I am from China and this reply was translated by DEEPL. In my province there is a high school with outstanding results called Double Ten（双十）. We often hear stories about this school. This school was established to commemorate the Xinhai Revolution, which took place on the 10th of October. The Xinhai Revolution overthrew the imperial system and established the Republic of China, which retreated to Taiwan Province and part of Fujian Province in 1949, which was under the control of the People’s Republic of China. During the Cultural Revolution that school was plundered several times because of its name. There were many absurdities during the Cultural Revolution and the victims were not bourgeois, maybe they were just returning from studying abroad, maybe they just had problems with certain people but were criticised for it. Ordinary people in China respected both Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong. Although Mao produced mistakes like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, he established the People’s Republic of China and the industrial, political and military achievements of the Mao era laid the foundations for Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. Mao and Deng were not adversaries, they were close collaborators, and together they made China what it is today. (Of course without the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution perhaps China would be a better place today) Workers did have a high status in Mao’s time, but the peasants, who made up the majority of the population, were not well off. In the north, a peasant could only keep 180 kg of grain, in the south it was 200 kg. In many places peasants therefore kept arable land for themselves and refused to allow it to join collective farms, but these were disparaged as “capitalist”. Some peasants felt that they could not benefit from joining a collective farm and wanted to leave but were refused. Incidentally, today China has about 500 kg of food per person and the quality has improved, not only in terms of corn and potatoes, but also in terms of meat, vegetables and fruit. Mao promised to give the peasants a better life, but from the 1950s to the 1970s the food situation in China did not improve much and could even be described as stagnant, with the vast majority of peasants still living in poverty, excluding some of the model socialist villages, and it was in this context that Deng Xiaoping began his reforms. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms introduced Western capital, which came to China to exploit the Chinese. But on the other hand, the Western investment also increased China’s productivity and a large number of peasants became workers, which did not affect China’s agricultural production, as there were too many peasants compared to the cultivated land. As for agriculture, since Deng Xiaoping no longer collected surplus grain but used taxes, farmers would not only grow 180 kg or 200 kg of grain, they were willing to grow more. Every era has its own problems, but to reject reform because of the problems is like 因噎废食（Refusing to eat because of fear of food getting stuck in the throat） Without Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, socialist China would probably have disappeared long ago, as the Soviet Union did. Marxism is about keeping up with the times. Mao’s measures were out of date and therefore had to be reformed, and the left had to be realistic.

China