From an interview of Roderick MacFarquhar in Asia Times:
Q: What do you think Mao’s meaning of revolution was?
A: Mao hated quiet. He loved revolution. When the place was in chaos, in late 1966 – early 1967, he reveled in it.“There’s civil war!” （「祝開展全國全面內戰！」）he said cheerfully! He liked that idea. Of course it’s easy to like revolution if you are quite sure you are not going to be one of the victims. But he liked revolution, and he had this philosophical idea that nothing is ever at rest; everything is always in flux. That’s what he liked about Hegel’s ideas. Everything is always in flux, and everything contains its opposite inside it. And so he believed that progress was through continual movement, and movement into revolution… 27: 14 He didn’t want revolution of the Cultural Revolution type or the ’49 type all the time, but he understood that the Chinese bureaucratic system was so deeply ingrained in the genes of the Chinese people, that a few years after the CR had he still been alive, it would have been necessary to launch another one. Because the bureaucracy is so powerful, it takes over and runs things in a non-revolutionary way.
Q: What do you think Mao’s meaning of revolution was?
A: Mao hated quiet. He loved revolution. When the place was in chaos, in late 1966 – early 1967, he reveled in it.“There’s civil war!” （「祝開展全國全面內戰！」）he said cheerfully! He liked that idea. Of course it’s easy to like revolution if you are quite sure you are not going to be one of the victims. But he liked revolution, and he had this philosophical idea that nothing is ever at rest; everything is always in flux. That’s what he liked about Hegel’s ideas. Everything is always in flux, and everything contains its opposite inside it. And so he believed that progress was through continual movement, and movement into revolution… 27: 14 He didn’t want revolution of the Cultural Revolution type or the ’49 type all the time, but he understood that the Chinese bureaucratic system was so deeply ingrained in the genes of the Chinese people, that a few years after the CR had he still been alive, it would have been necessary to launch another one. Because the bureaucracy is so powerful, it takes over and runs things in a non-revolutionary way.
