Word: jungly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Just so you know where they stand, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday declare in the very first sentence of their impeccably detailed biography of Mao Zedong that he "was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other 20th-century leader." And that's one of the more positive things they have to say about the man who is still widely revered as the founder of modern China. To Chang and Halliday, Mao was a scheming opportunist who butchered his way to the top, then squandered the lives and wealth of his people in a bungled...
Amid the cozy clutter of books and Chinese antiques in her London town house, Jung Chang talked with TIME's Donald Morrison about Wild Swans, Mao Zedong and the future of China. Excerpts...
...These sentiments are reflected in the strain between Washington and Seoul over how to deal with Pyongyang. For decades, South Korea and the U.S. both treated North Korea as the enemy. But in 1997, with the election of pro-democracy activist Kim Dae Jung as President, Seoul changed course. The South's leaders realized that if Kim Jong Il's government collapsed and the North unraveled, the burden of feeding millions of starving North Koreans and rehabilitating the North's crippled economy could devastate South Korea's own economy for years to come. Seoul started to send aid across...
...That's an assessment he shares with the U.S. President. "After a succession of statesmen?Jiang Zemin, Vladimir Putin, Kim Dae Jung, Sweden's Goran Persson, Madeleine Albright?have returned home to tell us how rational, well informed, witty, charming, and deeply popular Kim Jong Il is, President Bush's judgement that Kim is loathsome seems the only honest and truthful one," Becker writes. He measures Kim's odiousness not just in nuclear weapons but in corpses. Kim and his father, Kim Il Sung, are responsible for the deaths of millions of North Koreans, he estimates, including as many...
...That sort of personal connection to the North Korean people animates the book. Becker challenges anyone he considers to be aiding and abetting their suffering. Former South Korean President Kim Dae Jung's "Sunshine Policy" of engagement with the North is denounced as a prop for Kim Jong Il's shaky regime. China, which treats refugees as illegal immigrants and repatriates them to face a nightmarish fate, is criticized for ignoring basic Geneva Convention obligations. The United Nations gets the harshest criticism. Becker spends a chapter cataloging the failures of U.N. aid agencies during North Korea's famine. Their chief...