Mao Zedong: Hero or a Dictator?

Mao Zedong is back in the headlines. In late October 2026, French football star Kylian Mbappé called him “a Chinese dictator” in a clip that went viral, lost Chinese sponsors within a day and then apologised. The row raises a bigger question: who was Mao Zedong, and was he really a dictator? This guide covers his early life, the Mbappé controversy, ten good things and ten bad things attributed to him, and whether his model of ruling China succeeded. We give the facts and the main views, and you can decide.

Short answer: Most Western historians call Mao Zedong a dictator, because he held near-total personal power and ran campaigns that killed millions. The Chinese Communist Party calls him a great revolutionary whose merits outweigh his mistakes. Both sides agree he changed China more than almost anyone in the twentieth century.

The Mbappé and Mao Zedong controversy: what happened

Here is what news reports from Al Jazeera, TIME and Bloomberg say happened, in order:

• Background. Fans online had been pasting Mbappé’s face on memes of “dictators”. In September 2026 he told L’Équipe that some of these memes showed “a lack of political and human awareness”.
• Monday 26 October. A clip from the French podcast The Bridge spread widely. In it, Mbappé laughs at a meme of his face on a figure he calls “some guy, I think he’s a Chinese dictator”. Al Jazeera notes he did not name Mao, but the picture was of Mao Zedong. The show later removed the clip and apologised.
• Tuesday 27 October. Chinese brands Dongpeng and Mengniu ended their deals with him. Le Monde, quoted by TIME, put the two deals at about 50 million yuan (around €6.7 million) combined. State broadcaster CCTV was reported to have pulled La Liga and Mbappé coverage and his adverts. Social platforms restricted his accounts. Mbappé apologised in French, Mandarin and English, calling his comment “ill-judged”.
• Wednesday 28 October. China’s foreign ministry said it “takes seriously” the apology. Real Madrid also apologised, and La Liga president Javier Tebas said he had met China’s ambassador to Spain.

Why is it so sensitive?

Inside China, Mao is still a national symbol. His portrait hangs over Tiananmen Gate and his body lies in a mausoleum in Beijing. Calling him a dictator is a taboo in China, as French analyst Marc Julienne told TIME, even though it is the mainstream view among Western historians. China also has laws that punish insulting national heroes; artist Gao Zhen, arrested in August 2024 over satirical Mao sculptures, was reportedly sentenced to three years. There is a precedent in business too: in 2019 China suspended NBA broadcasts for a year after a Hong Kong tweet by a team executive.

Some French and US commentators said Mbappé should not have apologised. Others said he failed to see that Chinese sponsorship carries political risk. Whichever view you take, the episode shows how differently Mao Zedong is remembered inside and outside China.

Mao Zedong early life: from a Hunan village to a revolutionary

Mao Zedong was born on 26 December 1893 in Shaoshan, a village in Hunan province in central China. His father, Mao Yichang, was a strict farmer who became relatively prosperous by trading grain. His mother, Wen Qimei, was a devout Buddhist. Mao later described his father as a harsh disciplinarian and sided with his mother, a pattern of defiance he showed throughout his life.

• Village school. He started school around age eight, learning the Confucian classics, but left at about 13 to work on the family farm.
• A forced marriage he refused. At 14 his parents arranged a marriage to Luo Yixiu. Mao rejected it and later said he never counted her as his wife.
• Leaving home. At about 16 he went to a modern school in a nearby county. There he read about world history and the idea that China needed to change.
• 1911 revolution. When the Qing dynasty fell in 1911, he briefly joined the revolutionary army as a soldier.
• Teacher training. From 1913 to 1918 he studied at the First Normal School in Changsha, where he became interested in politics and physical fitness.
• Beijing. In 1918 to 1919 he worked as a library assistant at Peking University under Li Dazhao, one of the founders of Chinese Marxism. This is where he moved toward communism.

From the 1921 party congress to the Long March

In July 1921 Mao attended the first congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai, as one of about a dozen delegates. At first the party followed the Soviet model and focused on city workers. After a Nationalist crackdown in 1927, Mao turned instead to the peasants. He led the Autumn Harvest Uprising that year and set up a base in the Jinggangshan mountains, where he built a peasant army.

