China's Mao Myth: What the World Really Thought of Its Founding Leader | Digging into China

Hi, I'm Dong Xiong. Welcome to Digging into China where we take a deep dive into what's really happening in China and share some unique insights. A French soccer superstar makes a seemingly casual remark during an interview. He recalls seeing an internet meme in which his face was superimposed onto the face of a Chinese dictator. The image was of Mao Zedong. That remark was enough to trigger a political and media storm in China. Brands associated with Kylian and Mbappe reportedly moved to distance themselves from him. Chinese state television suspended related content, and social media accounts accused him of insulting the Chinese people and showing disrespect towards their national history. But here is something interesting. Much of the Chinese media coverage avoided directly explaining what Mbappe had actually said. Instead, the story was presented as an insult to China as though mentioning Mao in an unflattering way was automatically an attack on the entire country. Why such a strong reaction? Why would a casual reference by a foreign soccer player become a national controversy? The answer has less to do with Mbappe than with Mao Zedong himself. More precisely, it has to do with the image of Mao that the Chinese Communist Party has spent decades constructing both at home and abroad. For years, Chinese propaganda has promoted the idea that Mao was not merely a revolutionary leader admired by the Chinese people, but also a towering international figure who commanded extraordinary respect around the world. Foreign leaders supposedly feared him. Foreign intellectuals admired him. Workers in distant countries revered his portrait. Even people who had never visited China were supposedly inspired by Mao's wisdom and revolutionary spirit. This image is repeated so often that it can begin to sound like an established historical fact. But was Mao really admired around the world in the way Chinese propaganda suggests? And when foreigners did admire him, what exactly were they admiring? The answers are considerably more complicated than the official narrative. One of the most familiar techniques of political propaganda is to take a limited truth, exaggerate And they repeat it until it becomes an accepted national story. Mao did have foreign admirers. Some foreign intellectuals praised him. Some revolutionary movements adopted his ideas. Some political organizations displayed his portrait and distributed his writings. But that does not mean the world admired Mao. It certainly does not mean that ordinary people across different countries regarded him as He is a great leader. In fact, the international image of Mao was always divided. To some people, he represented anti-imperialism, national liberation, and a challenge to Western power. To others, he represented dictatorship, political persecution, disastrous economic policies, and mass suffering. And for many people, especially those with little knowledge of Chinese history, Mao was was simply a distant and unfamiliar figure. Consider some of the stories that have circulated in Chinese media over the years. We are told that foreign leaders were deeply impressed by Mao's personality and wisdom. Some accounts describe Richard Nixon as being intimidated by Mao during their historical meeting. Others tell stories about Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev being humbled by Mao's swimming ability. These anecdotes are often presented as evidence of Mao's extraordinary personal authority. But even if a foreign leader was impressed by Mao's confidence, personality, or political position, that does not establish admiration for his rule or his historical legacy. Diplomacy is not a popularity contest. Leaders meet dictators, negotiate with rivals, and sometimes flatter people they privately distrust. A diplomatic photograph or a polite conversation tells us very little about what someone actually thinks. Another story often repeated in Chinese discussions concerns the United Nations lowering its flag for seven days after the death of Zhou Enlai in 1976. Zhou was China's first premier, serving from the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 until his death. He was also Mao Zedong's long-time second-in-command and one of the most prominent figures in Chinese communist leadership. playing a central role in China's government and foreign diplomacy. The story is used to suggest that the international community held Zhou in extraordinary esteem, but historical details of such accounts deserve careful examination. A dramatic story repeated in newspapers does does not automatically become evidence of a universal international tribute. There are also stories about workers in Albania and Cuba supposedly displaying Mao's portrait with deep reverence. Perhaps some people did admire Mao. During the Cold War, China cultivated relationships with revolutionary movements and governments around the world. Mao's image was used as a symbol of solidarity, and his writings were distributed internationally. But we should distinguish between admiration by a political group, support from a friendly government, and the feelings of ordinary people in an entire country. These are three very different things. A more revealing example comes from an incident involving Mongolian diplomats and China's Red Guards in 1967 during the Cultural Revolution. According to foreign reporting, a driver associated with the Mongolian delegation refused to display a portrait of Mao in his car. The situation reportedly escalated, and the driver was assaulted by Chinese Red Guards. The significance of this