Deng Xiaoping Quotes

As the first generation of Chinese Communism passes, we are baffled by its unexpected successes

Although I never marched through the streets shouting for Mao, I do believe that the liberation of China at the end of the 1940s was a wonderful thing and to provide its people with a billion pairs of shoes and trousers was a fantastic achievement.

Chairman Mao was after all a principal founder of the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Republic of China. In evaluating his merits and mistakes, we hold that his mistakes were only secondary. What he did for the Chinese people can never be erased. In our hearts we Chinese will always cherish him as a founder of our Party and our state.

Nobody would say the cowshed was heaven and nobody would say the inhuman torture of so many victims be called a revolution of the proletariat. ... A museum should be established to remind China of the follies and disasters that had fallen from 1966 to 1976. We cannot forget what had happened and history should not repeat itself.

It is Chairman Mao who should be held primarily responsible for the Great Leap Forward. But it didn't take him long - just a few months - to recognize his mistake, and he did so before the rest of us and proposed corrections. And in 1962, when because of some other factors those corrections had not been fully carried out, he made a self-criticism. But the lessons were not fully drawn, and as a result the "Cultural Revolution" erupted.

We must make a clear distinction between the nature of Chairman Mao's mistakes and the crimes of Lin Biao and the Gang of Four. For most of his life, Chairman Mao did very good things. Many times he saved the Party and the state from crisis. Without him the Chinese people would, at the very least, have spent much more time groping in the dark.

We should not lay all past mistakes on Chairman Mao. So we must be very objective in assessing him. His contributions were primary, his mistakes secondary. In China, we will inherit the many good things in Chairman Mao's thinking while at the same time explaining clearly the mistakes he made.

From 1945 to 1991, China was engaged in a series of wars that nearly broke them. This generation has been through hell: the Great Leap Forward, hunger, starvation, near collision with the Russians - the Cultural Revolution gone mad. I have no doubt that this generation wants a peaceful rise.

In 1949, Mao Tse-tung's Communists established the People's Republic of China, and the following year, his People's Liberation Army invaded central Tibet.

We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant's revolution, but one of the extreme Right.

Study Chairman Mao's writings, follow his teaching and act according to his instructions.

The Great Leap Forward

Mao Zedong was a revolutionary. He made a revolution.

Chairman Mao has never seen a greater show of red strength.

In the 1960s, I would have considered China with its CPC an ideologically more dynamic country than the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was strategically more threatening.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was neither a revolution, nor great, nor cultural, and, in particular, not in the least proletarian.

The influence of the Gang of Four should not be underrated, but it should be noted that 97 or 98 per cent of the population hate them intensely for their crimes. This was shown by the mass movement against the Gang of Four which erupted at Tiananmen Square on April 5, 1976, when the Gang were still riding high, Chairman Mao was critically ill and Premier Zhou had passed away.

I can understand the Cultural Revolution of Mao Tse-tung.

I was posted to China in the summer of 1988, which was the greatest time ever, I think, to have been in China.

I grew up pretty much prevented from knowing anything from Communist China except that they were the bad guys that stole our country.

In 1989, I was on Tiananmen Square with the students, living in their makeshift tents and joining their jubilant singing of the Internationale. In the two decades since, each time that I have gone back, visions from those days seem to return with increasing persistence.

When I first came to Guangzhou in 1981, it seemed such a hard and dour place with everyone in Chairman Mao uniforms.

Political prodigies are rare in a nation that grooms top leaders through decades of Communist Party road-testing and pageantry. And because Chairman Mao's cult of personality led the country into extremism, the Party spent the next three decades engineering its politicians to be as indistinguishable as possible.

During the Cultural Revolution, the communists came in, and what they wanted to do was eradicate all sense of traditional Chinese culture.

While I was writing Wild Swans I thought the famine was the result of economic mismanagement but during the research I realised that it was something more sinister.