Word: mao
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Some of the news in the book is not new. Mao's womanizing, gourmandizing and peculiar personal habits?his aversion to bathing and teeth brushing, for instance?surfaced in the entertaining 1994 memoir by his physician Li Zhisui. Evidence of Mao's Machiavellian ruthlessness has been seeping out of China for years. Journalist Jasper Becker reported in his 1996 book Hungry Ghosts that China's granaries were bulging during the 1958-61 famine, the worst in history...
...Mao survived the Long March largely because Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek made a secret deal with Stalin: Chiang let the Red Army escape in exchange for the Russians' release of the Generalissimo's son and eventual successor, Chiang Ching-kuo, held hostage in Moscow. Mao, meanwhile, solidified his power by luring a rival Red Army faction to its destruction and burying the survivors alive...
...Mao didn't fight the Japanese during World War II, according to Chang and Halliday, but instead welcomed their invasion of the mainland. He and Stalin planned to divide China with Japan; Mao would end up running a Soviet puppet state much smaller than today's People's Republic...
...fund the Red Army in the early 1940s, Mao grew opium, bringing in as much as $60 million a year. He stopped after overproduction drove down the price and Party officials?though not Mao?decided the practice was unseemly...
...Mao made a fortune in royalties from his writings, which Chinese were forced to read while other authors' works were suppressed. According to Chang and Halliday: "Mao was the only millionaire created in Mao's China...