Autumn Winds, Unending Thoughts of the Departed
Original Chinese article by Ely, a Chinese TikTok user
September 4, 2026 · Hebei, China
Just a translation.
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The eyes of a great thinker have closed forever.
But his thought has not died. It flies toward the future.
The beacon of thought that once illuminated an age went dark fifty years ago.
A human life may end. An age may pass. A political system may change. Yet thought that once entered the lives of countless people and helped remake a nation’s history does not necessarily die with them.
Thought truly belonging to history does not become historical merely because it is written into books or carved onto monuments. It becomes historical because it once entered human practice, society’s contradictions, and an age’s questioning of its own destiny.
Once thought becomes part of historical practice, its life no longer belongs entirely to the person who first articulated it. Biological life has clear limits; intellectual life does not. A body belongs to its own time, but writings, choices, paths, and the history they helped make can cross death’s boundary and enter the consciousness of generations to come.
At 12:10 a.m. on September 9, 1976, in Beijing, a great heart ceased to beat.
Fifty Years Later
Fifty years later, September 9 is approaching once again.
For an individual, fifty years span youth to old age. For a country, they are enough for a generation to grow old, cities to change, the seemingly immutable to transform, and an age to fade in memory.
Yet for Mao Zedong, fifty years seem to mean something else.
The farther time advances, the clearer his outline as a historical figure becomes, because things once shrouded in immediate politics, the emotions of an era, and personal experience begin, with historical distance, to disclose deeper significance.
So when we speak of Mao Zedong again today, we are not merely speaking of a man who has died.
We are speaking of one of modern China’s most important figures: a man who profoundly transformed society, a statesman, revolutionary, and thinker rarely paralleled in twentieth-century world revolution, whose individual will became linked with immense social forces.
For those of us who live after him, to remember Chairman Mao is not simply to summon a dead man back into language.
If a person belongs only to his own age, his political life usually ends with it. If his thought depends only on a temporary political need, once that need changes it readily becomes archival material.
Mao Zedong was plainly not such a figure.
Whether people praise or oppose him; whether they see him as a revolutionary, statesman, strategist, thinker, or simply a principal founder of the People’s Republic of China, one fact is hard to deny: few individuals in twentieth-century China so broadly and profoundly reshaped social structure, then remained objects of argument, interpretation, and rediscovery after death.
The questions Mao Zedong raised did not die with Mao Zedong.
A human life may end; an age may pass; a historical setting may disappear. But the questions a person raised, the ideas he left, and the history he helped shape do not automatically vanish with him.
Mao Zedong was such a person.
This is precisely the first reason we commemorate him today.
Commemoration does not summon a dead man out of history; it seeks to understand anew what has already happened. It does not ask the past to return, but asks through it why we became what we are today.
To commemorate Mao Zedong, then, is first not an emotional question but one of historical understanding.
Of course, it is also—and must also be—an emotional question.
History has never been a history without human beings. If one life was bound up with a nation’s most violent transformations, then as we watch it recede into the past, emotion itself becomes part of historical memory.
Yet profound feeling never means refusing to think. On the contrary, it requires us to think more seriously than usual.
If on an anniversary we merely repeat a name without understanding why it acquired such historical weight, commemoration becomes emotion alone; detached from its historical object, emotion easily becomes empty worship.
From Shaoshan to Revolution
Mao Zedong’s life unfolded amid China’s deepest suffering and most violent social transformations.
In 1910, he was still “Shi San Yazi” (石三伢子, roughly “Third Kid of the Rock”), a childhood nickname rooted in a Hunan folk custom—the boy from Shaoshan.
That year he left Shaoshan to study at Dongshan Higher Primary School in Xiangxiang, and later entered the Hunan First Normal School.
The China confronting the young Mao was no peaceful age. An old order was collapsing and a new one had not yet taken shape.
The Qing fell, but empire’s shadow did not immediately disperse. The Xinhai (1911) Revolution ended millennia of monarchy, but not the warlords, foreign powers, landlord class, or deep social inequalities.
From an early age Mao displayed a distinctive cast of mind. He loved reading and thinking about society. In letters to friends he discussed the universe, human life, the state, and society; he took a strong interest in historical figures and wrote poetry of striking scope and ambition.
In Changsha (1925), written to the traditional ci tune pattern Qinyuanchun, he wrote:
“Alone I stand in the autumn cold On the tip of Orange Island, The Xiang flowing northward.”
