Word: mao
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Beijing sources say that Jiang Qing, 77, widow of Chairman Mao Zedong and ringleader of the infamous Gang of Four, committed suicide late last month. She is believed to have hanged herself at the suburban Beijing villa where she had been under virtual house arrest since her trial and conviction 10 years ago for helping to carry out the Cultural Revolution that bloodied China from 1966 to 1976. Jiang, who was known to have throat cancer, may have wished to cut short her suffering. Her death comes at an awkward time for the Beijing government, concerned just now with...
...naturally became the symbols of China in American eyes during World War II, along with the sturdy peasants depicted in the novels of Pearl Buck. The U.S. armed and supported Chiang as an important ally in the struggle against Japan. Washington was wrong again: Chiang spent more energy attacking Mao Zedong's communists than trying to repel the Japanese invaders...
Unremitting enmity continued until President Richard Nixon's triumphant visit to Beijing in 1972 set up another false impression -- that China under Mao and Deng Xiaoping was a nation on the road to capitalism and possibly even democracy. It is, of course, no such thing. China remains a police state controlled by a Communist Party dictatorship and dedicated to socialist central planning with a few market mechanisms...
Getting people to think in categories is one of the techniques of evil. Marxist-Leninist zealots thought of "the bourgeoisie," a category, a class, not the human beings, and it is easy to exterminate a category, a class, a race, an alien tribe. Mao's zealots in the Cultural Revolution, a vividly brainless evil, destroyed China's intellectual classes for a generation...
...MAO II by Don DeLillo; Viking; 241 pages...