Mao’s iconoclasm was a fuller expression of Liang Qichao’s ideas of destructivism, expressed early in his exile to Japan. Mao took these ideas to their limits, creating a Chinese version of Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction.”

Many years later, in a 1940 essay, Mao stated this contradiction most clearly in the famous line, “There is no construction without destruction,” bupo buli (不破不立).