Word: mao
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...following might be just too horrifying and dangerous for some to depict in their minds. But the folks at the Harvard Model Security Council summarize it all in a grim joke: "China invades Taiwan. You are Taiwan. Your choices--swim, or go buy a Mao suit...
There seems to exist every reason to foresee a crisis in a tacit, longtime, mutual appeasement. Forty five years ago, because of the military intervention of the United States, Mao Zedong, reluctantly gave up his ruthless ambition of sparing none. Across the strait, Chiang Kai-shek thought the same. After spending some time interpreting Mao's "mercy," Chiang also subdued his obsession of recapturing the mainland, and his dream of visiting his hometown one more time gradually faded away. With the United States in between, relative peace was achieved out of a forced balance of explosive tension...
...fighting back, nearly stopped calling itself "Republic of China" in public and instead placed the focal point on its domestic development. And before long the economic performances of this "Little Dragon" were magnificent enough to wipe out its people's memory of the humiliating military defeat in 1949 by Mao's Red Army...
Does containment mean cold war II, with China playing the part of the old Soviet Union? Not quite. There is no ideological component to this struggle. Until late in life, the Soviet Union had ideological appeal, with sympathizers around the globe. Today's China, unlike Mao's, has no such appeal. China is more an old-style dictatorship, not on a messianic mission, just out for power. It is much more like late 19th century Germany, a country growing too big and too strong for the continent it finds itself...
Harvard professor Harvey Cox, a prominent theologian, credits Pagels with "a sixth sense'' for finding unrecognized patterns in familiar material. Her critics ask whether she blames Christian sources too much for an all too human tendency to demonize. "Mao did it without any reference to Christianity," observes Jeffrey Burton Russell, a specialist on Satan at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Others say Pagels finds the devil in passages where he is never explicitly mentioned or overplays marginal texts. Pagels is merely "scavenging at the edges of tradition,'' says Father Richard Neuhaus, editor of the religious monthly First Things...