By 1934 Nationalist forces led by Chiang Kai-shek had surrounded the Communists’ base in Jiangxi. The Red Army broke out and began the Long March, a retreat of about 9,000 km through mountains, rivers and grasslands. Estimates say that roughly 86,000 people set out and only about one in ten reached Shaanxi. At the Zunyi Conference in January 1935, Mao rose to the top of the leadership, and he never lost that position.

How Mao Zedong came to rule China

After the Long March, Mao based himself in Yan’an, where the party grew during the war against Japan. After Japan’s defeat in 1945, the civil war with the Nationalists resumed. The Communists won, Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan, and on 1 October 1949 Mao announced the People’s Republic of China from Tiananmen Gate. He ruled until his death on 9 September 1976, aged 82.

10 good things Mao Zedong is credited with

Supporters, and many historians, point to these achievements. Some figures are approximate, because Chinese statistics from the period are patchy.

1. Ended decades of civil war. China had been split by warlords, invasions and civil war since 1911. In 1949 the mainland was unified under one government.
2. Ended foreign control. The treaty ports and foreign concessions were gone. In China this is remembered as the end of the “century of humiliation”.
3. Land reform. Land was taken from landlords and redistributed to hundreds of millions of peasants in the early 1950s.
4. Women’s rights. The 1950 Marriage Law banned arranged and forced marriage, concubinage and child betrothal. Foot-binding disappeared.
5. Literacy. Mass literacy and school campaigns lifted adult literacy from about 20% in 1949 to about 65% by the 1982 census.
6. Life expectancy roughly doubled. It rose from about 35 years around 1949 to about 65 by the mid-1970s, despite the famine years.
7. Public health. Vaccination, sanitation drives and “barefoot doctors” brought basic care to villages. Smallpox was wiped out by around 1960 and infant mortality fell sharply.
8. Ended mass opium addiction. Strict campaigns in the early 1950s largely eliminated the drug trade that had harmed millions.
9. Industry and defence. With early Soviet help China built heavy industry, tested its first atomic bomb in 1964 and launched its first satellite in 1970.
10. Global standing. China took the UN seat in 1971, and President Nixon visited in 1972, ending decades of isolation from the West.

10 bad things Mao Zedong is blamed for

Critics, including many Chinese historians outside official channels, point to these failures. The death tolls are estimates and are debated.

1. The Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine (1958 to 1962). A drive to industrialise overnight, backyard steel furnaces and inflated harvest reports led to the worst famine in recorded history. Estimates of excess deaths run from about 16 million (implied by official data) to 30 to 45 million.
2. The Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1976). Mao mobilised students as Red Guards to attack “bourgeois” elements. Schools closed, officials were purged, and estimates of deaths run from about 0.5 to 2 million. About 17 million city youths were sent to the countryside.
3. The Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957). After inviting criticism in the “Hundred Flowers” movement, the party punished critics. About 550,000 people were labelled “rightists”, losing jobs and freedom.
4. Campaigns of mass killing. In land reform and the campaign against “counter-revolutionaries” in the early 1950s, large numbers of landlords and opponents were executed. Mao himself cited 700,000 executions in 1950 to 1952, and some scholars estimate higher totals for land reform.
5. Forced labour camps. The laogai system sent many political prisoners to hard labour.
6. Cult of personality and purges. Rivals fell: Peng Dehuai was purged in 1959 after criticising the Leap, and President Liu Shaoqi was persecuted and died in custody in 1969.
7. Cultural destruction. The “Four Olds” campaign destroyed temples, books, relics and old neighbourhoods.
8. Environmental harm. The campaign to kill sparrows helped insect pests multiply, forests were cut to feed furnaces, and badly built dams failed; the 1975 Banqiao Dam collapse killed tens of thousands.
9. No free speech. There was no free press, no independent courts and no room for open opposition. Religious practice and ethnic minority cultures were suppressed, including a crackdown in Tibet in 1959.
10. Economic stagnation and isolation. After the split with the Soviet Union, China was cut off for years. By 1976, incomes were far behind neighbours such as Taiwan and South Korea.

Why do the numbers differ? There was no reliable census between 1953 and 1964, local officials hid or inflated figures, and scholars use different methods to count “missing” people. Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone and Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine are the best-known accounts.

Was Mao Zedong really a dictator?

The answer depends on how you define the word. Let us look at the evidence on both sides, then you can weigh it.

