Quotes About Mao

Between 1978 and 1995, China had a spectacular growth rate of 9 percent per annum as a result of the price liberalization that followed Mao's death in 1976. This is in contrast to the serious economic problems that China had due to the strong government control measures promoted by that communist leader.

Mao, she said, deserved praise for 'doing more good than harm'.

Looking back, it is striking to note how many in western Europe and the United States expressed enthusiasm for Mao Tse-tung's dictatorially uniform 'cultural revolution' while defining cultural reform at home as the maximizing of private initiative and autonomy.

Says right here you are gung-ho." "Sir, yes sir!" "What the hell does that mean?" "Sir, it is a Chinese word! There's a Communist there, name of Mao, and he's got an army. We tangled with 'em on more'n one occasion, sir. Gung-ho is their battle cry, it means 'all together' or something like that, so after we got done kicking the crap out of them, sir, we stole it from them, sir!

Some believe his political vulnerabilities have not only driven him into the arms of Mao but also the clutches of the country's generals and admirals, who run what may effectively be the Party's largest and most powerful faction, the People's Liberation Army. Indeed, some, like veteran China watcher Willy Lam, believe the military is now Xi Jinping's faction.

The limits of Mao's system have just about been reached. Party cadres say they want the benefits of the Internet, but they also want to be able to censor it. They say they want to be a technological leader of this century, but they restrict innovation. They say they want a modern society, but they cannot relinquish their hold. Those who rule from Beijing want the benefits of change, but they do not want change itself.

Mao Zedong himself would have realized that the Communist Party has become weak. "All reactionaries are paper tigers," he said. And Mao said something else: repression breeds revolution. "[T]he Chinese," he told us, "never submit to tyrannical rule but invariably use revolutionary means to overthrow or change it.

We were for Mao, but when we saw the films he was making, they were bad. So we understood that there was necessarily something wrong with what he was saying.

Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Mao, Pol Pot, Antifa, Castro, Che Guevara and the like use power to reduce the sanctity of the individual for the common good of the collective. It is a kind of enslavement that degrades the human spirit and makes us poorer over time.

Large portraits of Mao on wooden boards several feet high stood at main street corners. Painted to make the old man look extremely youthful, healthy, and fat (a sign of well-being in China), these pictures provided a mocking contrast to the thin, pale-faced pedestrians walking listlessly below them.

As I gazed at Mao's face wearing what was intended as a benign expression but was in fact a smirk of self-satisfaction, I wondered how one single person could have caused the extent of misery that was prevailing in China. There must be something lacking in our own character, I thought, that had made it possible for his evil genius to dominate.

While I listened to the words of homage to Mao, I remembered Mao's awesome power, like a blanket over China threatening to smother whomever he chose.

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

The Korean War, which China entered on the side of North Korea, fixed Mao's image in the United States as another unappeasable Communist.

Dalla Cina di Mao all'India di Gandhi e alla Cambogia di Pol Pot, tutti gli esperimenti di autarchia, di sviluppo non capitalista, con caratteristiche nazionali, sono falliti. I più per giunta, facendo milioni di vittime.

In 1918 Mao landed a job in a library, the ideal location for a cash strapped nascent megalomaniac in need of easy access to inspirational bad ideas.

Since no grand resolution was available, the Gong memorial established a priority among the dangers, in effect based on the principle of defeating the near barbarians with the assistance of the far barbarians. It was a classical Chinese strategy that would be revisited roughly a hundred years later by Mao.

Mao thought he was inscrutable you know. At least I think he did. it was hard to tell with him.

Letting Stalin lead Mao into authorizing the Korean War was the only strategic mistake Mao ever made because, in the end, the Korean War delayed Chinese unification by a century in that it led to America's commitment to Taiwan.

The importance of Chinese Communism does not depend on the intellectual level of its dogmas. Mao was one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, manipulator of large masses of human beings in the twentieth century, and the ideology he used for the purpose is significant by reason of its effectiveness, not only in China but in other parts of the Third World.

The most influential utopian idea of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was socialism, which has failed everywhere. Under the banner of socialism, Stalin's U.S.S.R. and Mao's China gave us not utopias but ghastly anti-utopias.

On top of my to-do list in preparing for Beijing is 'On China' by Henry Kissinger, who has had firsthand experience with every top Chinese leader since Mao, so his insights are valuable and his access is perhaps unrivaled.

Chairman Mao not only introduced Pinyin in China, but also simplified half the Chinese characters, believing that fewer strokes would enable more people to learn to write the characters.

Of course, Mao made his mistakes, because everybody does, but at least he allowed working people to smoke, even in the most trying circumstances, such as when, for one reason or another, they found themselves up before the firing squad.