Evan Osnos, The New Yorker: The Cost of the Cultural Revolution, Fifty Years Later
In 1979, three years after the end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping visited the United States. At a state banquet, he was seated near the actress Shirley MacLaine, who told Deng how impressed she had been on a trip to China some years earlier. She recalled her conversation with a scientist who said that he was grateful to Mao Zedong for removing him from his campus and sending him, as Mao did millions of other intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution, to toil on a farm. Deng replied, “He was lying.”
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WNU Editor: Poor Shirley MacLain .... she did not know that Deng Xiaoping had a way to always respond bluntly to stupid people. When I was working in China in the 1980s .... every Chinese official that I got to know on a personal basis eventually told me what they had to go through during the Cultural Revolution. None of their stories were pleasant to listen to. I in turn always told them what my family had to go through .... the Ukraine famine, Stalin's purges, etc. .... and not surprisingly .... this in turn opened many and all doors for me .... we all had something in common. The presence of Mao in China .... like the presence of Lenin in Red Square .... is deep and difficult to remove. And while I look forward to the day when they remove Lenin's mausoleum from Red Square, I know that many of my Chinese friends and contacts are also looking forward to the day when Mao's portrait in Tienanmen Square has been removed. Unfortunately .... in both cases .... I give it another 50 years before that happens. Sighhh .... the philosophy of Communism/Socialism may be dead and utterly discredited in these countries .... but its terrible legacy continues.