Word: zedong
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...Zedong's Cultural Revolution was an eruption of ideological fervor, mass hysteria and outright brutality that left an estimated 10 million Chinese dead and ruined the lives of millions more. Now tales of even more horrible excesses from the years between 1966 and 1976 are coming to light: allegations of cannibalism, involving hundreds of men and women who violated mankind's most powerful taboo in the name of revolutionary purity...
There is no evidence that Mao Zedong knew cannibalism was being practiced during the Cultural Revolution. When Premier Zhou Enlai heard about the crimes in Guangxi, he ordered party officials to put a stop to them. Nonetheless, according to Zheng, amid the anarchy of the times cannibalism apparently persisted in Guangxi. "I believe Zheng's story," says Perry Link, a professor of Chinese at Princeton. "He's a writer of integrity, and the rich detail has the ring of authenticity." Chinese officials now disclaim any knowledge of the practice. Said a Public Security official in Beijing: "I've never heard...
China's former leader Mao Zedong once declared war against sparrows, believing they were a pest and a nuisance. In response, millions of Chinese took to the streets, banging on woks and pans to terrify the birds. The idea: force them to stay aloft until they dropped dead of exhaustion. They did just that. The campaign was halted after an infestation of caterpillars, now freed of their feathered predators, devoured the crops, enveloped the trees and rained down upon pedestrians. In that same grand tradition of meddling with nature, Alaska has declared an air war against hundreds of wolves...
...Nixonwould lose: "They felt Humphrey would be easier to deal with." But when Nixon ran again in 1972, even the Soviets were foursquare in his camp. In their eyes, he was no longer a cold warrior but the architect of detente. That same year, when Nixon visited China, Mao Zedong gave him his blessing, saying, "I like rightists Those on the right can do what those on the left can only talk about...
World communism was a chimera even before Kennedy sent U.S. advisers to Vietnam. The Sino-Soviet split began in 1960; later, Mao Zedong refused to let the Soviets send arms to Hanoi by rail across China. In 1978 Vietnam attacked the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the following year beat back an invasion by China. This was not the sequence of events that Dwight Eisenhower had in mind in 1954 when he propounded the domino theory, the rationale for U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia. Instead, the violent feuding among the region's Marxist regimes in the 1970s and 1980s...