Word: mao
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Salisbury writes soberly in staccato prose that "from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s" -- the height of the bloody purges of the Cultural Revolution -- "Mao's quarters sometimes swarmed with young women." The Great Helmsman staged nude water ballets in his swimming pool. "Art ensembles" and "dancing partners" were standing by wherever he went. One of Mao's doctors referred to him bluntly as "a sex maniac...
...poet-guerrilla so idealized by "friends of China" had other, more public failings, and Salisbury charts them in detail. Impatient with the slow pace of economic development, Mao launched the catastrophic Great Leap Forward in 1958. The movement forced farmers into communes, abolished private property and set up backyard steel mills to speed China into the industrial age. By 1960 even seed grains were exhausted and millions were starving to death...
When his old comrade Defense Minister Peng Dehuai told him the facts, Mao declared him an enemy, fired him and replaced him with Marshal Lin Biao (also apparently a drug addict). The country went bankrupt, and President Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, General Secretary of the Communist Party, took over day-to- day control to restore the economy...
...Mao concluded that Liu and Deng planned to force him into retirement -- and he may have been right. In 1965 Mao decided Liu "had to go." The weapon he chose was the Cultural Revolution, "a revolution against his own revolution." It was conducted by his harridan wife Jiang Qing and plotted by his favorite ideologist, security specialist and pimp, Kang Sheng...
Jiang and Kang loosed the young Red Guards on a murderous rampage that destroyed Liu's government and Deng's party. Thousands, if not millions, were killed. Lin became Mao's heir, but soon fell under suspicion of trying to turn Mao into a powerless figurehead. To avoid his own arrest, Lin attempted a putsch that failed. Premier Zhou Enlai was left in charge, but he too ended up in Jiang's sights as she maneuvered to succeed Mao...