In his 1968 study Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Yale social psychologist Robert Jay Lifton (1926-2025) speculated on the role that preoccupation with legacy played for Mao Zedong (1893-1976) in unleashing the Cultural Revolution in May 1966. Lifton distilled his hypothesis on Mao’s mindset in a single observation: “for a man in Mao’s position—of his age and special commitments—the affirmation of a sense of immortality becomes crucial. The overwhelming threat is not so much death itself as the suggestion that his ‘revolutionary works’ will not endure.” Fifty years on, if Mao retains any claim to immortality, it is largely owed to one of his lieutenants whom he marginalized and dismissed for harboring revisionist views. Deng Xiaoping (1904-1992) both loosened the reins and tightened them as circumstances required following his ascent to leadership in the years after Mao’s passing on September 9, 1976, recognizing Mao’s views and policies as having been “seventy percent correct.”

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How Beijing manages Mao’s legacy has never been a domestic issue alone; it is also reflected in China’s approach to foreign policy. Mao’s late opening to the West in his final years was not a break with the revolution but an effort to preserve it—a strategic decision that Deng and his successors inherited and fine-tuned. Foreign policy under President Xi, however, has undergone a radical shift that defies the foreign policy positions that resulted from Mao’s outreach to the United States and other Western powers.

In the seven years prior to his death, supported by Premier and consummate diplomat Zhou Enlai (1898-1976), Mao opened China’s path to re-engagement with the West after two decades of isolation. The relationship with Moscow had been uneasy from the start: as Adam Ulam recounts, Mao came away from his first meeting with Stalin in December 1949 feeling slighted—received less as the leader of a great revolution than as a junior supplicant. Ties deteriorated further over the decade and a half that followed, notably exacerbated by Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “secret speech” on Stalin to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU where he denounced the former Soviet Leader for the cult of personality that surrounded him and his persistent purges. Mao denounced Khrushchev for the Twentieth Congress speech and the revisionist course it invited.

Tensions heightened with China’s official denunciation of Khrushchev in June 1960 at the Bucharest Conference of Communist and Workers’ Parties. This was further exacerbated with the CCP Central Committee’s July 1964 letter “On Khrushchev’s Phoney Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World: An Open letter of the Central Committee to the CPSU.” Mao’s explicit animus continued with the onset of the Cultural Revolution, where PRC President Liu Shaoqi (1898-1969) and other alleged opponents to Mao were branded “Chinese Khrushchevs,” a lingering pejorative still in use two years after the Soviet leader had been forced out of office.

In March 1969, a border clash took place between Chinese and Soviet forces for what China decried as an intrusion into Chinese territory by Soviets patrolling Zhenbao Island, located in the Ussuri River along China’s northeastern border with the USSR — territory the Soviets also claimed as theirs and called Damansky Island. The Chinese ambushed the Soviet patrol, killing about a dozen troops. As tensions rose in the year that followed, Mao, with the essential support of Zhou Enlai, began to reach out to the United States that responded, in accord with the Sanskrit dictum “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Deng would build on that foundation in the post-Mao era, establishing the defense, economic, and trade ties that opened China’s path to becoming a major world power and a state with which others could credibly engage. Where Mao had dismissed the United States as “a paper tiger,” Deng’s strategy going forward was to “hide our capacities and bide our time.”

The Passing of the Great Helmsman

Mao survived more than a decade beyond a January 1965 interview with journalist Edgar Snow where he anticipated his death telling Snow that he was “getting ready to see God very soon.” Afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, Mao’s health steadily diminished and, following a heart attack, he died on September 9, 1976. On September 18, 1976, before a throng estimated at between 750,000 and one million mourners, Hua Guofeng, Premier of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Mao’s designated heir, delivered the eulogy. A few paragraphs in, Hua extolled Mao for his leadership role in the protracted war against Japan, followed by his resounding defeat of the Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975), reminding mourners that Mao had “long ago put forward the famous thesis that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Hua’s eulogy also included two discrete denunciations of Deng Xiaoping: Hua first branded him, alongside Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao (1907-1971)—both eliminated during the Cultural Revolution—as the leaders of a “counterrevolutionary deviationist line” that Mao had silenced. He singled out Deng once more toward the end of the eulogy, blaming him for “the right deviationist attempt to reverse” the “victories of the Great Proletarian Cultural........

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