Word: mao
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Christian Democrats and Socialists. While Italy is beset by inflation and strikes, the coalition parties are campaigning largely on the argument that Communists are Communists, one using Khrushchev's ouster to underline the point; the Christian Democrats even put up portraits of Khrushchev, Malenkov, Stalin and Mao right in Rome's Via Veneto to recall the jungle warfare in the Red world. The Communists counter by sticking to Italian economic issues and by pointing to Mayor Dozza and the rinnovatori (modernizers) elsewhere to show that Communism has indeed changed...
...also still feeling the effects of the 1960 pullout of Russian technicians, who not only took their blueprints with them but also, in a final fraternal gesture, sabotaged the machinery they left behind. In North China people in rags still live in the same caves around Yenan in which Mao and his men holed up for years after the Long March. All kinds of consumer goods are pathetically scarce and expensive; a new bicycle costs an unskilled city worker half a year's pay. A Japanese newsman in Mukden leaves two used razor blades on the wash basin...
Food & Trade. There are more vegetables, pork and eggs. In many areas pork is off the ration, though its price makes it a luxury. Despite the ridicule he heaped on Khrushchev's incentive measures, Mao permits hog farmers, after delivering their fixed quotas to collectives, to sell the balance on a free market. Dogs and cats, slaughtered wholesale for food during the Leap, are again appearing with impunity in Peking and Shanghai, and even birds-once relentlessly exterminated as predators-have returned to Canton...
...exhibitors are offering everything from an aircraft instrument landing system to a diesel electric locomotive. Doing business with Peking can be both sweet and sour. Japanese businessmen, no amateurs themselves, describe Mao's Marxist idealists as ruthless bargainers. Moreover, the Reds begin every session with an infuriating propaganda speech, and cannot meet at all on Wednesdays and Saturdays, when they do their own indoctrinal homework...
...pronouncements. His Latin American tour this fall did not create the impression he had hoped it would: he needed an opportunity to recover prestige. The pre-Inauguration quiet in the United States, the internal machinations in the Soviet Union, and the passing of all the other great figures except Mao Tse-tung, have left the world stage bare. Any move he made now would receive maximum attention...