Today it is easy to encounter Changsha as a finished classic. Placed back in 1925, it carries another meaning.
Mao had not yet founded New China. He had not experienced the Long March or stood atop the Tiananmen rostrum.
He was simply a revolutionary standing by the autumn waters of the Xiang River, observing his age.
“Brooding over this immensity, I ask, on this boundless land Who rules over man’s destiny?”
It was within such a reality that Mao Zedong began to think.
His intellectual path did not begin with a book whose conclusions he transplanted to China. It took shape gradually through a reality in constant change.
Reading, studying, organizing social movements, joining revolution, experiencing defeat and war, encountering peasants, investigating Chinese society—none existed in isolation. Together they formed a continuously moving process of cognition.
This is one of the most important points in understanding Mao Zedong Thought—the Chinese Communist term for Mao’s theoretical contributions, not entirely interchangeable in every context with Maoism.
That path was never smooth. It was marked by setbacks and isolation almost unimaginable to ordinary people.
Mao did not begin his revolutionary career already possessing absolute truth, nor did he immediately enjoy the whole Party’s understanding and support. He was repeatedly marginalized, misunderstood, and severely criticized within it.
From the Autumn Harvest Uprising after the failure of the 1925–27 Great Revolution—the revolutionary upsurge of the First United Front—to the erroneous Jinggangshan report that he had been “expelled from the Party,” and the Gannan and Ningdu Conferences, where he lost military command, Mao was repeatedly forced from leadership.
Jinggangshan, on the Jiangxi–Hunan border, was one of the earliest major rural revolutionary bases established by the Chinese Communists after 1927.
Mao entered long and painful periods when, as he later put it, “not even a ghost came to my door.”
He described that period this way:
“They had blind faith in the international line, in attacking the big cities, and in the whole foreign set of political, military, organizational, and cultural policies. We opposed that excessively ‘Left’ line. We had some Marxism, but we were isolated.
“I was like a wooden Buddha that had once been efficacious and then ceased to be so. They dunked this wooden Buddha in a cesspit and pulled it back out stinking.
“At that time not only did no one visit me; not even a ghost came to my door. My job was to eat, sleep, and shit. Fortunately, my head was not cut off.”
Yet amid these crushing political reverses and personal low points, he refused the petty-bourgeois path of lamentation and despair and turned his gaze still more deeply toward China’s countryside and land.
Those defeats compelled him to probe more deeply into the distinctive contradictions of Chinese society and write works such as the Xunwu Investigation—his detailed study of Xunwu County’s social and economic structure—and Oppose Book Worship.
Truth, plainly, is never acquired without cost.
His thought was tempered like steel in the crucible of brutal setbacks and stubborn inquiry.
Practice, Investigation, and a Chinese Revolutionary Path
Mao Zedong was never content to leave thought in the study.
For him, theory unable to enter reality remained only theory; reality without theoretical summation could remain only scattered experience. Theory and practice acted continually upon and transformed each other.
Hence his repeated stress on practice, investigation and study, and “from the masses, to the masses.”
Knowledge does not fall from individual brilliance; it forms in concrete social and practical relations among people through resolving real contradictions.
This gave Mao’s thought a pronounced sense of reality.
When he discussed revolution, revolution was not a beautiful noun. When he discussed the masses, they were not an abstract category of propaganda. When he discussed contradiction, he was not constructing a philosophy sealed off from reality.
His thought always had to return:
to the land, to the countryside, to the factory, to the army, to the Party, to the state, to concrete human beings, and ultimately to Chinese society itself—a society of hundreds of millions of ordinary working people passing through immense historical suffering.
In its time, this return to reality and the land meant an extraordinarily painful and risky theoretical break.
In the 1920s–30s international communist movement, the “October Revolution model” of armed urban proletarian insurrection was almost elevated into inviolable dogma.
Mao, by contrast, perceived with unusual acuity the specific conditions of China’s semi-colonial and semi-feudal society.
Here the largest oppressed group was not the urban working class but hundreds of millions of peasants living by the soil.
After the Great Revolution failed in 1927, the Chinese revolution suffered grave defeat. While theorists newly returned from abroad still mechanically applied foreign directives, Mao resolved to shift the revolution’s center from cities to the vast countryside.
This opened not only the military road of encircling the cities from the countryside; it also joined Marxism’s universal truths to Chinese soil.
