ‘red tourism’, and build national confidence through ‘red culture’. But memory does not move mechanically from the institution to the visitor, or from the screen to the viewer, from above to below. State institutions may give revolutionary culture resources, public space and continuity, but it is the millions of Chinese people who give it social life. Recent television dramas and blockbuster films have turned from monumental portraits of revolutionary leaders towards the process of their formation: how they read and argued, organized and suffered defeats, and transformed themselves through struggle.

From Memory to Method

As the university borrowing lists suggests, beyond museums, screens, and memorial sites, there is renewed engagement with the Mao’s texts themselves. In online forums, young readers often refer to Mao as ‘Teacher’ (教员) from whom a method might still be learned: how to identify the contradictions within a situation, distinguish its surface appearance from its underlying movement and locate individual experience within wider social forces.

Mao’s 1930 famous statement—No investigation, no right to speak’—in Oppose Book Worship, was written against those who tried to command reality from the distance of inherited formulas. Investigation meant entering social life, learning its texture and allowing concrete conditions to test political theory. In 2023, the CPC Central Committee launched a Party-wide campaign to promote investigation and research, in the spirit of Mao’s formulation. It directed cadres towards some of China’s most pressing contradictions, from technological self-reliance and financial risk to urban–rural disparities, employment, education, healthcare and housing. Its working method for party Cadres was direct: no advance notice, no advance warning, no prepared briefings, and no elaborate receptions—go to the grassroots and go directly to the people.

This method acquired its greatest recent scale during the campaign to eradicate extreme poverty, achieved in 2020 on the eve of the centenary of the CPC’s founding. Investigation began at the household door in rural communities across the country. In the initial phase, 800,000 cadres were dispatched to 128,000 villages to understand not only who the poor were but the particular conditions that produced poverty in each family: illness or disability, lack of land, geographical isolation, schooling costs, and other granular realities that national statistics could not reveal. To study reality, however, was only the beginning; the purpose has always been to change it.

As part of the Targeted Poverty Alleviation campaign launched in 2014, 255,000 village work teams and more than three million first secretaries and cadres were sent into the countryside. For years, they lived and worked among rural families and communities to chart a path out of poverty. By the end of 2020, China’s remaining 98.99 million rural poor, according to the national standard, had been lifted out of extreme poverty. More than 1,800 cadres died during the campaign. Behind these national figures were millions of encounters, repeated household by household, village by village, cadre to cadre.

The campaign drew upon capacities accumulated through decades of socialist construction: Communist Party organization extending into the village, the mobilization of different sectors of society towards a common objective, public finance and state banks, planning, collective institutions and the authority to concentrate national resources upon a social objective. The instruments had changed enormously since the revolutionary period, but the political demand remained recognizable: to know conditions among the people—to be like ‘fish in water’—in order to transform them. This is the movement Mao described through the mass line: ‘from the masses, to the masses’, and back again through the test of practice, which has been revived and strengthened in recent years through such campaigns.

Between Defeatism and Triumphalism

Investigation begins by refusing to mistake the surface of events for the direction in which history is moving. This is also what has brought readers back to On Protracted War (论持久战) in recent years as a way to understand the current conjuncture. Mao wrote the text in 1938, ten months into Japan’s full-scale invasion of the then semi-colonial, semi-feudal China, during the World Anti-Fascist War that claimed 24 million Chinese lives. Confronted with a Japan that held decisive advantages in weapons, industrial capacity and military organization, defeat appeared to many as the only sober conclusion.

Mao fought against two apparently opposed positions. The theory of inevitable ‘national subjugation’ saw Japan’s advance and declared resistance futile. The theory of ‘quick victory’ turned the certainty that China must win into the belief that it would win soon. In one account, the enemy is invincible; in the other, it is ready to collapse. Both failed to ask how a weaker force could preserve itself, accumulate strength and transform the conditions through which a people could win its liberation.

Between surrender and fantasy lay the difficult work of the protracted war: preserving forces, building base areas, organising the people and undertaking the slow, patient, and costly work of changing the conditions under which the struggle would be decided. This is why a military text written under invasion and during a drastically different historic conditions can speak beyond its original battlefield and context. Qiushi, the Party’s leading theoretical journal, published ‘How to Re-read ‘On Protracted War’ Today’ in 2025, while the text circulates among the works that young people are again borrowing and discussing.

In May 2026, the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, an influential Beijing research institution, published an article describing China–US relations as entering a ‘new stage of strategic stalemate’. Published on the eve of the Xi–Trump summit in Beijing, the paper uses the language of On Protracted War to describe the present conjuncture as a transition in which the old order is dissolving while the new has yet to crystallize. It warns of the ‘jungle-ization’ of international relations as a hegemon increasingly turns to coercion where it can no longer rely upon economic dominance.

For a global left that can move too easily between defeatism and triumphalism—between the conviction that US imperialism is immovable and the declaration that ‘multipolarity’ of an anti-imperialist character has already arrived—Mao offers a method for inhabiting a long transition. Imperialism in its hyper-imperialist phase is declining and remains enormously dangerous, seeking to compensate for its relative economic decline through military, political and financial coercion. The unrivalled military supremacy of the United States—and its willingness to use it—is demonstrated in the genocide in Gaza, the proxy war in Ukraine, the strangulation of Cuba, and the kidnapping and killing of sovereign leaders from Venezuela to Iran. Although the centre of gravity of the world economy is moving southwards and eastwards, the Global South has not yet constituted itself as a coherent political force. The outcome will depend upon the political, economic and organizational capacities built during the interval.

The young Mao of Asking the Vast Earth swims into a river swollen by the storm because, he says, its temper can be understood. Fifty years after his death, this may be one reason young Chinese people are returning to him, having inherited another China and entered another current, formed by socialist construction, market reforms, new social contradictions, and an imperialist capitalist world order in violent transition. Mao cannot tell us in advance where the current will lead. What he offers is the conviction that it can be studied—and that, through organization and struggle, forces that appear weak can acquire the strength to change its course.