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 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. China: Mao's legacy
Chen closed his eyes, and his mind drifted back over the decades. He did not write of absolute victory, nor
Chen’s task was to help draft the initial bureaucratic summaries of the Chairman's legacy. But how could a single brush stroke capture a man who was both a god and a hurricane? The Two Faces of the Mountain It would be written by the billion people