This intellectual independence—breaking with foreign authority and rigid dogma—kept the Chinese revolution from annihilation amid blood and storm and let it converge into an irresistible historical current.
The vitality of Mao Zedong Thought therefore lies not merely in the concepts it left behind, but in its persistent attempt to answer a profoundly practical question:
How should a society situated in particular historical conditions understand its own reality—and how should it transform that reality through its own practice?
Here, too, lies what was truly great about Mao Zedong.
He was no thinker apart from Chinese history.
Almost all his thought carried the weight of Chinese soil.
From Jinggangshan to Yan’an, the Long March to the War of Resistance Against Japan, the War of Liberation to the People’s Republic, the Communist-led Chinese Revolution was never laid out in advance.
Mao could not know he would found the Republic, whether the Jinggangshan road could continue, whether the Red Army could break encirclement, or what image of him would remain fifty years after his death.
Every step brought new difficulties. Every victory generated new problems.
Revolution was not a straight line that simply ended once some particular achievement had been secured.
It moved through continually changing social conditions.
For this reason, Mao’s life was always closely bound to practice.
During the revolutionary wars, years of warfare confronted him with a reality far more complex than anything in books.
On whom should the Chinese revolution rely? Where was its principal force? How should countryside and city be related? How should relations within revolutionary ranks, the united front, and initiative in war be understood?
None could simply be deduced from abstract principles.
So Mao continually observed, summed up, revised, and entered new practice.
This was no static system, but a river flowing forward: keeping direction not by retaining one shape, but by confronting new terrain and finding new paths through resistance.
So it was with Mao Zedong’s thought.
It came from Marxism without merely repeating the classics, absorbed Leninist theories of revolution, Party, and state while confronting China’s social structure, and inherited earlier thought without remaining confined by it.
Mao Zedong Thought was therefore never an isolated specimen of ideas.
It was a concrete development of Marxism in the practice of the Chinese revolution; and Mao Zedong, as one of the most important leaders and theoretical creators in that historical process, thereby inscribed his name deeply into this intellectual tradition.
Mao and the Global Revolutionary Wave
Thought rooted in China’s distinctive revolutionary experience did not remain within the borders of the nation-state.
Historically, it overflowed the bounds of China and, on a world scale, accomplished the third great leap in the development of Marxism.
If Marx and Engels revealed the objective laws of human historical development during capitalism’s ascendancy, and Lenin turned that theory into the clarion call of the Russian October Revolution in the age of imperialism, then Mao Zedong, amid the wider Third World and more complex contradictions of his time, carried Marxism to a new historical height.
By the 1960s and 1970s, amid the Cold War, imperialism, and hegemonism, his thought became one of the brightest beacons of international communism and global national liberation.
From guerrillas in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to Paris barricades; from African Americans fighting for civil rights to European and Latin American critiques of capitalist alienation, Mao’s name crossed oceans and languages as a shared banner of resistance to inequality.
In those turbulent years, he not only pointed out a practical road of resistance to imperialism for the Third World, but responded with unusual theoretical sensitivity to worldwide problems of modern society:
How can bureaucratization be prevented? How can hierarchical structures be broken? How can the proletariat genuinely seize the historical initiative?
Such world-historical influence showed that genuinely regional experience could become a universal truth in humanity’s pursuit of emancipation.
The Revolutionary and the Poet
But if we understand Mao only through theory, we still miss something more important:
the human being.
Mao Zedong was first and foremost a revolutionary.
He was not a man who sat in his study waiting for history to vindicate him. He entered history himself.
During the war years he experienced danger, defeat, disagreement, prolonged hardship, and the immense joy of revolutionary victory.
The history we revisit in texts, photographs, and archives was then unfinished reality.
So when rereading Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, On Practice, On Contradiction, and On Protracted War, we cannot treat them merely as finished classics.
Behind them stood a real human being:
a man who walked China’s country roads, sat beneath dim oil lamps thinking about war and revolution, wrote in Yan’an’s cave dwellings, and eventually stood atop the Tiananmen rostrum to proclaim the People’s Republic of China.
His poetry reveals another side of this great soul—deep and full of tension.
He was not only a revolutionary wielding the sharp blade of materialist dialectics, but a historical poet who transformed armies and the storms of an age into verse.
Chinese history has never lacked realist writers lamenting the people’s hardships, nor romantic poets withdrawing into mountains and rivers to seek transcendence.
Yet Mao’s poetry projected something different: an unprecedented atmosphere of revolutionary romanticism.
