China: Mao's Legacy is like an absurdly specific Paradox game on a tight budget, and also one of the best sims I've ever played

GamesSimChina: Mao’s Legacy is like an absurdly specific Paradox game on a tight budget, and also one of the best sims I’ve ever playedWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Nostalgames)

A political hierarchy showing Hua Guofeng, Mao Zedong, Jiang Qing, and Wang Hongwen.

But that’s the way it goes inChina: Mao’s Legacy, a rickety political strategy game from the same studio that put out such bangers as Crisis in the Kremlin, Ostalgie: The Berlin Wall, and Collapse: A Political Simulator. Canny readers will note a theme here—simulations of historical epochs that you might politely call ‘transitions’ or honestly call ‘disintegrations’.

(Image credit: Nostalgames)

The world map.

Mao’s Legacy is no different. The game kicks off in April 1976. Former premier, consummate diplomat, and archetypal reformer Zhou Enlai has been dead for three months. Mao Zedong—the chairman himself—is visibly ailing. Factions are already vying for control over the post-Mao direction of the country like dogs over a T-bone steak.

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Unlucky for me, then, that I can’t be anybody else. Your goal in China: Mao’s Legacy is, more than anything, to keep a grip on power. Everything else is subordinate to that. This is why the first two entries on the game’s charmingly homespun (almost Flash game-like) UI record your popularity among the party and your popularity among the people simultaneously.

(Image credit: Nostalgames)

Choosing between hardline and soft options in responding to a campaign against Zhou Enlai.

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But you also have buttons to push and knobs to twiddle to adjust your longer-term prospects. If I were to compare Mao’s Legacy to anything, it would be a kind of ultra-budget Paradox game: CK3 on the back of a few bucks. You can flick between screens to muck with the budget, tinker with your international diplomatic stances, set domestic policy and all that other stuff you’re used to doing in the Europa Universalises of the world. Dump your budget into propaganda and welfare and your popular support will go up, drop it into the bureaucracy and the party will like you more, use it to grease your comrades' palms and, sure, their opinion of you will skyrocket, but you’ll also send corruption through the roof.

(Image credit: Nostalgames)

Allocating limited budget resources.

Next round? Trying to fix that too, dividing my annual budget between the party machinery and buffering my public support. I even directed our scientific research (there’s a tech tree) into better industrial technology to try to give me more money to spend on all these ingrates. It worked for a little bit, but not forever.

(Image credit: Nostalgames)

Choosing which tech to research.

It soon becomes clear that following the historical route—reform and opening up—is the path of least resistance. I don’t think that’s a flaw. In fact, it might be what I find most admirable about this strange, scrappy little sim that looks partially like it was made in MS Paint. China in 1976 was tired, and looking for a new direction. Radicalism had produced the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, two events that public and (the majority of) party opinion regarded as catastrophes. I couldn’t just flip a switch and get everyone hype for the revolution again.

At the same time, of course, both party and public were committed enough to the revolution for which so many had fought and died that you couldn’t just flip a switch and transition the whole country to some kind of humdrum capitalist republic, either. Under those conditions, of course Dengist state-led developmentalism is the easiest path to pursue. Living standards go up, the revolution endures, and no one gets plunged back into the pseudo civil war of the Cultural Revolution. It’s a real triumph of this weird, rinky-dink little game full of strange UI and slightly garbled English that it manages to capture that so well.

(Image credit: Nostalgames)

A party coup ousts the player from power.

*This quote is likely apocryphal. However it is also very funny, so let’s all agree that he said it anyway.

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Sailing the seas depends on the helmsman#

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