> Mao had hoped his revolutionary movement would turn China into a beacon of communism. But 50 years on many believe it had the opposite effect, paving the way for China’s embrace of capitalism in the 1980s and its subsequent economic boom.
> “A common verdict is: no Cultural Revolution, no economic reform,” Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals write in their book on the period, Mao’s Last Revolution. “The Cultural Revolution was so great a disaster that it provoked an even more profound cultural revolution, precisely the one that Mao intended to forestall.”