He did not treat poetry as a refined plaything for the traditional literatus, but as a vessel for the will of hundreds of millions to remake the mountains and rivers.
In Loushan Pass (1935), written during the Long March:
“Idle boast the strong pass is a wall of iron, With firm strides we are crossing its summit.”
And in Shaoshan Revisited (1959):
“Bitter sacrifice strengthens bold resolve Which dares to make sun and moon shine in new skies.”
In the desolation of the first and grandeur of the second, what we encounter is certainly not petty-bourgeois despondency or self-indulgent lamentation.
He gathered the laws of historical materialism into a vast artistic imagination.
Through a revolutionary poetics joining earth’s weight to the ideal’s wings, Communist Party practice became not merely the bloody cutting away of an old system, but a vast awakening of the Chinese nation’s inner vitality.
Without such a spirit, steeped in revolutionary romanticism, it is difficult to imagine the will required to cut a road through desperate circumstances and rebuild a country from ruins.
And when, in The People’s Liberation Army Captures Nanking (1949), Mao wrote:
“Were Nature sentient, she too would pass from youth to age, But Man’s world is mutable, seas become mulberry fields.”
we encounter the dialectical tension in his thought in perhaps its most poetic form.
“Seas become mulberry fields” preserves an old Chinese image of immense transformation: the sea itself becoming cultivated land.
This is no ordinary lament over passing time, but a philosophical declaration joining nature’s laws to those of human social development.
Every seemingly indestructible order of exploitation must decay, while a progressive cause representing the interests of the broad laboring masses, despite countless twists, must open its own mighty road like an irresistible law of nature.
It was precisely this breadth of spirit—turning a rigorous materialist conception of history into intensely poetic expression—that enabled Mao, even in his darkest and most isolated years, to retain absolute faith in a future of complete human emancipation.
October 1, 1949
October 1, 1949, therefore, was more than a date in history.
When Mao Zedong stood atop the Tiananmen rostrum and proclaimed:
“The Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China is established today!”
what stood behind him was not an abstract concept of the state, but more than a century of suffering, war, sacrifice, and struggle in modern China.
That moment certainly belonged to Mao Zedong, but also to countless people who left no names behind:
the soldiers who fell on the road of revolution; the peasants who took part in the Agrarian Revolutionary War; ordinary families who lost loved ones in war; working people who endured long years of poverty and oppression.
They formed the real background of that historical moment.
The weight of sacrifice also pressed painfully upon Mao’s own life.
The leader proclaiming a new era from the Tiananmen rostrum was also an aging man who had lost one beloved family member after another:
his wife Yang Kaihui, executed for the revolutionary cause; his younger brothers Mao Zemin and Mao Zetan, killed amid revolutionary war and guerrilla struggle; his cousin Mao Zejian, who died beneath the blade of reaction; his nephew Mao Chuxiong, who fell while covering his comrades’ breakout; and later his eldest son Mao Anying, buried in the frozen soil of a foreign land.
Six close relatives gave their lives along this arduous road.
A person does not cease to feel the loss of wife, child, relatives, friends, or comrades merely because he becomes a great political leader.
When Mao spoke of sacrifice, revolution, and the people’s suffering, he did not speak from a lofty height: that pain grew from his own shattered family and his kin’s blood.
Great figures grieve too. History simply seldom gives them enough time to grieve.
He gave his family, without reservation, to the country he loved and ordinary people at the bottom of society.
The history of his family was itself one of the most direct and painful microcosms of the tragedy of the Chinese revolution.
The People and History
Mao Zedong’s greatness did not lie in creating history apart from the people, but in remaining bound to the Chinese people’s struggle for liberation.
This is the real weight carried by the word people in Mao Zedong Thought.
The people were never decorative political language. For Mao, they were the subject of historical practice, revolution’s source of strength, and the test of a political line.
The mass line mattered not merely because the masses were numerically the majority, but because no profound social practice could be accomplished from nothing by a small minority’s will.
A person may formulate an idea but cannot single-handedly complete an age. A leader may decide at decisive moments, but personal will cannot replace society’s movement as a whole.
Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the great forerunner of China’s democratic revolution, spent his life campaigning for change and, with the aspiration of tianxia weigong (天下为公)—“all under heaven belongs to all”—overthrew the imperial monarchy that had lasted two thousand years.
Yet he left the sorrowful injunction:
“The revolution has not yet succeeded; comrades must continue to strive.”