incident is not simply that it involved a foreigner refusing to honor Mao. It reveals something about the political atmosphere of the time. Mao's portrait was not just a personal symbol of admiration. In the China of the Cultural Revolution, displaying it could become a test of political loyalty. Even foreigners could find themselves caught up in this atmosphere of ideological fanaticism. The official image of Mao as a universally respected revolutionary leader leaves little room for such stories. It prefers scenes of foreign admiration and international praise. It has much less interest in showing what happened when people refused to participate in the political rituals surrounding Mao. But perhaps the most useful way to examine Mao's international reputation is to look at public opinion surveys. A survey conducted in 2014 asked the young people in several European countries about China's political system during Mao's era. The results were striking. 94% of French respondents judged that the political system is one that did not respect human dignity and freedom. The corresponding figures were 92% in Finland, 91% in Germany, and 89% in Britain. We should be precise about what these numbers mean. The survey asked respondents to evaluate the political system of Mao-era China. It was not a direct measurement of whether they personally liked or disliked Mao. But the results certainly do not support the ideas that Mao's political legacy was widely admired among young Europeans. A more recent American survey, conducted in September 2025, also offers an interesting picture. Only 1% of respondents said they viewed Mao very favorably, while 6% viewed him somewhat favorably. 41% expressed an unfavorable or very unfavorable opinion. Another 53% said they did not know enough about him to form an opinion. That last number is important. More than half of the American respondents did not claim to know enough about Mao to judge him. It would be misleading to present the survey as proof that every American knows Mao's history and condemns him. But it is equally misleading to portray Mao as a figure who enjoys widespread admiration in the United States. So where did Mao's foreign admirers come from? Why did his portrait appear in demonstrations, universities, radical political organizations, and revolutionary movements thousands of miles from China? To understand that phenomenon, we need to look at the political atmosphere This was a period of enormous upheaval. The Vietnam War was intensifying. Anti-colonial movements were spreading across Asia and Africa. The civil rights movement was challenging racial discrimination in the United States. Students and young people were questioning traditional authority. Capitalism established the political institutions and the cultural values of their parents. For some radical activists, Mao offered an appealing alternative. He was the leader of a revolution that had defeated a government supported by foreign powers and established a new political system. He spoke the language of class struggle, anti-imperialism, and revolutionary transformation. His government presented itself as an opponent of Western domination. For young radicals who wanted to overthrow the existing order, Mao could look like a revolutionary hero. But there was a fundamental problem with this admiration. Many of these foreign followers were not necessarily interested in the everyday lives of ordinary Chinese people. They were attracted to the revolutionary image of Mao, not necessarily to the reality of Mao's China. The distinction matters enormously. Take France, for example. After the student protests and the labor unrest of May 1968, radical left-wing movements gained influence among sections of the country's intellectual and student communities. Maoist groups emerged, and some activists regarded China's Cultural Revolution as a model for challenging established institutions. Even prominent intellectuals became involved in supporting radical publications and movements. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, publicly supported the newspaper La Cause du Peuple and participated in efforts to distribute it when the authorities tried to suppress it. For some of these activists, Mao represented a revolution that had not been absorbed by the traditional political establishment. He seemed to offer a way to challenge capitalism, bureaucracy, and what they considered the compromises of conventional left-wing parties. But there was a considerable gap between the revolutionary fantasy and the reality in China. The Cultural Revolution was not simply a movement of young people questioning authority. It was a political campaign initiated by Mao that unleashed mass persecution, public humiliation, violence, and the destruction of cultural and intellectual life. Teachers, officials, writers, and ordinary citizens were denounced and attacked. Families were torn apart. Countless people suffered because they were accused of holding the wrong political views or belong to the wrong social category. Yet some foreign admirers saw the Cultural Revolution as an exciting experiment in revolutionary democracy. They imagined that China was creating a new society in which ordinary people had finally seized power. The people actually living through the campaign had a very different experience. This gap between revolutionary romanticism and the political reality helps explain much of Mao's foreign popularity. For people living thousands of miles away, Mao could be an idea, a symbol, or a fashionable political identity. For Chinese citizens, Mao's decisions determined their education, employment, family life, freedom, and sometimes