An analysis of the negative impact of Mao Zedong's legacy in China through the totalitarian state and the failure of communist ideology This historical study will define the negative impact of he economics and politics of Mao Zedong cultural policies that defined the failed communist state and the rise of socialist/capitalist China. During the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, Mao was responsible for rapidly improving China's industrial modernization, but this policy resulted in poverty and famine. During the 1960s, the Cultural Revolution defined opposition to the economic policies of Mao, who used the state as a way to condemn political opponents, such as Deng Xiaoping, who called the failure of the communist state. Mao's fall began with the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which defined an era in which the promise of a collective state would serve to unite the Chinese people and unite them against common enemies, such as the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) party and China. the Japanese invaders who constantly attacked China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The underlying goal of communism was to derail the top-down economic hierarchy of the elite capitalist classes and to place greater value on the identity of the peasant worker as a contributing member of the state. After taking control of the CCP in the 1940s, Mao began using the state to promote extremely rapid economic development in the Great Leap Forward. This form of massive industrial expansion marked the beginning of government abuses that followed totalitarian states, instead of communist Mao's radical use of the state to control the economy, industrial development and social progress of communist ideology had a negative impact, since Deng had simply followed this path in state control of capitalist enterprises which in no way served the proletariat, worker as an equal participant in economic progress. Finally, the 21st century defines a great devolution of communist ideology as a mere symbol of the extreme forms of capitalist enterprise defined under the guise of “state power”. Mao had a negative impact on the Chinese economy by giving the state too much decision-making power, which ultimately conforms to neoliberal economic ideologies that exploit the Chinese proletariat. Just as the Great Leap Forward killed 45 million workers in the late 1950s, so does the current mode of economic development in an increasingly stratified class divide centered in urban areas.