Jung Chang: prediction

Transcript context

…His son is chased out of a window by Red Guards. The doctors refuse to operate on him because he's Deng Xiaoping's son. So he's paralyzed for life and is forced to do manual labor. This guy who was basically kind of running China under Mao, he's doing manual labor out in the countryside. When he comes back into power after the Cultural Revolution, from the outside, I don't understand how he doesn't immediately denounce Mao. Talk about the horrible things he did. How did he allow—there's a quote from him—he says, "we must be careful not to overemphasize the crimes of Mao or something." For somebody who is so personally harmed by Mao, how is he not immediately condemning him? This is something I don't understand. And I also think he made a big mistake. If he had dissociated from Mao like Khrushchev had with Stalin, I mean, it would not have just been the right thing to do, but it would have been the popular thing to do because there was a great groundswell of sentiment for denouncing Mao or at least dissociating from him. Not just from the population, from the victims, which virtually everybody was in China, but from the leading elite, from most of his closest colleagues. I mean, for the few elders who were in favor of Mao, he could easily have dealt with them like Khrushchev had dealt with the Stalinists, but he chose not to. What got into his mind? I haven't studied him very carefully, but I think he was probably thinking that if you reject Mao, it's inevitable that Communism will collapse in China. Unlike Khrushchev's time in 1956, he could denounce Stalin without endangering Communist rule in Russia, but Deng at his time could not. Well, at least probably he thought he could not have denounced Mao without endangering the rule of the party because we're talking about the 1980s, late '70s, '80s now, near Gorbachev's time. So I think that's probably his devotion to the party. Yeah, but I think he might have been right. And obviously, the point is that he would have been right to say that. Well, this is actually inherent in the communist regime in Russia in the '80s when they have glasnost and perestroika, and they talk openly about the gulag system. That is one of the main contributing factors. And people say, well, how can a regime that allowed this to happen be allowed to exist anymore? How can this be our governing regime? And that does lead to the—yes, exactly.…

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