Deng Xiaoping Quotes

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.

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.

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

I have always loved the Mao cap, though I hate violent revolution.

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

In the last couple of years before Chairman Mao's death he said that the "Cultural Revolution" had been wrong on two counts: one was "overthrowing all", and the other was waging a "full-scale civil war". These two counts alone show that the "Cultural Revolution" cannot be called correct. Chairman Mao's mistake was a political mistake, and not a small one.

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.

In the spring and summer of 1989, a serious political disturbance took place in China.

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

Tiananmen Square in early 1989 attracted many dreamers like Ma Jian, who returned from Hong Kong to a one-room shack in Beijing in order to join the student protests.

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 Xi Jinping came to power, there were a series of hints that market-based capitalism would be allowed to move forward under his leadership. At the first real threat, they've fallen over themselves to impose government control.

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

Comrade Deng Xiaoping - along with other party elders - gave the party leadership their firm and full support to put down the political disturbance using forceful measures.

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.

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.

There are other issues I have felt more emotionally connected to, like China, where I lived and worked for some time. I was living there when Tiananmen Square erupted.

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.

I was Chairman Mao's dog. Whomever he told me to bite, I bit.

I was born in April of 1966, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Soon after, my parents and grandparents all lost personal freedom simply for being intellectuals. So I spent most of my childhood rotating between adopted families of peasants and coalminers.

What we saw in Tiananmen Square 31 years ago was a massacre, a massacre of innocent people that came from Hong Kong but also Chinese people to protest.

Domestically, a lot of people think Xi Jinping is becoming Mao Zedong. By giving Hong Kong democracy, people would look at them as enlightened leaders.

I was a college student in 1989 when I participated in the demonstration at Tiananmen Square. I was one of the organizers.