China: Mao's Legacy -

Old Chen, a veteran clerk of the Central Committee, stared at the blank sheet of paper before him. His brush, heavy with rich red ink, hovered in the air. Outside, the nation was holding its breath. The "Great Helmsman," Chairman Mao, was dead.

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. China: Mao's legacy

: He remembered standing in Tiananmen Square. The electric roar of the crowd as Mao proclaimed that the Chinese people had finally stood up. The end of centuries of foreign humiliation. Hope was a physical thing then, thick in the air. Old Chen, a veteran clerk of the Central

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. The "Great Helmsman," Chairman Mao, was dead

: 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 looked at the portrait on the wall. Mao's face smiled back, serene and omniscient. To dismiss him was impossible; he had forged the very foundation of the modern state. To praise him without reserve felt like a betrayal of the millions who had vanished into the dust of his grand experiments.