Mao Zedong is remembered in official Chinese history as the founder of the modern state, but this History Hit film asks what that title costs to maintain. It lays out the human toll of the Great Leap Forward, the famine that followed forced collectivization, and the political violence of the Cultural Revolution, using archival footage and historian interviews to weigh the record against the myth. The second half turns to Deng Xiaoping, once Mao's protégé and later purged as a rival, who returned after Mao's death to dismantle much of his economic legacy and open China to foreign trade and investment. The film traces how Deng's reforms, cautious and pragmatic where Mao's were absolute, set the course for China's rise as an economic power. Rather than treating the two men as a simple succession story, it frames them as opposing answers to the same question: what modern China should be built on, ideology or results.