Word: mao
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...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...
...even reading the book. Authors and terrorists have nothing -- zip, zero -- in common. One class creates, the other destroys; one competes in the marketplace for attention, the other commands it at gunpoint. Case closed. Those who are satisfied with such commonsense certainties, though, should probably halt their progress through Mao II, which bristles with unsettled and unsettling impressions: "Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb- makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness...