Word: mao
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...will be re-elected to a second five-year term as party General Secretary. The former hydraulic engineer's sense of China's future is rooted in his own experiences. Though he came from a moderately prosperous family of tea merchants, Hu was thrust into the turmoil of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution soon after he graduated from Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University in 1964. Along with millions of others, he was sent to the countryside to "learn from the masses." After a year spent carrying bricks at a construction site in Guizhou province, Hu began a gradual rise through...
...divisions of Chinese infantry where none should have been, advancing under heavy shelling as if in a light rain. It was perhaps the first modern "mission accomplished" moment. The U.S. thought it had the Korean War sewn up, but it spent the next three years slugging it out with Mao's "volunteers." In The Coldest Winter (Hyperion; 736 pages), David Halberstam, who died in April, brings angry wisdom to a conflict that, after the moral clarity of WW II, seemed remote and incomprehensible. It was the miserable prototype for wars to come...
...auspicious time of 8:08 p.m. on Aug. 8, precisely one year before the Olympic Games are to open in Beijing, China held a celebration of the coming festivities in Tiananmen Square. The Gate of Heavenly Peace, where Mao Zedong's portrait still hangs, was bathed in red and gold light for the event, which featured intricately choreographed dance routines, multiple pop stars and, of course, fireworks...
...anyone who visited the workers' paradise when it was still the land of Mao suits and communes, trying to reconcile that China to the one that young élites live in today is disorienting. When I first visited China in 1981, I went to the People's Park in Shanghai with two traveling companions. Our obligatory Foreign Ministry "guide" ushered us through a special gate reserved for "foreign friends." A knot of young Chinese had gathered outside. As we passed, a few made loud comments about the unfairness of having parts of the People's Park reserved only for foreigners...
...There's another reason for the lack of political ferment: it's exhausting. Like anyone else, members of the Me generation are shaped by their experiences and those of their families. When their parents talk about the Great Leap Forward (a disastrous Mao campaign in the late 1950s that left 20 million to 30 million dead of starvation) and the subsequent chaos of the Cultural Revolution, they mostly tell horror stories that would put anyone off politics forever. That chapter in Chinese history, which officially ended with Mao's death in 1976, is ancient history to today's young...