Word: mao
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Wang Bingnan drove me out to visit Fragrant Hill. From the hill you can almost see Peking, 25 miles away. In the evening, when the sun purples the range, the passes in the mountains show the way ancient conquerors cut their entry into the capital. That was the way Mao Tse-tung, the last conqueror, came to view Peking in 1949, when he held it in his hand ? and Mao still haunts Fragrant Hill, as he haunts Peking, haunts all China, haunts its politics, dreams, nightmares...
...story, even now in 1983, started with him. Wang Bingnan was telling me of his first night on the hill back then in 1949. He had arrived with Mao and the Zhongyang, the Central Committee that rules the Communist Party of China. They came as a nomad encampment, several thousand men and women who promised to give new government to the China they had conquered. For two years, they had been wandering the arid northlands, pursued by Chiang Kai-shek's divisions. But Mao had raced his own best troops northeast to Manchuria to encircle and wipe out Chiang...
...March 1949, it was over ? or just beginning. That last day's trek, Mao had moved the Zhongyang to Fragrant Hill so its fires twinkled above the capital. Mao's troops were still cleaning out the fallen city, and it was not yet safe for him to enter, even though Nationalist dignitaries were about to arrive to sue for peace. Each morning Chou En-lai and Wang Bingnan would drive down to negotiate; each evening they would drive back to report. Mao was inflexible: no terms for surrender. China was his to remake...
Wang Bingnan remembered how Mao, coming in from the march that first evening, had been offered a bed. He was to sleep on a spring mattress, after 15 years of sleeping on a hard board with only a thin peasant's pad between the board and his body. Wang remembered meeting Jiang
When I came to China more than 40 years ago, I came believing it was a land whose pride had been erased. But, watching the Chinese fight Japan, I learned that pride, personal and national, still smoldered. Mao brought it to flame. I watched him change their thinking to that of eternal "strug gle" ? better to die than to submit...