Sixty years ago, China was in a chaotic condition. Few people inside or outside the battered country would have bet much on its chances of survival over the long term. The devastating effects of Japan's invasion and occupation were visible from northern Manchuria to the southern border; the Soviet Union had shown no great faith in China's future as a viable state and was unimpressed by Mao Zedong's eccentric and personalised leadership style; Great Britain and France seemed still intent on shoring up their economic presence in Hong Kong and south-east Asia; Korea was divided and unstable; Tibetan policy was uncertain; the Chinese Nationalist forces were consolidating their anti-Communist bastion on Taiwan; and the US, though nominally neutral in China's protracted civil war, had clearly been disillusioned about the chances of China establishing any kind of viable democratic structure as the Communists tightened their hold over a population of close to 600m.

The fact that China's Communist regime was nonetheless able to hold on to power for the following 60 years is one of history's most unlikely political wonders. The attempt to find a convincing explanation for the role of Mao Zedong in this grows harder rather than easier year by year. Again and again, by dint of his persistence and apparently unshakeable ideological self-confidence, Mao was able to impel his political allies and hundreds of millions of subjects to follow him into utterly unknowable terrain: immense military commitment to the cause of North Korea, a ruthless use of mass-criticism campaigns to destroy China's capitalists and intellectual elites, implementation of compulsory land seizure and redistribution, emasculation of all unions, nationalisation of foreign and domestic investments and assets, nationwide suppression or censorship of the press and other media, ideological obedience in schools and colleges, political use of the power of the People's Liberation Army, collectivisation of rural land-holding, labour and the market system.

When, in the late 1950s, the enforcement of totally unviable farming procedures was added to this list – close planting, ever-deeper ploughing, stripping of grasslands, destruction of livestock, uprooting of private vegetable plots – China was set on course for one of the most deadly famines in human history. Barely had some economic recovery begun in the mid-1960s than Mao instigated the Cultural Revolution, designed to eradicate all traces of China's history and culture – along with the living exponents of that culture, be they party officials, artists, teachers, the elderly or schoolchildren. Many of these policies remained in place after Mao's death in 1976, and correction of the worst abuses often took decades.