"My daughter, she’s young and doesn’t care so much. I don’t think young people could accept Mao’s times as we did.”

That quote comes from a 2011 New York Times article on the legacy of Mao Zedong for many Chinese. A 76 year old Chinese woman visiting Beijing for the first time in her entire life insisted that her family visit the Mao's mausoleum. Her 50 year old daughter said “For us, Mao Zedong is the founder of our country. We deeply admire him. He lives in our hearts." The article shows that many do regard Mao with a more critical eye on his legacy and his cruelty, but these quotes and this article is all to say that people view him as a much more positive historical figure. There's a particular strand of ["neo-Maoism" in the PRC] (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/08/great-helmsman-dictator-china-anniversary-mao-40-years-after-death) that has promoted a view of Mao's time as a place of greater equity.

People debate his legacy in China the way the U.S. debates legacy of Thomas Jefferson. Many view him critically, as a hypocritical slaveowner, while others would react as Li Lin did to a critical essay on Mao (“Separated from Mao, the Communist Party has no glory left!”) because it's uneasy to view someone who wrote the Declaration of Independence as cruel or unjust or different than how they were educated about the founders (as these Google Reviews of Monticello frequently show).

The article points to how people view him as polarized. Would he have a more positive and less polarized image based on his accomplishments before the Cultural Revolution or the famine?

Frank Dikotter's People's Trilogy provides a more critical lens to these founding and formative events. In the People's Republic of China, state archives belong to the party not the people. Dikotter is a historian who gained access to these archives and wrote a trilogy of books providing sobering facts of Mao during the Cultural Revolution but also during the Great Leap Forward and the years between 1949 - 1957. We know now that the Great Leap Forward was an event that resulted in 30 - 45 [million] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Methods_of_estimating_the_death_toll_and_sources_of_error) deaths. But we also know that "violence and coercion were the nature of the regime from the beginning". In many areas, party officials had quotas for purging out dissidents and enemies. As the review linked above highlights, "For the provinces of Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Guangxi and Guangdong, the death toll was 301,800, or 1.69 per 1,000 people."

Despite this, people still saw and still see Mao in a positive light. During the Great Leap Forward, as people suffered, many also saw Mao as someone who would liberate them (Mao's Great Famine, Dikotter). Many viewed the party cadres as the bad ones. And despite our knowledge of Mao's actions and the killings of his war for liberation, Mao remains a positively viewed figure by many as he is the founder.

That makes answering your question difficult. He remains a polarizing figure but he is still viewed positively by many. The components that we associate with his negative status - the brutality the Great Leap Forward's famine and the Cultural Revolution - existed during the founding. Party archives show that Mao remained informed on the actions of party cadres and leaders. Mao always lead an incredibly brutal regime.

I wrote my MPhil on Chinese history (late Qing dynasty). Communist history isn’t my specialty, but I’ve always been fascinated by Mao, so here goes:

I think you’ve posed two questions:

1. What did Chairman Mao achieve before he inflicted widespread famine on China?

2. "Had Mao died before launching the Cultural Revolution, he would surely be remembered today as a much more positive historical figure." How true was this statement?

I’ll answer each of these in turn.

Chairman Mao’s achievements and prestige within the Communist Party, which set the stage for his ability to direct party policy in the 1950s and 60s, comes from two interlocking sources:

1. Mao is credited with justifying the use of communist doctrine in China

After the last Qing emperor was overthrown, China was in a state of flux. Influential thinkers were casting about for new forms of government. In this environment, Marxist doctrine grew organically (for instance, Li Dazhao’s study group at the Beijing University), but communist ideas were also nurtured by the Russians. The Russians, however, began to believe that China was not yet ready for Marxism. In Russia, communism was possible because of the support of disaffected factory workers. However, China was nowhere near as industrialised and many Russian communists believed that, consequently, China didn’t have the necessary base for communist action. Mao argued that the Chinese peasants were just as oppressed as Russian workers. Mao reframed the communist aims as a peasant revolution, rather than a worker’s revolution. This strategy was ultimately wildly successful, despite Russian scepticism.

2. Mao is widely credited with leading the Communists to victory over the Nationalist Party (also known as the Kuomintang or KMT), during the Chinese Civil War.

