China鈥檚 subsequent leaders have always been at best ambivalent about their
predecessor.聽
Under Deng Xiaoping, academics came up with that 70% correct/30% incorrect
breakdown of Mao鈥檚 legacy without of course bothering with any details
about exactly which decisions or ideas of Mao fell into which category and
there has been little effort over the decades to try and finish that task.聽
Even the line about 鈥渢he mistakes made by a great revolutionary and
Marxist鈥was recycled from a speech given by Jiang Zemin twenty years ago
聽at the centennial of Mao鈥檚 birth in 1993.
