Today is being marked by speeches (like this one by President Hu Jinato) to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the ‘reform and opening’ drive launched by Deng Xiaoping, the moment China took its first step on the road to the present day. For a amazingly prescient look at the future from the man himself though,take a look at this section of a speech Deng gave to the U.N. General Assembly in April of 1974. (Thanks to Rick Baum):
If capitalism is restored in a big socialist country, it will inevitably become a superpower. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which has been carried out in China in recent years, and the campaign of criticizing Lin Piao and Confucius now under way throughout China, are both aimed at preventing capitalist restoration and ensuring that socialist China will never change her colour and will always stand by the oppressed peoples and oppressed nations. If one day China should change her colour and turn into a superpower, if she too should play the tyrant in the world, and everywhere subject others to her bullying, aggression and exploitation, the people of the world should identify her as social-imperialism, expose it, oppose it and work together with the Chinese people to overthrow it.
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