Word: mao
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Born in 1957 in China's Hunan province, Tan began life as an unlikely candidate for concert-hall stardom. He spent the hellish years of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution planting rice and listening not to symphonies and concertos but to the music of village rituals. "It's more like a language than music," he recalls. "Soundwise, it's like the texture of wind." At 19, while playing violin in a Beijing opera company, he heard his first piece of Western classical music, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which opened up a whole new world of sonic possibilities. He went...
SHENYANG A grimy city where they miss Mao...
Night is when Shenyang comes alive. Young and old, families and flirting teens swirl around the towering, 35-ft.-tall statue of Mao Zedong. Here Mao lives, a hero still. In his long shadow, fan-twirling line dancers stomp through a traditional peasant rite. Doctors in grubby white coats offer herbal medicines, acupuncture or blood-pressure tests. Vendors proffer savory kabobs or key chains. Children rent old-fashioned roller skates for a few yuan, while their elder brothers play badminton without any nets. The throng does not disperse until the blazing phosphorus lights dim near midnight...
...fact, workers like Liang look back with misguided longing to the days of Mao for their salvation. If they had their choice, they'd retreat to 1955 rather than grapple with today's complicated reforms. "We respect Mao, not Deng," says Liang. "Deng forgot about us." The people of Shenyang resent the way the city has been left behind by the capitalist advances in Shanghai and Guangzhou. At Liang's old workplace, his friends sit around all day grousing, drinking tea and reading the papers until the shift whistle blows. "We call it the nonworking day," he says. "The managers...
...Under Mao, he says, "who dared be corrupt?" Shenyang's workers complain angrily that bosses are pocketing all the wealth through bribery, kickbacks and payoffs. That bothers them even more than their own low salaries. "If you were corrupt under Mao," Liang says, "you'd be purged. Now they just tolerate it." Shenyang's citizens "loved" Beijing's recent Strike Hard crackdown on crime and corruption. When U.S. officials noted that some innocent people were jailed during the ruthless campaign, Shenyang applauded. "They said only bad people got caught," says a Western diplomat...