Chen knew the struggle for the soul of the party was already beginning in the corridors outside. Men like Deng Xiaoping were waiting in the wings, eager to turn the country toward the outside world and repair the broken economy. The era of perpetual revolution was ending, and the era of pragmatism was about to begin. The Final Stroke

With a hand that trembled slightly from age and the weight of history, Chen finally lowered his brush to the paper.

The heavy curtains in the Beijing study were drawn tight against the biting autumn wind of 1976. On the massive mahogany desk sat a single porcelain cup of green tea, long gone cold.

He did not write of absolute victory, nor did he write of absolute ruin. He simply recorded the dates, the titles, and the official mourning periods. The real story of the legacy, Chen realized, would not be written by clerks in quiet rooms. It would be written by the billion people outside, deciding which parts of the Chairman's shadow to keep, and which parts to finally step out of.

: He remembered the frantic, exhausting energy of the Great Leap Forward. Villagers melting down their cooking pots in backyard furnaces to make steel. Then came the silence. The terrible, hollow silence of the famine years that followed.

: He remembered the sea of Red Guards. Young boys and girls waving the Little Red Book, screaming slogans. Chen had hidden his ancient poetry books under the floorboards to save them from the flames of the Cultural Revolution. He had watched his own brother, a quiet schoolteacher, being dragged away to a re-education camp. The Unending Echo Chen opened his eyes. The room was deathly silent.

We could explore a of the "70% good, 30% bad" official evaluation by the CCP, or pivot to the economic reforms that followed under Deng Xiaoping. China: Mao's legacy в Steam