Status Updates From Mao: A Biography

If Mao can cooperate with the US after his son was killed in the North Korean War, and with the KMT after they killed his first wife, I can tolerate someone who put his photo with another girl as his profile photo.

"When we become a modernized, industrialized, and highly cultured great power fifteen years bence," he told the Eighth Congress, "we may possibly become too cocky and raise our tail sky high."
It was a strange mixture of overoptimistic prediction and awareness that success would h a dark underside to it.
Mao at 8th Congress in 1958 --GLF

The Mao of 1948 scorned such pessimism. "Thirty to fifty years" had been Mao's estimate to Xiao You, as they took a boat to Shanghai in 1921, of how long it would take for the CCP to win power. "One and a half years of fighting," he predicted in the summer of 1948..
and that turned out about right.