Word: mao
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...founder, the late Kim Il Sung, all housed underground to withstand nuclear attack. Delisle sketches a few scenes that highlight the absurdity of a friendship exhibition in an atomic bunker, but stops short of committing all the details to paper. "There's ... an armored vehicle from Stalin, another from Mao, three fabulous Russian cars from the '50s and one or two South Korean models," he writes, "but I'm too lazy to draw them all." A pity, but even without them, Delisle has drawn an unforgettable picture of Pyongyang...
China may claim 5,000 years of civilization--as locals often remind visitors from younger nations--but over the past half-century most of the country forgot its collective manners. Mao Zedong, the founder of the People's Republic, considered teeth brushing a Western affectation and thought nothing of greeting international dignitaries while wearing patched trousers. Although China has mostly shed Chairman Mao's class-busting ideology and cities like Shanghai boast skyscrapers and bustling shopping malls, the deportment of some citizens evokes an era of subsistence. Even some members of the new bourgeoisie indulge in conspicuously boorish behavior, like...
Many Chinese etiquette instructors and authors of best-selling manners manuals are progeny of the high-class aesthetes Mao tried to eradicate. Professor Li of the Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade is the descendant of a cotton tycoon, and grew up eating Western fare like rye bread and cheese for breakfast. His brother, a doctor, was killed during the Cultural Revolution. The fact that Li leads classes on Western etiquette says something about how far China has come since the days of Mao, but it is also a reminder of the gaps that still exist between China and the developed...
...genocide under Hitler was a horrible atrocity, but isn't it time to stop ignoring this century's many other genocides? Why the silence concerning the 6.5 million Mao Zedong killed? Or the 20 million Stalin was responsible for murdering? Or the 2 million killed by black-African governments in Uganda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Sudan and other nations? Or the Japanese genocide that killed 2 million in World War II? And on and on. Your reviewer, like many other people, is dismayed that so few young Americans have heard of the Holocaust. But everyone should be angered about ignorance...
Among China scholars, there has been much debate about the book's editorializing (it was published in Britain in June). Chang and Halliday spent years researching the book and conducted interviews with surviving Mao associates around the world. But for all its detail, this is a one-dimensional portrait, an exhaustive trashing that gives one pause, as does the certainty with which many events are described. "Mao did not care one iota what happened after his death," the authors say. Who could characterize even their own feelings with such certitude...