their survival. The Chinese Communist Party also worked actively to spread Mao's ideology overseas. Mao's writings, especially the famous Little Red Book, were translated and distributed across the world. Chinese publications celebrated the international circulation of these materials. By 1977, the People's Daily reported that close to 34 million foreign-language which editions of the book had been published. That was an extraordinary propaganda effort. But the number of books printed does not tell us how many people actually read them, agreed with them, or adopted Mao's political beliefs. A book distributed to a revolutionary organization is not the same thing as a book embraced by an entire society. A portrait displayed at a political rally does not mean the population of that country admires the person in the portrait. And some of Mao's most enthusiastic foreign admirers were not moderate reformers. They were radical groups that believed political violence was a legitimate way to transform society. In the United States, Mao's influence reached parts of the radical left. The Black Panther Party, founded in 1966, drew inspiration from revolutionary and anti-imperialist movements around the world. Its members read Mao's writings, and the Little Red Book became associated with some of its political activities. The Panthers operated in a way in a very different environment from Mao's China. Their central concerns included police violence, racial discrimination, poverty, and the rights of Black Americans. Mao's writings offered some activists a language of revolutionary struggle and a resistance to established power. But the use of Mao's ideas by a political organization does not mean that American society admired Mao, nor does it mean that the organization's members fully understood the consequences of the political system he created. Other radical groups went further in their embrace of revolutionary violence. The Weather Underground, for example, emerged from the American student radical movement and carried out bombings during the late 1960s and 1970s. Its members believed that violent action could help bring down the existing political order. Maoist ideas were part of the wider ideological environment in which some of these radicals operated. But we should not confuse influence with direct control. These organizations had their own agendas, and their actions cannot simply be attributed to Beijing. The same distinction applies to revolutionary movements in other countries. In India, Mao's ideas inspired the Naxalite movement, which emerged from a peasant uprising in the late 1960s. The movement promoted armed revolution and drew heavily on Maoist concepts of rural insurgency. Its followers believed that the existing political system could not be transformed through ordinary elections and reforms. They sought to overthrow it through armed struggle. In Nepal, Maoist insurgents later waged a decade-long civil war, drawing on Mao's theory of protracted people's war. The conflict caused enormous suffering and fundamentally changed Nepal's political landscape. In Peru, the Shining Path adopted an especially extreme interpretation of Maoism. Led by Sabi Mao Guzman, the organization launched a brutal insurgency against the Peruvian state. Its violence included the 1983 massacre at Lucanamaca, where Shining Path militants killed dozens of villagers. These examples should make us pause. When we talk about Mao's international legacy, we are not merely talking about intellectual admiration or revolutionary slogans. We are also talking about the spread of an ideology that some movements used to justify armed struggle, political terror, and the elimination of opponents. There were also strange political combinations in Europe. In Italy, for instance, elements of the far right developed forms of what was sometimes described as Nazi Maoism. These groups borrowed revolutionary imagery and methods from Maoist movements while retaining radically different ideological commitment. That may sound contradictory. How could people associated with the far-right admire a communist revolutionary? Because political extremists sometimes care less about the precise content of an ideology than about its methods and its promise of power. They may admire discipline, hierarchy, mobilization, violence, and the ability to destroy an existing political order. They can borrow symbols from movements whose underlying beliefs they otherwise reject. This is another reason why the existence of foreign Mao admirers should not be treated as a proof of universal respect. Some were attracted to Mao's anti-imperialist message. Some admired his revolutionary strategy. Some wanted to imitate his political methods. Others simply saw him as a symbol of rebellion against the established order. These are not the same as admiring the actual historical record of his rule. And what was that record? Mao led the Chinese Communist Party to victory in 1949 and established the People's Republic of China. He played a central role in unifying the country under a new political system after decades of war and instability. His government also expanded certain state services and carried out campaigns that supporters considered transformative. But his rule was also marked by catastrophic political and economic disasters. The Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958, attempted to accelerate industrial and agricultural production through radical collectivization and mass mobilization. The policies contributed to a devastating famine that killed tens of millions of people, although estimates vary among historians. The Cultural Revolution, beginning in 1966, brought