Word: mao
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...office, wireless telephones sit next to socialist reviews. Six green leather chairs (the luxurious, deep kind that Mao always preferred) rest on yellowed linoleum floors, backed by off-blue walls. On his bookshelf, sandwiched between Chinese works on Marx, are two slim English volumes on Business Cycles. The pope wears gray polyester pants and a blue-and-white-checked shirt--short-sleeved and semitransparent so you can see his T shirt. He sips tea from an extra-large mug. Everyone else in the room drinks from a small white one, each stamped with a large red number...
Everywhere in China you hear talk of a spiritual vacuum, an echoing nihilism that quiets this hyperkinetic nation. This week, as China celebrates the 50th anniversary of Mao's October revolution, high-tech military jets will scream over Beijing, foreigners will arrive in search of new investment opportunities, and the government will celebrate a nation transformed. But what will be missing is faith. Fifty years ago, on an overcast fall day, Mao and his cadres gathered in Tiananmen and stared at a nothing future--no food, no remnants of a healthy economy, no allies. All they had was faith...
Viewed against China's 5,000-year history, Mao's revolution already looks like a tiny, violent, unmatchably murderous moment. But no more than a moment. China is remaking itself at warp speed. Deng Xiaoping's immortal slogan, "To get rich is glorious," has replaced Mao's aphorisms in the same way that the tabloid Shopper's Guide has supplanted his Little Red Book. But the Chinese are discovering that while getting rich is marvelous, it can also be numbing. Communism and its concordant atheism remain the state religion. Indeed, Hu Jintao, a contender to succeed President Jiang, built...
...many ways, the religiosity that has been reasserting itself in China may simply be delayed evolution. Very similar melting pots of prosperity, superstition and pious philosophy have emerged and thrived in Chinese communities uninterrupted by Mao's revolutions--in Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. China of old had three competing and complementary religious traditions: Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. While the religions were often at odds with one another--Confucianism, for instance, is built on a base of worldly order and ancestor worship that's far different from Taoism's mystical beliefs--they have, over a long history, fused...
...explosive composition. The country's history is filled with terrible uprisings inspired by newfangled religions--among the most recent and cataclysmic, the Christian-tinged Taiping Heavenly Kingdom from 1851 to 1864 and the mystical, Kung Fu-like Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the century. Even Mao's militant idealism can be seen in this light. But China's long history is also filled with moments when faith and pragmatism merged to create miracles. What scares China's leaders is that the very first miracle of the nation's new faith may be their disappearance...