"The legacy that Mao Zedong left for his successors was thus a most ambiguous and contradictory one, marked by a deep incongruity between the Maoist regime's progressive socioeconomic accomplishments and its retrogressive political characteristics. On the one hand, Mao "created a nation," as Deng Xiaoping said, completing in the early years of the People's Republic many of the unfinished tasks of the Guomindang's abortive bourgeois revolution. The Maoist regime also established some of the preconditions for socialism. It began China's modern industrial revolution; it abolished private ownership of the means of production, a necessary if by no means sufficient condition for socialism; and it kept alive (far longer into the postrevolutionary era than might have been anticipated) a vital socialist vision of the future. On the other hand, Maoism retained essentially Stalinist methods of bureaucratic political rule; it generated its own cults, orthodoxies, and dogmas and it consistently suppressed all intellectual and political dissent. Mao Zedong, to be sure, looked upon the Communist bureaucracy as a great evil, but the only remedy he could devise to control his own creation was to rely on his personal prestige and the force of his own personality. Neither in theory nor in practice does the Maoist legacy include meaningful institutional safeguards against bureaucratic domination."