PICTURE CHINA

The official party line is that 70% of what Mao Zedong did was right and 30% was wrong. This pretty much sums up the ambiguity with which most modern Chinese see their often criticized former leader. His detractors condemn him as a mass-murderer who was responsible for the deaths of millions of people in the wake of the disastrous reforms of the Cultural Revolution. His supporters point out that during his tenure he dramatically increased the living standards for most Chinese and send the country on its way to becoming a modern nation. Either way you look at it is impossible to deny that the China that we see today was at least in part shaped by his hand.

For the next generation of young Chinese who have grown up in the years after he died and reformers like Deng Xiaoping started to transform the country, Mao has become a more and more abstract figure. While his face still appears on the Chinese currency and his portrait hangs on Tiananmen Gate, he is seldom mentioned by the government and his teachings are not so strongly emphasized in Chinese schools. In a nation where it is second nature the tear down and rebuild, the legacy of Mao and the turbulent years that he represents will no doubt fade the collective conciseness and become fodder for the history books as China races ahead in the 21^st Century.