China Scholars Downgrade Mao

Historians attacked Mao Tse-tung today as an ultra-leftist utopian who was “divorced from reality” during the last 20 years of his life, one of the most critical assessments ever of the founder of Communist China.

Western diplomats described the latest criticism of the leader who took power in 1949 as “much stronger” than the official reappraisal in 1981, when Mao was recognized as the founding father of Communist China but a man who made serious mistakes in his last years. Mao paralyzed China for a decade during the chaotic Cultural Revolution of his later years.