Vejas Liulevicius: belief

Transcript context

…So, as the same question I asked about the Soviet Union, why do you think there was so much failure of policies that Mao implemented in China during his rule? Mao himself had a view of human beings as being, as he put it, beautiful blank pieces of paper upon which one can write new characters. And that is clearly at variance with what you and I know about the complex nature of human beings as we actually encounter them in the world. I think that in the process of hatching schemes that were one-size-fits-all for a country as big and as varied in its communities as China, inevitably, such an imposition of one model was going to lead to serious malfunctions. And so much of what other episodes in Chinese history had showed the entrepreneurial capacity, the productive capacity economically of the Chinese people was suppressed by being fitted into these rigid schemes. What we’ve seen since, after Mao passes from the scene and with the forms of Deng Xiaoping one sees just how much of those energies had been forcibly suppressed for so long and now we’re allowed to re-emerge. Mao died in 1976. You wrote that the CCP in ’81, looking back through the lens of historical analysis, said that he was 70% correct. Seven zero, exactly, 70% correct.…

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