In Chapters 20 and 21 of Wild Swans, we see the extent of the persecution against the author's parents. She writes of this experience in 1968,

'That night, as I lay in bed listening to the gunshots and the Rebels' loudspeakers blaring out bloodcurdling diatribes, I reached a turning point. I had always been told, and had believed, that I was living in a paradise on earth, socialist China, whereas the capitalist world was hell. Now I asked myself: If this is paradise, what then is hell?'

China has much changed and is different today. In the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping's reforms, and the introduction of Communism with Chinese characteristics has resulted in the development of international trade, economic liberalisation, and Mao now officially being 70% correct.

If you consider historical time in hundreds, or thousands of years, rather than in single years or decades, then could you say that Mao and the Cultural Revolution has played a minor part? But maybe he has changed China for hundreds of years to come? Will his impact now endure through the control of the Communist Party? Or will the economic interests of the east and the west become bigger than their political differences, and so make them look more alike in the future? What do you think? Can you imagine historical time spread over hundreds of years?