"Mao ruled for twenty-seven years. If the past, as he believed, is indeed a mirror for the present, will the twenty-first century see a third Chinese golden age, for which the Maoist dictatorship will have opened the way? Or will it be his fate to be remembered as a flawed colossus, who brought fundamental change to China on a scale that only a handful of others have achieved in the past several millennia, but at a terrible price, and then failed to follow through? History is laid down slowly in China. One day, perhaps, Mao's shadow will loom less large. His name will recede into a more distant, less threatening past, to join the shades of other founding statesmen: Peter the Great, the tyrant who laid the foundations of modern Russia; George Washington, slave-owner and humanist; Napoleon, ‘the greatest criminal in French history’, as one French intellectual put it; Oliver Cromwell, iconoclast and regicide; a handful of others. But the regime Mao founded may well last longer than most Westerners wish to think. In Asia, elements of a market economy have coexisted for thousands of years with authoritarian rule. Certainly China will change, but not necessarily as the rest of the world expects."