Mao Zedong has a complex legacy, neither wholly good nor wholly bad. On the one hand, Mao’s revolution achieved China’s sovereignty, and his land reforms bequeathed land to a formerly landless peasantry. On the other hand, Mao ran an authoritarian government that quashed dissidence and caused years of terror, suffering, and famine for its people. Some of his most reactionary policies—state-controlled media, for example, or the one-party system—have persisted in China. The Chinese government’s official position on Mao is that his actions were laudable until the summer of 1957, after which they get harder to defend.
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