The case that he was a dictator

• No limits on his power. He led the party until his death, with no term limits and no independent court, press or parliament that could check him.
• Rivals were removed. Peng Dehuai and Liu Shaoqi, both senior leaders, were purged after they challenged or stood in the way of Mao’s policies.
• Mass campaigns on his orders. The Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were launched at his initiative.
• A cult of personality. His portrait and quotations were everywhere; the “Little Red Book” was close to compulsory.
• Suppression of dissent. People who criticised him or the party risked prison, labour camps or worse.

The case against, or at least for a more complicated view

• The word has different meanings. The Chinese constitution calls the state a “people’s democratic dictatorship”, a Marxist term for class rule, not a one-man despot. This is why the word offends some Chinese audiences.
• He did not rule alone. Mao worked through the party, the army and a leadership circle. After the Leap, he stepped back from daily affairs and others such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping ran the economy for several years.
• He had real popular support. Many Chinese peasants gained land and rights and backed him sincerely, especially in the early years.
• The party’s official verdict. The party’s 1981 resolution called the Cultural Revolution a “grave blunder” but concluded that Mao’s merits were primary and his errors secondary. Deng Xiaoping is often quoted as saying he was about 70% right and 30% wrong.

Most historians outside China conclude that, in practice, Mao ruled as a dictator, and in some respects as a totalitarian one. Within China, the official view stresses his role as founder. The two views are not always the same discussion: one is about how power was used, the other about what he achieved.

Is the Mao Zedong model successful?

The “Mao model” means a one-party state, collective farms, central planning, heavy industry and mass political mobilisation. How you score it depends on what you measure.

• Where it worked: it built a strong state that unified the country, expanded schools and basic healthcare, and raised life expectancy and literacy.
• Where it failed: it caused the Great Famine, wasted resources on the Leap, and left most people poor. China’s income per person stayed very low through 1976.
• What came next: after Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms from 1978 brought in markets, private enterprise and foreign trade. China’s growth took off only after that shift. Many economists argue that the Mao-era gains in health, education and infrastructure helped the take-off, while others say the same results could have come at far lower cost.

Today’s China keeps Mao’s party-led political system and honours his image, but it runs a market-based economy that is quite different from his plans. So whether the “Mao model” succeeded is partly a matter of definition. Its social foundations helped, its economic and political methods were mostly abandoned, and its human cost remains a matter of debate.

You decide: five questions to weigh

1. Does unifying a country and raising literacy outweigh policies that caused a famine?
2. Is “dictator” a fair word if the system claimed to serve a class and had a ruling party behind it?
3. Should a leader be judged by intentions, outcomes or both?
4. Could China have achieved the social gains without the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution?
5. Why do Chinese and Western audiences often see the same man so differently?

Quick answers about Mao Zedong

Who was Mao Zedong?

Mao Zedong (1893 to 1976) was a Chinese communist leader who founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and ruled until his death.

Why did Mbappé apologise?

After he described a meme figure, understood to be Mao, as “a Chinese dictator”, Chinese sponsors cut ties and state media criticised him. He apologised, calling his comment “ill-judged”.

How many people died under Mao Zedong?

No one knows exactly. The Great Famine alone is estimated at 16 to 45 million excess deaths, and the Cultural Revolution and early campaigns add several million more, depending on the source.

Is Mao Zedong still respected in China?

Yes, officially. The party treats him as the founding father, though it acknowledges mistakes in his later years. Surveys and personal views vary, and open criticism is restricted.

Conclusion

Mao Zedong was a man who unified China, lifted literacy and life expectancy, and gave his country a new place in the world, and a leader whose policies caused one of history’s worst famines and a decade of political chaos. Calling him a dictator is accurate in how most historians describe his use of power, but it is not the whole story in the eyes of many Chinese people. Look at the numbers, weigh the costs and benefits, and decide for yourself. For more on how great-power politics shapes events today, see our explainer on what if the Russia Ukraine war ended today.

Sources: Al Jazeera, Mbappé and China (28 Oct 2026); TIME, Mbappé apologises after “dictator” Mao comment (28 Oct 2026); Bloomberg (27 Oct 2026); Encyclopaedia Britannica, Mao Zedong; Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine (2010); Yang Jisheng, Tombstone (2008); Judith Banister, China’s Changing Population (1987); Cao Shuji (2005); Communist Party of China, Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party (1981); World Bank data. Death tolls and statistics are estimates and are debated by scholars. Photos are public domain via Wikimedia Commons; the map uses Natural Earth data. This article is for general information.