Deng Xiaoping Quotes

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.

The Great Leap Forward

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

Mao Zedong was a revolutionary. He made a revolution.

We must wait for the official history of the Chinese Revolution to record in greater detail the invaluable work of our Japanese friends.

I was born and grew up in China during the 1960s.

Comrade Mao, whether he was crossing 'a sea of surging waves' or scaling 'a mountain pass impregnable as iron' always held unwaveringly to his course, setting a shining example for the Chinese Communist Party.

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

In 1925 - 27 the revolution in China was destroyed by the false revolutionary strategy of the Stalinist faction. To this last question I consecrate my book, Problems of the Chinese Revolution (issued by the Pioneer Publishers, New York 1932).

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.

The Chinese people have stood up.

There have been 50 or 60 books written about Empress Orchid, but none of them bothered to really examine the period in China when she lived. I was taught that she was evil; it's in all the textbooks.

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.

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.

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.