Q.Do you think that Mao Zedong and the Communist Party of China were successful in liberating China and laying the basis for its current success?

Mao Zedong and the Communist Party of China did achieve a decisive break from the old order — they ended foreign domination, unified the country under a single government, and carried out land reforms that dismantled the landlord system. That much is historically clear. But "liberation" and "laying the basis for current success" are two different claims, and they deserve separate judgment.

On the first, the CCP under Mao did bring political independence and national sovereignty, which had been eroded for over a century. On the second, the economic foundation for today's growth was not primarily built during Mao's era — in fact, policies like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution caused severe economic disruption and human suffering. The current success of China rests far more on the post-1978 reforms, which moved away from Mao's centralised command economy toward market mechanisms and opening up to the world. …

The question of whether Mao Zedong and the Communist Party of China “liberated” China is not merely a matter of military victory in 1949. It is a question about the meaning of liberation itself — liberation from what, for whom, and toward what end. Before 1949, China was a country fragmented by warlords, humiliated by foreign powers, and crushed by a landlord system that kept the vast majority of peasants in poverty. The Communist Party’s promise was not just to win a war, but to overturn an entire social order. In that sense, the liberation was real and profound: the end of the century of humiliation, the expulsion of foreign concessions and unequal treaties, and the redistribution of land to the peasants who had tilled it for generations without owning it.

The Party’s success in unifying China was itself a monumental achievement. For the first time in over a century, a single government controlled the mainland, abolished the warlord fiefdoms, and established a central state that could plan, tax, and mobilize. This was the necessary precondition for everything that followed — industrialization, education, public health, and national defense. Without that unity, the later economic miracle would have been impossible. The Communist Party also broke the power of the old gentry and comprador classes, replacing a society of deference and hierarchy with one of mass mobilization and egalitarian rhetoric. Women gained legal equality, literacy campaigns reached the countryside, and basic healthcare — barefoot doctors, village clinics — extended life expectancy dramatically. These were not cosmetic changes; they transformed the human material of the nation.

Yet liberation is not the same as utopia. The Mao era also brought the Great Leap Forward, whose forced collectivization and unrealistic production targets led to a catastrophic famine in the late 1950s, and the Cultural Revolution, which devastated institutions, families, and cultural heritage. These were not accidents but products of Mao’s own ideological convictions and the Party’s methods of mass campaigns. A balanced assessment must acknowledge that the same revolutionary energy that liberated China also, at times, consumed it. The question is whether these disasters negate the foundational work.

What is often overlooked is how much of China’s current success rests on Mao-era foundations. The industrial base built in the 1950s and 1960s — steel, machinery, chemicals, and the beginnings of a domestic arms industry — provided the skeleton for Deng Xiaoping’s later reforms. The massive investments in rural infrastructure, irrigation, and basic education created a population that was literate, healthy, and disciplined enough to become the world’s factory floor. The land reforms, whatever their later distortions, broke the landlord stranglehold and created a rural society that could later respond to market incentives. Even the political system — a strong central party-state with deep penetration into every village and enterprise — is a Mao-era creation that has proven remarkably durable and effective in mobilizing resources for development.