During the civil war (which lasted from 1927 – 1949, with a cessation of hostilities in the middle while both sides banded together to fight the Japanese invasion) Mao helped craft the political and military decisions that ultimately led the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to victory. The civil war can essentially be divided into two phases (before and after the Japanese invasion). During the first phase, Mao helped devise a policy of guerilla warfare, which allowed the communist Red Army to effectively fight back against the stronger and better equipped KMT. When the KMT eventually overran the Red Army’s position, Mao played a central role in the Long March. The Long March was a lengthy and gruelling retreat, which saw the Red Army undertake a series of marches to evade the KMT, eventually settling in Shaanxi Province, where they regrouped. Mao played a central role in orchestrating this and was elected leader of the CCP at the end of the march, in 1935. Mao’s role in the Long March was vital to his prestige as a leader after the civil war was finally won in 1949. That said, it’s definitely worth noting that Mao carefully crafted his own legacy. Sun Shuyun, for instance, author of The Long March: The True History of Communist China's Founding Myth, contends that Mao’s role in the Long March was nothing like Mao claimed.

Mao’s political doctrines also played a central role in leading the CCP to victory during the second half of the Chinese Civil War (1945 – 1949). Mao fervently believed that Chinese communism should focus on the needs of the peasants. He supported land reform (i.e., the confiscation of land from landlords and subsequent distribution among the peasants), which obviously appealed greatly to the enormous peasant population. Because many of the KMT’s soldiers were of peasant origin, they began to desert in droves, switching their support to the communists. The ranks of the People’s Liberation Army (as the Red Army was known from 1945 onwards) grew and the KMT were defeated. The KMT retreated to Taiwan, which is the foundation of today’s tension between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland.

In answer to your second question ("Had Mao died before launching the Cultural Revolution, he would surely be remembered today as a much more positive historical figure." How true was this statement?), I’m personally inclined to disagree with this statement. Mao was the driving force behind the Great Leap Forward, which was an unmitigated disaster. As Frank Dikötter (author of the excellent book Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe) puts is: “Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell.” Estimates of the death toll from this period range from 15 to 32 million deaths (mostly by famine). Once it had become apparent to the party leadership what an overwhelming failure the Great Leap Forward truly was, Mao lost a great deal of power and respect. Mao’s launching of the Cultural Revolution was intended (at least partly) as a way of regaining that power. In this respect, he was successful, because it completely reshaped the power balance within the party and led to the downfall of previously highly respected officials. On the other hand, it catapulted China into another decade of mayhem. Either way, with or without the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s disastrous policies during the Great Leap Forward would forever leave him with a highly mixed legacy.

While the other reddit users have provided more well-known and more direct information about Mao's legacy, I would share some less well-known resources for context about this topic.

The Vladimirov Diaries——Yenan, China, 1942~1945 by Peter Vladimirov

Peter was a TASS news agency journalist and the liaison of the Communist International to the CCP when he was sent to China in 1942. He had direct access to the radio that communicated with Moscow and he knew a couple of shady things going on at the higher ups of CCP leadership. For example:

1. Opium trade. Yen'an (the CCP capital during WW2 in China) planted opium poppies in the territories it controlled as cash crops.

2. Contact with the Japanese. Mao was not interested in actually fighting them during WW2 and even secretly sent representatives to negotiate with the Japanese.

Not surprisingly when this book was published during the Sino-Soviet split (1973), the Beijing regime denounced it as anti-Chinese propaganda by the revisionist Soviets.

The Rice Sprout Song by Eileen Chang

This book is about the famous land reforms during the earliest days of the Maoist regime. Eileen was a famous author in China by the middle of the 1940s. She herself had opted to stay in Shanghai when the victorious Communists came in 1949. In the summer of 1950, she accompanied the Shanghai "cultural and arts delegation" ( 文艺代表团 ) to northern Jiangsu province to participate in the land reform movement.

However, by June 1952, with the pretext that she needed to continue her education that had been disrupted by wartime, Eileen left for Hong Kong and never returned to mainland China. It was during her stay in Hong Kong that she wrote this book that revealed what was going on with the land reforms to the outside world (in Mao's era communication with the West was limited, when Shanghai fell to the PLA it took three months for newsreels about the city to appear beyond China). I won't spoil it here but this book has some not so pleasant details.