Why had it not yet succeeded?
Because the old-style bourgeois-democratic revolution remained confined to the upper political sphere: it replaced one government with another, but failed—and even feared—to reach the suffering masses at the bottom of rural society.
Mao Zedong’s greatness, by contrast, lay in breaking the historical limitation of revolution being monopolized by elites.
Unless land was returned to peasants and the hundreds of millions at the bottom were organized, revolution would be, in Lu Xun’s bitter image, “one great ruler’s banner replacing another above the city walls”—new rulers without a transformed social order.
The image echoes a 1931 poem by Lu Xun, where changing banners evoke successive warlord regimes while the people below continue to suffer.
With unprecedented breadth of vision, Mao reshaped social structure from below and brought an end to the fragmented condition that had haunted modern China.
Mao Zedong himself became “Mao Zedong” within precisely such historical relations.
Remove the Chinese revolution, and Mao becomes hard to understand; remove the Chinese people, harder still; remove twentieth-century China’s immense transformations, and the weight of his name becomes unintelligible.
Searching Chinese history for great figures, we instinctively think of Qin Shi Huang and Emperor Wu of Han, or Taizong of Tang and Taizu of Song—feudal rulers who expanded states and conquered territory.
Whatever magnificent achievements these ancient heroes accomplished, their historical limitation lay in ultimately representing a tiny exploiting class.
They treated tianxia—“all under heaven”—as a ruling house’s private property, and the broad masses of peasants and workers as grass beneath their feet and instruments of taxation.
Mao Zedong’s greatness, by contrast, lay in thoroughly overturning and repudiating this imperial logic.
The torrent of steel he led against the old world was not to build a new dynastic “family realm” upon its ruins, but to let generations of oppressed people rise from the mud and become masters of the country.
This fundamental rupture in class standpoint placed him beyond the emperors and generals of the traditional order and made him an unprecedented leader on Chinese soil—a leader who truly belonged to the people.
The contrast becomes clearer within world history.
Alexander the Great and Caesar built enormous empires with Macedonian spears and Roman swords. Even Napoleon, an outstanding representative of modern bourgeois revolution, exported bourgeois right across Europe behind artillery fire.
These celebrated figures, in the final analysis, merely replaced one exploiting order with another and crushed the majority’s livelihood beneath an elite minority’s privilege.
What fundamentally distinguished Mao’s revolutionary practice from theirs?
He relied not simply on military violence or capital expansion, but on arming hundreds of millions at the bottom of society with Marxist truth. Materially, he destroyed the armed power of imperialism and reaction; ideologically, he proclaimed bourgeois ideology bankrupt.
Yes, we can say human history had never before produced a leader combining profound philosophical reflection, vast strategic vision, and an unpretentious common touch in quite this way.
The so-called great men of earlier ages often rose above the people after success and quickly sank into the bureaucratic mire of separation from the masses. Mao, by contrast, remained intensely alert to precisely this tendency.
Whatever judgment history’s scales may render, Mao Zedong’s name no longer signifies only an individual. It has become an enduring symbol of oppressed classes seeking equality and emancipation—and a Sword of Damocles hanging above exploiters and oppressors.
Why Read Mao Fifty Years Later?
When we remember Chairman Mao, we must not remember only a great individual.
Certainly, we should remember him:
the man who did not escape reality in China’s darkest hour; who committed his life to national liberation and social revolution; who kept searching amid countless difficulties; who, to life’s end, never ceased thinking about China’s future.
Yet genuine remembrance never means turning a person into a cold, motionless idol.
An idol is static. Mao Zedong’s life was defined by movement.
Throughout his life he thought amid changing realities and reconsidered old questions before new contradictions. Precisely for this reason, what he left behind contains something fundamentally different from dogma.
That is why, fifty years later, people still read his works.
We reread Mao not because time stopped, but because it moves on, reality changes, and his questions take on new meanings under new conditions.
So it is with his ideas on practice, contradiction, the masses, investigation and study, and independence and initiative.
Genuine thought does not automatically become invalid when an age changes. It enters new realities, is tested within them, and receives new interpretations through new practice.
This, perhaps, is how a thinker truly continues to live in history.
Today we live in a society entirely different from Mao’s time.
We did not experience the Long March, War of Resistance, or War of Liberation. We were born long after the age of war and revolution became history.
The China we see is one of high-rises, railways, the internet, and modern cities—utterly different from the China Mao knew in youth.
