Mao Zedong Thought: The Ideology the Party Still Defends

By D. R. Ashworth · November 24, 2024 · Updated October 18, 2026 · 4 min read

• People's Republic of China
• Ideology and Theory
• Communist Leaders

The constitution of the Chinese Communist Party, as revised in 2022, still names Mao Zedong Thought among the Party’s guides to action, alongside Marxism-Leninism and “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.” It defines Mao Zedong Thought as “the application and development of Marxism-Leninism in China” (CCP Constitution, 2022). How the Party came to keep the ideology while admitting the catastrophes carried out in its name is one of the central stories of modern China.

Mao in his own words

Mao adapted Marxism-Leninism to a country of peasants, and he was explicit about the role of violence. In his report on the peasant movement in Hunan in 1927 he wrote: “a revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery … A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another” (Mao, 1927).

In 1938 he told the Party: “Every Communist must grasp the truth, ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’ Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party” (Mao, 1938).

And on the eve of taking power in 1949, he answered critics who called the communists dictatorial: “My dear sirs, you are right, that is just what we are.” The “people’s democratic dictatorship,” he explained, meant “to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that right” (Mao, 1949).

Yan’an: making the Thought

Mao’s ideology became Party orthodoxy through terror. In his history of the Yan’an Rectification Movement (1942–1945), the historian Gao Hua describes how Mao used “a politics of terror,” with torture and violence forcing Party members into “self-criticism” and false confessions that they were counter-revolutionaries, Kuomintang spies or “Trotskyites.” The movement purged Mao’s potential rivals and imposed his version of Marxism-Leninism — later known as Mao Zedong Thought — on the Party; his triumph was formalized at the Seventh Party Congress in April 1945. Gao traced the roots of the Cultural Revolution to these years. His book is banned in China (Sempa, review of Gao Hua).

The Thought in power

Two of Mao’s campaigns stand out for their human cost.

The Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) forced peasants into communes and demanded impossible harvests. The famine that followed killed somewhere between 30 and 45 million people — see our article on the Great Chinese Famine for the estimates (Johnson, NYRB). At the Lushan conference in 1959 Mao turned on Peng Dehuai and launched a Party-wide struggle against “Right opportunism” which, the Party later admitted, cut short the correction of the Leap’s errors (CCP Resolution, 1981, para. 17).

The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) was “initiated and led by Comrade Mao Zedong,” in the Party’s own words (Resolution, para. 19). From 1,520 county histories, the sociologists Andrew Walder and Yang Su estimated that in rural China alone it killed between 750,000 and 1.5 million people, permanently injured a similar number, and subjected 36 million to some form of political persecution (Walder and Su, 2003). In these years Mao was the object of mass worship; when the army was called in to restore order, it relied on “mandatory rituals of worship such as daily reading of the Little Red Book” (Leese, Mao Cult).

The Party’s verdict: Mao erred, the Thought did not

In 1981, five years after Mao’s death, the Party issued its official judgement. It called the Cultural Revolution “responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic,” and said “chief responsibility” lay with Mao (Resolution, paras. 19, 22). Of the Great Leap Forward it admitted only that the economy “encountered serious difficulties” causing “serious losses” — blaming Mao’s errors together with “a succession of natural calamities” and “the perfidious scrapping of contracts by the Soviet Government.” The resolution gives no death toll (para. 17).

Yet it ruled that Mao’s “merits are primary and his errors secondary” (para. 27). And it drew a careful line. Mao Zedong Thought, it declared, was a “synthesis” produced by “the Chinese Communists, with Comrade Mao Zedong as their chief representative” (para. 28). The theses on which Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, by contrast, “must be clearly distinguished from Mao Zedong Thought” (para. 19). The ideology was thus preserved by separating it from the man who wrote it.

Why it matters

Mao never hid what his ideology meant: power from the barrel of a gun, revolution as an act of violence, dictatorship that denies its enemies the right to speak. The famine and the Cultural Revolution were not departures from those principles but their application. The Party’s solution of 1981 — blaming the man, keeping the doctrine, and publishing no count of the dead — allowed it to keep both its founder and its monopoly on power. His Thought remains in the Party’s constitution.

Further reading on this site

• The Great Chinese Famine — the human cost of the Great Leap Forward.
• The Hundred Flowers Campaign — Mao’s invitation to criticize, and the purge that followed.
• Faith under the Party — religion from the Cultural Revolution to today.
• All articles on China, ideology and communist leaders.