ran into this from the "my girlfriend is an ultra!" thread. i'll start by saying i saw this on wikipedia so maybe there's some missing context or mischaracterisation inherent here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_roader

consider this quote

"Mao was an advocate of practical education outside of the classroom.[13] Deng's reforms to educational policy limited this experience and instead focused on classroom education which Mao cited was one that made Deng a capitalist roader.[14]"

if you think about it for a second, isn't that just philosophically interesting? like it's not something to be done lightly. Mao, previous leader of the most influential and important recent revolution at the time, making an absolute point of making sure everyone knows that this Deng guy has fucked up big time and is going to lead everyone back to capitalism and discard the advances won by the revolution... by (among other things i assume) citing a change in policy that means education was going to be focused more on classroom learning now. and Deng was so of the opposite opinion on the idea of education needing to be outside the classroom that he would not reneg or concede or anything (obvs among other policies) in order to show that he wasn't a "capitalist roader". unless there was indeed quite a bit of history and nuance to how he refuted these sorts of things and kept his government's mandate of heaven rolling?

idk Mao's background being extremely grounded in education coupled with the compounding of consequences because of their disagreements around this is just really intriguing to me