"Mao's impact on Chinese politics will probably be reinterpreted for as long as that impact is politically significant - and it remains considerable ten years after his death, both among reformers who have redacted their own 'new text' and among the 'leftists' who resist this construal. To Deng Xiaoping and his 'practice faction', the 'living soul' of Mao Zedong Thought consists of the mass line, 'seeking truth from facts', and independence - of class struggle, Mao's 'key link', the less said the better. Mao's notions of a regenerative bourgeoisie, of 'struggle between the two lines' within the Party, of 'continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat', have been essentially repudiated, thereby removing this source of theoretical embarrassment and political anarchism. Mao's deep concern with distributive justice, as translated into economic egalitarianism and a smothering ideological conformity, has likewise gone by the board. The posthumous interpretation of what Mao was wont to call 'self-reliance' (zili gengsheng) thoroughly discounts the old economic indices therefore (eschewal of loans, investment, or very much trade) in favour of 'opening to the outside world', compensating with a more heavy-handed appeal to Chinese nationalism. The post-Mao leadership has thus in effect sought to preserve only those aspects of Mao's legacy which are utterly flexible, while dismissing those to which he attributed immortal importance."