Mao Zedong Dies: China's Revolutionary Era Ends

Mao Zedong died in Beijing on September 9, 1976, at the age of eighty-two, having ruled the People's Republic of China for twenty-seven years. His legacy is defined by contradictions of extraordinary scale: he unified a fractured nation, lifted China from colonial subjugation, and launched industrialization and literacy campaigns that transformed hundreds of millions of lives. He also presided over the deadliest famine in recorded human history. The Great Leap Forward, his campaign to rapidly industrialize China's agricultural economy between 1958 and 1962, killed between 15 and 55 million people through a combination of forced agricultural collectivization, wildly unrealistic grain production quotas, the diversion of farm labor to backyard steel furnaces that produced unusable metal, and the systematic execution or imprisonment of local officials who reported the actual death tolls. He was informed. Provincial reports documenting starvation reached Beijing. He continued. In 1966, he launched the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long campaign to purge "bourgeois" and "counter-revolutionary" elements from Chinese society that destroyed a generation of intellectuals, artists, teachers, and professionals. Students organized into Red Guard units ransacked museums, burned libraries, and publicly humiliated, tortured, and killed an estimated 500,000 to 2 million people. The Cultural Revolution did not end until Mao's death. His embalmed body lies in a mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, and his portrait still hangs above the square's entrance. The Chinese Communist Party's official assessment, delivered in 1981, declared him "seventy percent right, thirty percent wrong." Estimates of total deaths from his policies range from 40 to 80 million people.