another decade of political turmoil, persecution, and social destruction. Mao's personal authority was used to mobilize the population Against the supposed enemies within the party and society. Millions of people were subjected to political campaigns, and many suffered imprisonment, violence, or death. These are not minor details that can be dismissed as unfortunate side effects of an otherwise admirable revolution. They are central to any serious assessment of Mao's leadership. This is why historians and scholars often discuss Mao alongside other 20th-century dictators responsible for mass political violence, including Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. The precise number of deaths attributed to each regime remains a subject of historical debate. Different scholars use different methods and include different categories of deaths. But the scale of suffering under Mao's rule is not seriously in doubt. This brings us back to Mbappé. Why did a comment by a foreign soccer player cause such an intense reaction? Because Mao is not simply a historical figure in today's China. He remains part of the political foundation of the Communist Party's legitimacy. The Party traces its rise to power through Mao's revolution. Its official history presents the founding of the People's Republic as a historical achievement that justifies its continued rule. Mao's image therefore occupies a special place in the political system. Criticism of Mao can easily become criticism of the Party's own historical narrative. The Party has a complicated relationship with Mao's legacy. It cannot completely reject him without undermining the story of its own founding. At the same time, it cannot openly defend every policy he pursued because the consequences of some of those policies were too disastrous to ignore. So the official position has been to recognize that Mao made serious mistakes while insisting that his overall historical contribution remains overwhelmingly positive. This arrangement allows the Party to preserve Mao as a national symbol while limiting public discussion of the darkest chapters of his rule. And this is where the distinction between the Chinese people and the Chinese Communist Party becomes essential. A criticism of Mao is not automatically an insult to China. A discussion of the Great Leap Forward is not an attack on Chinese civilization. An examination of the Cultural Revolution does not mean hostility towards the Chinese people. China is a country with thousands of years of history, a rich culture, and a population of more than a billion people. Its identity cannot be reduced to one political party or one revolutionary leader. But the Party often treats criticism of its historical leaders as though it were an attack on the nation itself. This is politically useful because it turns a debate about the Party's record into a question of national loyalty. Instead of asking whether a historical claim is true, people are encouraged to ask whether repeating it is patriotic. That is a powerful way to discourage debate. The Mbappe controversy illustrates this mechanism. Rather than having a serious discussion about the Mao's historical legacy, the reaction focused on whether a foreign celebrity had shown sufficient respect. The issue became national dignity, commercial consequences, and the supposed feelings of the Chinese people. But the real question should be much simpler. Was Mao a dictator? Did his policy cause enormous human suffering? And is it responsible for people outside China to discuss those facts openly? Of course it is. There is no reason a foreign soccer player should be required to repeat the Chinese Communist Party's preferred version of history. Nor should foreign companies be expected to treat every reference to Mao as a diplomatic crisis. The deeper irony is that the Party's aggressive defense of Mao may actually reveal how insecure it is about his legacy. If Mao's international reputation were as universally glorious as propaganda claims, why would a passing remark by a celebrity create such anxiety? Why would the media need to turn the issue into a national loyalty test? Mao did have foreign admirers. Some were sincere, some were influential, some helped spread his ideas across continents. But many admired and imagined the revolutionary hero rather than the reality experienced by ordinary Chinese people. Others were attracted to the radical methods of his movement, including its willingness to use violence to achieve political goals. And outside those relatively small political circles, Mao's reputation was far from universally positive. Some people viewed his rule as oppressive and disastrous. Others knew little about him. The available surveys certainly do not support the Chinese propaganda narrative of widespread international admiration. A casual remark by a French soccer superstar exposed a much larger All just sensitivity. The Chinese Communist Party still needs the world to see Mao through the lens of its own propaganda. It wants foreign admiration to validate its historical narrative, and it treats criticism as a threat to national dignity. What it cannot do is rewrite the experiences of the people who lived through Mao's campaigns, or erase the historical record of what happened. Mao's legacy belongs to history, not to the propaganda department of any government. And history does not become more respectful, more accurate, or more patriotic simply because criticism is forbidden. Thank you so much for watching. If this video was helpful, please like, subscribe, and if you are watching on your phone, click hype right below. 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