From The Financial Times, via A Glimpse of the World:
Three decades after his death, Mao Zedong still enjoys an officially enforced reverence in China accorded few erstwhile national leaders of any country. Mao’s face adorns every banknote. The blandly sinister, giant portrait of his fleshy visage still hangs in Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heart of modern China in Beijing.
Deng Xiaoping tossed out Mao’s impoverishing, autarkic economic policies as soon as possible after he died in 1976. But even with that repudiation, officials and scholars who criticise Mao in public in China today still do so at their peril.
The reason that Mao survives as the symbol of modern China is pure politics. Drag down Mao and you will inevitably bring down the ruling Communist party with him. Deng understood that and helped engineer a formula, or more accurately, a ruling on Mao’s legacy – that he was 70 per cent good and 30 per cent bad. With the case closed, the party could set about regrouping and running the country. Since Deng’s ruling more than 20 years ago, Mao’s atrocities have been largely a taboo topic in China.
