Word: greatness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...occasionally balances gibes at his comrades by poking fun at himself. In a secret speech at Lushaa in 1959, he discussed the need to go slower during the Great Leap Forward: "One can't be rash. There must be a step-by-step process. In eating meat, one can only consume one piece at a time. One can never hope to become a fatso at one stroke." After a pause, Mao continued: "The commander in chief [Marshal Chu Teh] and I didn't get fat in a single...
...grow again once it's been cut." Mao's most recurrent metaphors refer to the digestive process, which evidently fascinates him. In his Lushan speech, in which he characteristically called on his colleagues to join him in discharging their feelings of guilt for the failures of the Great Leap, he concluded with this scatological flourish: "Comrades, your stomachs will feel much more comfortable if you move your bowels and break wind...
Under heavy attack at Lushan for the shortcomings of the Great Leap, Mao acknowledged that he had taken sleeping pills three times for tension. He was ready to shoulder the blame for his catastrophic scheme of building backyard steel foundries. Citing Confucius' Analects to the effect that the man who initiates something evil will be severely punished by God, Mao revealed that he had been struck down by the very punishment prescribed by the sage-the loss of his sons. He disclosed that one of his two sons had died in battle (presumably in Korea) and the other...
...need to read so many books. How long did it take Hua T'o [the father of Chinese medicine] to learn what he knew?" Mao, who has succeeded in destroying the Chinese educational system in order to radicalize it, has this to say: "Schools are small tombs with great evil emanations and shallow ponds with many snapping turtles...
...ardor: there is a fervent tide. Our nation is like an atom. After the atom's nuclear fission, the thermal energy released will be so formidable that we will be able to accomplish all that we now cannot do." That was Mao's call to accelerate the Great Leap Forward, which soon turned into a great lurch backward. China is only now beginning to recover from the chaos created by the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution. In large part its future depends on whether Mao's successors will be able to achieve his lifelong dream...