"At best, Marx equipped Mao with a dynamic vision of reality, but one which was fundamentally posited on contradictions. Once more, the real ballast was supplied by Daoism, a body of ideas reaching back to the earliest recorded dynasty, the Shang, and set down in oracular form. The Way or Dao celebrated counterpoised forces, the struggle for the achievement of balance in society constantly undermined by the rise of new forces and situations. Flux was the god of this view of the world, and it was to flux and dynamism that Mao himself appealed in perhaps the only one of his works that claims to have made a distinctive and original contribution to the corpus of Marxist theoretical works: ‘On contradiction’."