To think of China today is to think of Mao Zedong. Despité his excesses, brutalities and immense mistakes, for most Westerners there can be no doubt: the "Great Helmsman" was the great founder of modern China. More than 40 years after his death, his portrait still hangs on the walls of the Forbidden City. In a lifetime of struggle, he ushered in a new era for the Middle Kingdom, extricating it from its misery, its archaism and its subjection to the Western world. Far more than other great Chinese figures of his generation, Mao led China from immobility to become a major world power. In other words, Mao is China and China is Mao.

And yet this is a myth. Despité a few successes, when Mao died he left behind a country that was bloodless, economically backward and closed off from the rest of the world, isolated from everything and everyone. It was only after his death that the country metamorphosed into the China we know today. In the space of a generation, it became the workshop and then the bank of the world, and established itself as a great power, an economic, political and cultural power in the midst of galloping globalisation, of which it is one of the most powerful symbols. Never before in history has a nation experienced such a rise to power in such a short space of time. But China does not owe this metamorphosis to Mao. It owes it to his successor, Deng Xiaoping, who was, from 1978 to 1989, the real architect of China's real take-off.

From the film: History Uncovered - Mao, founder of modern China?
Direction: Philippe Saada
Production: Cinétévé

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