Word: mao
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...most dedicated missionaries--one an unaffiliated rad; one from the Socialist Workers Party, which is the oldest Trotskyist organization in the United States; and one from Progressive Labor, which took over SDS a few years back and which used to be Maoist but has now decided that Mao is a tool of the bosses--bumped into each other, smack in the middle of Bay State Road where there were no cars to duck behind...
...were purged from the thousands of posts they held in the government, party and military. This nearly paralyzed the bureaucracies, even at the highest levels. Of the 21-man Politburo, only eleven members are known to be active, and its five-man standing committee has only two functioning members, Mao and Premier Chou Enlai. This week's congress must fill those vacant ranks. It is also expected that for the first time Lin will be branded a traitor and right-wing opportunist (the party's worst sin). The congress will then have to adopt a new party constitution...
...party leadership and the government since then have suffered massive upheavals. In 1971 China's institutions had just begun to recover from the dislocations caused by the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution when they were again shaken by the Lin Piao affair. Though he was Mao's heir designate, Lin, according to the official Peking version, attempted a coup against Mao. When his plot was discovered, he tried to escape to the U.S.S.R., but died when his plane mysteriously crashed deep inside Mongolia...
...years of willow-pattern tranquillity overthrown, Confucius and Mencius consigned to the paper shredder, and the arts of the ancestral dynasties-Chou and Han, T'ang and Sung, Ming and Chi'ing-abandoned as relics of decadent feudalism, replaced by the cast-concrete colossus of Mao or the agitprop poster of beaming, eupeptic tractor drivers exceeding their norm in Szechwan province...
This, like so many of our ideas about China, was a myth. In fact, the Chinese seem to have taken Mao's apothegm, "Let the past serve the present," with a literalness that Western archaeologists-hampered as they are by the depredations of the antiquity market-might envy. Since about 1950, China's policy for exhuming and classifying its own past has been very coherent and systematic. Indeed, no Western country has produced a state-funded archaeology program to equal China's. For the Chinese, archaeology has a political significance that it lacks in the West...