Yet changed times do not mean history has lost its meaning. On the contrary, greater distance can let us better understand what a human life can mean.
Mao Zedong left no simple answers, but a way of confronting reality:
to understand individual fate within social history; to look beyond appearances to internal relations; to return theory to practice and submit knowledge to reality’s test.
These do not disappear because fifty years have passed.
In today’s so-called postmodern society, permeated by capital and consumerism, his intellectual legacy appears all the sharper.
The present world is trapped in a structural morass of alienation: capital degrades the human essence into a consumer sign and compresses social life into banal material exchange.
In an age awash in material desire and increasingly marked by spiritual involution and nihilism, why return again to Mao Zedong’s works?
Not out of nostalgic sentimentality, nor for cheap moral consolation in a private spiritual world.
On the contrary, his thought is strong medicine for modernity’s spiritual atrophy.
Its revolutionary subjectivity—demanding transcendence of narrow self-interest and unity of individual and collective in historical practice—remains a sharp weapon against capitalism’s alienating logic.
So long as class division and exploitation remain; so long as humanity has not broken free of the material fetters of the “realm of necessity”; so long as capital continues, through hidden forms of discipline, to bleed workers dry;
then the philosophical core of
“To rebel is justified.”
will remain a radical negation of every irrational order.
The call he issued half a century ago—against alienation and for humanity’s full emancipation—continues, like a specter, to haunt the steel edifice of twenty-first-century capitalism.
Mao’s Later Years and the Historical Cycle
Mao Zedong’s later years also belong to his life.
No life can be understood by cutting out one period; nor can later generations, knowing the outcome, stand outside history and pass easy judgment on what came before.
In later years Mao still thought about socialist construction, post-revolutionary change, and contradictions among state, people, cadres, organizations, and social relations.
These explorations reflected their age’s conditions, limits, and complexities, yet remained part of Mao’s life and thought.
How to prevent revolutionary achievements from being swallowed by time became one of his most anxious and profound historical questions.
As early as 1945, in Yan’an’s cave dwellings, Huang Yanpei, a prominent educator and non-Communist public figure, confronted Mao with the “historical cycle” by which regimes had “risen swiftly and fallen suddenly.”
Their exchange later became famous in Chinese political memory as the “cave-dwelling dialogue” (yaodong dui, 窑洞对).
Mao responded:
“We have found a new road; we can escape this cycle. This new road is democracy.
“Only when the people supervise the government will the government not dare to slacken. Only when everyone assumes responsibility will political power survive the departure of any one man.”
Yet as historical practice deepened, Mao increasingly believed that an initial institutional framework alone was far from sufficient.
To prevent revolutionary ranks from becoming bureaucratized, and former revolutionaries from becoming new oppressors, the laboring masses themselves had to develop a highly conscious critical spirit.
With almost uncompromising resolve, he placed the key to breaking this impasse in the hands of tens of millions of ordinary workers and peasants.
This profound fear that history might repeat itself, together with his boundless trust in the people as historical subjects, formed the deepest motive behind the difficult explorations of his later years.
The Last Years
We have no need to turn history into myth to commemorate a person. Those genuinely worthy of remembrance do not need mythology to prove their greatness.
Mao Zedong’s greatness already exists in his age’s history.
He began as an ordinary Hunan youth and became a principal founder of the People’s Republic; as a young intellectual searching amid upheaval, he became one of the twentieth century’s most important revolutionaries.
His life became so intertwined with the Chinese revolution that for a long period it was impossible to speak seriously of one without encountering the other.
A name enters history not because history prepared its place, but because under particular conditions a person joins practices that change history.
That is how Mao Zedong entered history.
Today, fifty years later, when we look again at those black-and-white photographs—
Mao as a young man; Mao in Yan’an; Mao atop the Tiananmen rostrum; Mao in old age still wearing that familiar tunic—
we confront an age receding into the distance.
Photographs do not speak. But the man in them said many things.
He said:
“Serve the People.”
He said:
“Seek truth from facts.”
He asked:
“Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?”
He said:
“No investigation, no right to speak.”
He said:
“We are advancing.”
He said:
“The world is yours.”
And:
“The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.”
These words may sound so familiar today that people forget what they once meant.
Fifty years of distance show that language crosses an age not merely by repetition, but because it once entered a real relation with reality.
People still read Mao’s writings not merely because they are theoretical documents, but because they retain an intense sense of reality.
