Mao Zedong Dies

Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party and the dominant figure in the People's Republic of China since its founding in 1949, died in Beijing in September 1976 at the age of 82. His death closed an era of revolutionary politics and opened a struggle over succession that would reshape China, setting it on a course of economic reform that transformed the country and the world economy.

Mao had led the Communist movement through decades of civil war and the war against Japan, and he proclaimed the new state in October 1949. As chairman, he oversaw land redistribution, the nationalization of industry, and a campaign to build socialism. Several of his later initiatives had catastrophic results. The Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958, aimed at rapid industrialization and collectivization but was followed by a famine in which tens of millions are widely estimated to have died, though scholars disagree on the exact toll. In 1966 Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, mobilizing students and Red Guards against alleged bourgeois elements within the party and society. It brought years of persecution, violence, and disruption to education and administration, and it sidelined many senior officials, including Deng Xiaoping.

By 1976 China was politically tense and economically stagnant. Premier Zhou Enlai had died in January, and public mourning for him in Tiananmen Square that spring turned into a protest that authorities suppressed. In July the Tangshan earthquake killed a very large number of people, and some Chinese saw such disasters as omens of a change in rulers. Mao, in poor health for some time, died after a series of heart problems. His body was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum in Tiananmen Square.

The succession was settled quickly. Hua Guofeng, whom Mao had elevated, became party chairman, and within weeks he and other leaders arrested the "Gang of Four," a radical group that included Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, and that was blamed for the Cultural Revolution's excesses. This ended the radical phase of Maoist politics.

Deng Xiaoping, twice purged and twice restored, gradually outmaneuvered Hua and by the end of 1978 had become China's most influential leader. He championed "reform and opening up," which introduced household farming, special economic zones, foreign investment, and market mechanisms while keeping the Communist Party in firm political control. Decades of rapid growth followed.

Mao's legacy remains contested. The Communist Party officially judged him to have been mainly right but made serious mistakes late in life, and he is still honored as the founder of the state even as historians document the human cost of his policies.