In late May 1938, Mao Zedong began a series of lectures in Yan’an that would become On Protracted War. Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Nanjing had fallen to Japanese imperialist ambitions, while China, as a semi-feudal and semi-colonial country, remained vastly inferior in weapons, industry and military organisation. As the resistance became a major front of the World Anti-Fascist War, two conclusions took hold. The defeatist theory of inevitable ‘national subjugation’ treated Japan’s superiority as permanent; the triumphalist theory of ‘quick victory’ substituted the desire to win for the conditions of victory.
Mao rejected both. Between surrender and fantasy lay protracted war: preserving forces, organising the people, building base areas and changing the conditions under which the conflict would be decided. He anticipated three stages—strategic defensive, strategic stalemate, and strategic counter-offensive—but time alone could not move the struggle from one to the next. Victory depended on what the Chinese people could build during the long interval.
The war was won seven years later, at the cost of 24 million Chinese lives, paving the way for the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) four years later, which arose from a century of humiliation and decades of devastating war. Yet the method forged through resistance outlived the battlefield. Fifty years after Mao’s death, one of his most consequential legacies lies in the capacity to carry a long historical task through changing conditions: preserving the consciousness of how sovereignty was won, maintaining institutions able to organise people and resources, and confronting the new contradictions generated by socialist construction.
After Mao passed away on 9 September 1976, the Communist Party of China (CPC) faced a question whose stakes extended beyond the judgement of one leader. It had to assess the errors of the Cultural Revolution while preserving the revolution that had defeated imperialist domination, unified the country and laid the foundations of New China.
The Party’s 1981 historical resolution concluded that Mao’s ‘merits are primary and his errors secondary’, and that his contributions to the Chinese Revolution far outweighed his mistakes. The familiar ‘70–30’ formulation condensed this judgement into popular shorthand, although it is not the resolution’s literal wording. China could correct its course without surrendering its revolutionary foundations. Reform and opening up transformed the productive forces and people’s material lives on an immense scale, within the framework established after 1949. In 2013, Xi Jinping gave this continuity a concise formulation that the historical periods before and after reform and opening up cannot be used to negate one another. A decade later, commemorating the 130th anniversary of Mao’s birth, he said that ‘the best way to commemorate Comrade Mao Zedong is to continue advancing the cause he pioneered’.
That cause must now be advanced under conditions Mao did not live to see: a vast socialist market economy; an urbanised, technologically advanced society; deep integration into the world economy; and new contradictions connecting development, social balance and ecological survival.
History as a living capacity
For young Chinese people, the victory of 1945 and the establishment of the PRC belong to a distant past. Most have known only a sovereign China; many grew up during its rise as the world’s largest manufacturing economy and becoming a world leader in scientific and technological innovation. The younger generations must learn that the unity, sovereignty, and developmental capacity it inherited were won through organised resistance, planning, and socialist construction, rather than given as the natural conditions of modern China.
Across the country, revolutionary history is actively preserved. More than 1,600 museums and memorial halls conserve former meeting rooms, battlefields, workers’ clubs, village houses, martyrs’ cemeteries, and the routes of the Red Army. Together, these ‘red history’ sites received 2.8 billion visits from 2018 to 2023 alone. The ‘Four Histories’ programme has brought the histories of the Communist Party, New China, reform and opening up, and socialist development into political education across society. In 2025, the eightieth anniversary of victory in the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War placed this transmission of historical memory at the centre of public life.
That history also lives through popular culture. Television series like The Age of Awakening (2021), about the generation that founded the Communist Party, have become a major cultural event among viewers born after the mid-1990s. Mao’s Selected Works also rose to first place on Tsinghua University’s library borrowing list from 2019 onwards, a pattern repeated at several other leading universities. Across screen, memorial site and written work, young people encounter Mao as both a maker of history and a thinker whose methods remain part of China’s socialist construction.
New stages of socialist construction
Historical memory becomes a living capacity when it enters political practice. Mao’s often-cited 1930 statement—‘No investigation, no right to speak’—was directed against those who tried to command reality through inherited formulas. Cadres had to enter social life, learn its conditions and submit policy to practice. In 2023, a Party-wide work plan returned to Mao’s formulation, adding that without investigation there is ‘no right to decide’. It called for cadres to reach grassroots sites without advance notice, prepared briefings or staged receptions, through the method known as ‘four no’s, two directs’.
For a Communist Party that has governed for more than seven decades, the mass line is also a practice of self-renewal. The Party’s account of the challenges it faces includes the danger of separation from the masses, reiterated at its 18th Congress in 2012, when Xi Jinping became general secretary. The mass line addresses this danger by forming political leadership ‘from the masses, to the masses’: gathering dispersed experience, concentrating it through analysis, returning it as policy and testing it again in practice.
Few recent undertakings reveal this method more clearly than the campaign to eradicate extreme poverty. Across China, 255,000 resident work teams and more than three million first secretaries and cadres were dispatched to villages. By the end of 2020, 98.99 million rural residents had been lifted out of extreme poverty according to the national standard. The first-secretary and village-work-team systems then carried forward into rural revitalisation, turning an emergency mobilisation into a durable institution of rural governance.
This campaign drew upon capacities accumulated through socialist construction: Party organisation reaching into the village, public finance and state banks, planning, collective institutions, modern infrastructure, and the authority to concentrate national resources on a social objective. Its instruments were far removed from those of Yan’an, but its political demand remained recognisable: to know conditions among the people in order to transform them.
As conditions change, the tasks of socialist construction change with them. In 2017, the Communist Party reformulated China’s principal social contradiction—a concept inherited from Mao’s theoretical contributions—as that between the people’s growing need for a better life and unbalanced and inadequate development. The task had moved from overcoming absolute scarcity through developing the productive forces towards addressing imbalances between regions, town and countryside, material development and ecological life.
The project of socialist modernisation was established during the Mao period. Deng Xiaoping introduced the term ‘Chinese-style modernisation’ in 1979; under Xi Jinping, it was developed into a comprehensive theoretical framework, particularly at the 20th CPC National Congress in 2022. Its defining characteristics include harmony between humanity and nature, common prosperity, and coordinated material and cultural-ethical advancement.
The long task continues
Four generations after victory in the World Anti-Fascist War, China’s young people have inherited a country profoundly different from the one Mao addressed in Yan’an. Yet his underlying question remains: how can a people read a changing balance of forces and act within it? In May 2026, the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations published an article
describing China–US relations as entering a ‘new stage of strategic stalemate’. Appearing before the Xi–Trump summit in Beijing, it draws on On Protracted War to describe a transition in which the old order is dissolving while the new has yet to crystallise. It warns of the ‘jungle-isation’ of international relations as a hegemon increasingly turns to coercion where it can no longer rely on economic dominance.
Amid these ‘changes unseen in a century’, political judgement can swing between defeatism and triumphalism that Mao warned against: between the conviction that US imperialism is immovable and the expectation that it will collapse tomorrow. Mao offers a method for inhabiting a long transition without yielding to either. For China’s younger generation, this demands a historical consciousness equal to contemporary conditions: an understanding of how a weak and divided country organised itself, recovered its sovereignty and built the foundations of socialism, and of how the capacities formed through that history can be directed towards the contradictions of their own time. While the stages and global conditions have changed, the long task continues.
The Valdai Discussion Club was established in 2004. It is named after Lake Valdai, which is located close to Veliky Novgorod, where the Club’s first meeting took place.
Please visit the firm link to site
