Word: zedong
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China may claim 5,000 years of civilization--as locals often remind visitors from younger nations--but over the past half-century most of the country forgot its collective manners. Mao Zedong, the founder of the People's Republic, considered teeth brushing a Western affectation and thought nothing of greeting international dignitaries while wearing patched trousers. Although China has mostly shed Chairman Mao's class-busting ideology and cities like Shanghai boast skyscrapers and bustling shopping malls, the deportment of some citizens evokes an era of subsistence. Even some members of the new bourgeoisie indulge in conspicuously boorish behavior, like...
...genocide under Hitler was a horrible atrocity, but isn't it time to stop ignoring this century's many other genocides? Why the silence concerning the 6.5 million Mao Zedong killed? Or the 20 million Stalin was responsible for murdering? Or the 2 million killed by black-African governments in Uganda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Sudan and other nations? Or the Japanese genocide that killed 2 million in World War II? And on and on. Your reviewer, like many other people, is dismayed that so few young Americans have heard of the Holocaust. But everyone should be angered about ignorance...
When I first traveled to China in the late 1970s as a student and then a foreign correspondent, the Chinese were giddily beginning to explore the new boundaries of freedom after Mao Zedong's death. There was a propaganda onslaught against the Gang of Four--the quartet (including Mao's wife Jiang Qing) that was blamed for the Cultural Revolution, the decade of terror that Mao had unleashed and then nourished. Mao didn't count among the fiendish four, but when the plucky Chinese I encountered talked of the Gang, they would hold up five fingers, then fold the thumb...
When Richard Nixon flew into Beijing on the morning of February 21, 1972, Mao Zedong was so thrilled, he wanted the U.S. President to come straight from the airport to meet him. Mao had been seriously ill for weeks: resuscitation equipment was hidden behind potted plants in his residence in case he collapsed during the meeting. The Chairman was fitted with a new Mao suit to conceal edematous bloating. That morning he had his first haircut in five months...
...pose "an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere." Since then he has danced more carefully to Beijing's tune. Soon after his provocative comment, China's leaders insisted that he remove the BBC from Star TV's menu of channels after it aired a program critical of Chairman Mao Zedong. Murdoch complied, and has gone further since. On his orders, News Corp.'s publishing arm, HarperCollins, dropped a book written by Chris Patten, Hong Kong's last British Governor, in which Patten was critical of Beijing. In 1999 Murdoch even derided the Dalai Lama, Beijing's longtime...