Word: mao
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...Chairman Mao's birthplace of Shaoshan is a powerful draw for anyone interested in Chinese history. Just don't expect to find too much history there. The town in China's central Hunan province has a museum, library and ersatz 1960s communal farm all dedicated to the founder of the People's Republic. His family home, cattle barn, shed, cattle pen and the family tomb have all been carefully preserved for the millions of tourists, many of them student groups on school-sanctioned "red tours," who visit Shaoshan each year. Newly built shrines - resembling the sort that might have been...
...amid all the memorials there are surprisingly few details about some of the most pivotal periods of Mao's life. The museum focuses on the early days of the Communist Party, the Long March, resistance against the Japanese and the defeat of the Nationalists. As might be expected in a country whose founding father's image is rigorously managed, there is little mention of the disastrous Great Leap Forward, a period of forced collectivization that led to famine and the deaths of millions, or the Cultural Revolution and the persecution of millions more labeled as counterrevolutionaries...
...Luckily, one doesn't have to travel far from Shaoshan and its blaring patriotic songs and armies of hawkers to find a more nuanced and interesting look at modern China. The birthplace of Liu Shaoqi, another communist leader and Mao's contemporary, lies an hour's drive from Shaoshan in Ningxiang county. Liu's memorial is quiet and forested. Once you pass through the entry gates there are no touts or trinket stands, and noticeably fewer visitors. Liu was known as a practical, down-to-earth official. During an inspection tour of the region in 1961, he learned...
...Plain, the pacifist The Burmese Harp, the kinky, contemplative Odd Obsession. His most enthralling epic is Tokyo Olympiad, a record of the 1964 Olympics that stands with Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia as the great art-reportage of the summer games Xie Jin, 84, a preeminent director in Mao's China, is best known for Two Stage Sisters, an assured melodrama about a country girl who joins a rep company. During the Cultural Revolution the film was charged with advocating "the reconciliation of social classes," and Xie Jin (like most other Chinese directors) made no films for a decade. After rehabilitation...
...TIME in 1985, I asked, "Why is this holocaust different from all other holocausts? In raw nightmare numbers, the Nazi extermination of 6 million European Jews ranks below the Soviet Union's systematic starvation of the rebellious Ukraine in 1932-33 (10 million by Stalin's count) and Mao's catastrophic Great Leap Forward into prolonged famine in 1957-62 (at least 27 million). Uganda and Kampuchea have produced more recent evidence" - alas, the examples of Rwanda, Bosnia and Somalia could subsequently be added - "that Hitler's policy of mass murder as an instrument of statecraft was not unique...