Word: mao
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...People's Republic of China, improved sanitation and medicine prompted rapid population growth that - after a century of wars, epidemics and unrest - was initially seen as an economic boon. "Even if China's population multiplies many times, she is fully capable of finding a solution; the solution is production," Mao Zedong proclaimed in 1949. "Of all things in the world, people are the most precious." The communist government condemned birth control and banned imports of contraceptives. (Read a TIME cover story on China's growing power...
Before long, however, population growth was taking a toll on the nation's food supply. In 1955 officials launched a campaign to promote birth control, only to have their efforts reversed in 1958 by the Great Leap Forward - Mao's disastrous attempt to rapidly convert China into a modern industrialized state. "A larger population means greater manpower," reasoned Hu Yaobang, secretary of the Communist Youth League, at a national conference of youth work representatives that April. "The force of 600 million liberated people is tens of thousands of times stronger than a nuclear explosion...
...which has progressed spectacularly in spite of a vast, impoverished population and an absence of democracy. China's advantage is its far more homogeneous society and its single-party rule, which can easily suppress any social dissent and move rapidly on any project. Also, China learned the lessons of Mao-era excesses and made necessary course corrections. Similarly India has understood the errors of its socialist beginnings, which suppressed private enterprise in all fields at the cost of developing human resources and infrastructure. But India, too, has made its course correction and the result has been the rapid economic growth...
Khamenei's backing of the disputed election results has surprised many in Iran, precisely because it is directed against a substantial segment of the revolution's political establishment. Just as Mao Zedong, in China's Cultural Revolution, unleashed a campaign of terror carried out by poorer young people against what he decried as the more liberal, "bourgeois" elements of the communist party, so does Ahmadinejad claim to be waging a class war, with the backing of the poor and the security forces, against a corrupt political elite brought to power by the revolution. And he clearly has Khamenei's backing...
...much easier and cost-effective to modulate an individual's environment than it is to alter their genetic code," says Buckholtz. And until the gene is better understood, that investment will pay off for those with the MAO-A defect and those without...