Exchange between Mao and Edgar Snow. Snow published the following based on
memory. He asked "'You have fundamentally changed the environment in China.
Many wonder what the younger generation bred under easier conditions will do.
What do you think about it?'
Mao supposedly replied:
He also could not know, he said. He doubted that anyone could be sure. There
were two possibilities. There could be continued development of the
revolution towards Communism, the other possibility was that youth could
negate the revolution, and give a poor performance: make peace with
imperialism, bring the remains of the Chang Kai Shek clique back to the
mainland, and take a stand beside the small percentage of
counter-revolutionaries still in the country. Of course he did not hope for
counter-revolution. But future events would be decided by future generations,
and in accordance with conditions we could not foresee. From the long-range
view, future generations ought to be more knowledgeable than we are, just as
men of the bourgeois-democratic era were more knowledgeable than those of the
feudal ages. Their judgement would prevail, not ours. The youth of today, and
those to come after them would assess the work of the revolution in
accordance with values of their own. Mao's voice dropped away and he half
closed his eyes. Man's condition on this earth was changing with ever
increasing rapidity. A thousand years from now all of them, he said, even
Marx, Engels and Lenin, would possibly appear rather ridiculous."
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