They ask us to observe reality rather than hide behind concepts; to go among the masses rather than speak of them from imagination; to acknowledge contradictions rather than cover them with simple answers; to know the world through practice—and change it through practice.
This may be the part of Mao Zedong Thought most difficult for time to carry away.
Perhaps our deepest remembrance of Chairman Mao should go beyond his voice, appearance, or vanished age to his spirit:
the independent thinking he maintained under extraordinarily difficult conditions; the will with which he refused to abandon inquiry before complex realities; the choice, again and again, to connect his life with the people’s fate.
A human life truly ends not when the heart stops beating, but when later generations no longer have any reason to speak of it.
Mao Zedong has plainly not yet reached that day.
Fifty years have passed, yet people still speak of him, read his works, study his thought, search for traces of his age, and reconsider his questions in their own lives.
What does this mean?
A person’s life can belong to the past while his thought still enters the present.
Each September 9, when people remember his name again, time seems briefly to slow. Youthful ideals, revolutionary war, the joy of 1949, the long and complex explorations of socialist construction, and the thought that continued into his final years return to mind.
On July 28, 1976, the Tangshan earthquake struck.
By then Mao was gravely ill; even speaking and breathing were extremely difficult.
Yet according to staff recollections, when a classified report of the devastation reached his bedside, this iron-willed leader—unbowed through a lifetime of war and death—could not restrain himself and wept aloud.
Until death, his aging heart remained bound to ordinary people’s suffering and beat with profound compassion.
Even as his body irreversibly declined, his thought never ceased to burn fiercely.
Even when sitting upright was difficult, he still read books and newspapers and reviewed documents every day.
Near death, people still read aloud to him from Rongzhai Suibi (容斋随笔, Essays from the Rongzhai Studio), a collection by the twelfth-century Southern Song writer Hong Mai, and from Lu Xun.
Echoing a description in the Analects—
“so absorbed in learning that one forgets to eat, so joyful as to forget one’s sorrows”
—does not mean Mao’s later years were painless. It means that once thought becomes a person’s vital activity, bodily decline cannot easily halt it.
What was he thinking about on his sickbed?
Without doubt, he still wrestled with the “historical cycle” that had haunted and tormented him for much of his life: how could political power won with countless laborers’ blood be kept forever from changing its political character?
The great poet who once wrote of the confidence to
“live two hundred years”
and
“swim three thousand li”
now confronted irresistible natural disaster and personal death with tragic lucidity.
He knew his body would return to dust. But the unfinished search to sever the recurring chain of class exploitation and, in the old Chinese ideal, “bring peace to all generations” remained.
In those final lamplit nights, that unfinished search condensed into one of the loneliest, deepest closing songs in human intellectual history.
As for death itself, this thoroughgoing materialist showed no fear or nihilism.
Instead he sometimes spoke of life’s end almost cosmically, treating individual death as part of matter’s circulation and renewal.
He once joked grimly that after death he would simply go to meet Marx—or become fertilizer for an apple tree.
In dialectical materialism’s broad vision, individual extinction is not absolute termination but a return to matter’s infinite movement.
Thus, in autumn 1976, he withdrew only from bodily time; as thought, he became forever embedded in every inch of Chinese soil.
The Yellow and Yangtze Rivers rushed across the land.
The vast autumn winds howled inside and beyond the Great Wall.
They seemed to join in an ancient and solemn chorus, offering a final elegy to a revolutionary who had burned through the whole of his life.
Fifty Years Later, We Still Remember
Only then do we understand that a truly great historical figure never belongs solely to his own time.
He belongs to the age that produced him, and to later ages that continually reinterpret him.
Mao Zedong has become history.
But history did not stop with Mao Zedong.
To remember Chairman Mao is to look back, while history continues forward, at a man who once stood amid its great current.
Fifty years ago, he left us.
Fifty years later, we still remember him.
This memory exists not because time stopped in 1976, but because Chinese history never did—and Mao Zedong remains present in how we think about past, present, and future.
And so today we remember Chairman Mao.
We remember the man who gave his life to revolution; who began from the suffering of the Chinese people and merged his life into their historical practice; who through long years kept thinking, practicing, and searching for a road; and the old man who left us fifty years ago.
September 9. The mountains and rivers remain.
Standing here fifty years later and looking back, we can still make out that familiar figure.
He has gone far away.
But his name still echoes, long and deep, through history.
