Should Mao Zedong's huge portrait still hang above the front gate of Tiananmen Square? Should China's ruling party still call itself communist?
These are not idle questions. Unless and until China's leaders answer both questions with a simple 'no', they will continue to have blood on their hands and a tainted legitimacy. Many mainlanders do not accept communist rule precisely because the Communist Party denies its past, and remains unapologetic about its cruelty.
This is one reason why the mainland has a Taiwan 'problem'. The communists insist that being Chinese means accepting the political reality of a sole communist sovereign.
Many Taiwanese think that, if being Chinese means accepting all that goes under the name of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, they would rather deny their 'Chineseness' than assume some of that shame.
Similarly, while a recent poll found that 70 per cent of Hongkongers are proud of being ethnic Chinese, a similar percentage are ashamed of the conduct of the mainland government.
Enshrined in the Chinese constitution are the following words: 'Mao Zedong, the party's chief representative, created Mao Zedong Thought, which has been proved correct by practice, and based on which the Communist Party developed the basic system of socialism economically, politically and culturally after the founding of the People's Republic.'
But how 'correct' was Mao? In her new book Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang - author of the international best-seller Wild Swans - exposes startling new details that prove beyond doubt that Mao was a tyrannical, cruel hypocrite whose disregard for human lives and suffering surpassed that of even Stalin and Hitler. Her catalogue of Mao's 'correct practice' is numbing in its immorality and bloodthirstiness.