This seems to be a paraphrasing of this quote from Chen Yun a party official:

Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have been immortal. Had he died in 1966, he would still have been a great man but flawed. But he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say?”

Before the founding of the PRC and during the Civil War Mao was famous for ruling over a sort of archipelago of communist held territories in China known as the Chinese Soviet Republic, then he was the principal architect of what became known as the Long March, which was basically a tactical retreated of those territories intro the countryside when one of the other faction in the civil war The Nationalist Party (or Kuomintang) tried to destroy them, this was considered a work or military genius and saved the communists. Then when the Japanese invaded the Communist and the Nationalist united and where able to defeat them, only for the fight of the two the resume but this time the Communist got the upper hand and won once and for all, thus reunifying China.

So from a Communist perspective Mao led and saved the revolution, protected the country for foreign invasion and then stopped decades of civil war.

Not to mention that if you were a peasant live in China was better under Mao since he redistributed land (at a bloody cost). He also improved the social position women, and made education accessible to the masses from at early stage.

So its posible that if he would have died before killing millions of people he may be viewed more sympathetically (what a pharse). He would have still been a communist so i dont know if anti-communist would have love him but he would at least recibe a treatment closer to the one Lenin recives.

Mao has to be assessed objectively, as with all other historical figures. While he undeniably had serious flaws, we should not forget that he also had some very impressive achievements. Amartya Sen (the Nobel-winning economist) wrote a detailed piece on Maoist China, where he makes a generally positive analysis, saying:

Because of its radical commitment to the elimination of poverty and to improving living conditions - a commitment in which Maoist as well as Marxist ideas and ideals played an important part - China did achieve many things… [including] The elimination of widespread hunger, illiteracy, and ill health… [a] remarkable reduction in chronic undernourishment… a dramatic reduction of infant and child mortality and a remarkable expansion of longevity.

The socialist policies implemented under Mao resulted in the near-doubling of China's life expectancy. According to a study in the journal Population Studies:

China's growth in life expectancy at birth from 35–40 years in 1949 to 65.5 years in 1980 is among the most rapid sustained increases in documented global history.

Historian Maurice Meisner notes that this fact "offers dramatic statistical evidence for the material and social gains that the Communist Revolution brought to the great majority of the Chinese people." His book Mao's China and After: A History of the People's Republic is an excellent source on the period as a whole.

The Chinese-born scholar Mobo Gao wrote in his book The Battle for China's Past:

It was due to this revolution that the average life expectancy of the majority Chinese rose from 35 in 1949 to 63 by 1975 in a space of less than 30 years. It was a revolution that brought unity and stability to a country that had been plagued by civil wars and foreign invasions, and a revolution that laid the foundation for China to become the equal of the great global powers. It was a revolution that carried out land reform, promoted women’s status, improved popular literacy, and eventually transformed Chinese society beyond recognition.

With all that in mind, we should not deny that Mao made serious errors. The Great Leap Forward was an abject failure, which resulted in great suffering. However, we should also remember that the deaths caused by the Great Leap Forward must be taken in the context of general mortality rates in developing nations. In his book Hunger and Public Action, Amartya Sen states:

...it is important to note that despite the gigantic size of excess mortality in the Chinese famine, the extra mortality in India from regular deprivation in normal times vastly overshadows the former. Comparing India’s death rate of 12 per thousand with China’s of 7 per thousand, and applying that difference to the Indian population of 781 million in 1986, we get an estimate of excess normal mortality in India of 3.9 million per year. This implies that every eight years or so more people die in India because of its higher regular death rate than died in China in the gigantic famine of 1958 – 61. India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame.

The Cultural Revolution can be said to have gone too far in places; however, it also helped to boost life expectancy (the famous barefoot doctors were introduced during the Cultural Revolution), as well as access to primary education, which was massively expanded (though university education suffered seriously). This may account for its mixed reputation among the Chinese people.

In short, Mao was one of the most impactful figures in human history, and he should be analyzed on objective terms.

Sources

• Harvard University | Perspectives on the Economic and Human Development of India and China
• Population Studies | An Exploration of China's Mortality Decline Under Mao: A Provincial Analysis, 1950-1980
• University of Wisconsin-Madison | Mao's China and After: A History of the People's Republic
• University of Adelaide | The Battle for China's Path: Mao and the Cultural Revolution
• Harvard University | Hunger and Public Action