The damage that Mao Zedong wrought in China made it much easier for that country to move away from a Soviet-style economic model and toward a new market-oriented one, a Stanford scholar says.
In fact, China has been in full retreat for four decades from Mao's disastrous rule, according to a new book by Stanford sociology Professor Andrew Walder. "Mao ruined much of what he had built and created no viable alternative," he wrote. "At the time of his death, he left China backward and deeply divided."
Led by Mao, China's Communist Party seized power in 1949 after a long period of guerrilla insurgency followed by full-scale war. Mao launched a bloody Chinese revolution that resulted in the deaths of millions of Chinese over the next few decades.
In an interview, Walder said that Mao pushed campaign after campaign against the Chinese Communist party and bureaucracy after 1966 – "The bureaucracy was basically flat on its back at the time of his death."
