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Chinese leader reveals Mao persecuted his family

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Chinese leader reveals Mao persecuted his family
Malcolm Moore
November 4, 2011
CHINESE Premier Wen Jiabao has revealed how his family was ''constantly persecuted'' during the darkest years of Chairman Mao's rule, in a speech that may be a warning to the hardline faction within the Communist Party not to repeat the mistakes of history.

The speech, delivered in front of students at Mr Wen's alma mater, the Nankai high school in Tianjin, recalled the paranoia and fear of life in China at the end of the 1950s as a deeply divided Communist Party hunted down its opponents.

''I was born into an intellectual family in Yixing, north Tianjin in 1942. My grandfather ran a school in the village. It was the first primary school to admit girls, against pressure from the local landlords. Many of the teachers were university graduates and some became professors after 1949,'' said Mr Wen.

According to a transcript published in China's official state media, Mr Wen said he had carried his grandfather's body to hospital.''He died of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1960. The school he taught at had kept his files, filled with one self-criticism after another, written in small neat characters,'' he said. At the time, the Communist Party had forced intellectuals to ''revise their thinking'' through self-criticism until they became ideologically sound.

After inviting them to speak out about China's problems, Mao performed an about-turn and attacked those who were bold enough to voice their opinions publicly.

''After I went to high school and university, my family suffered constant attacks in the successive political campaigns,'' he said.''In 1960, my father was also investigated for so-called 'historical problems'. He could no longer teach and was sent to work on a farm on the outskirts of the city tending pigs. My father was an honest man, hard-working and diligent throughout his life.''

China's top leaders rarely discuss their personal history or family lives. The attacks by Mao on 550,000 intellectuals at the end of the 1950s remain a strictly censored topic.

The attacks on Mr Wen's family came at a time when the party under Mao was split internally over how to set a path for the country, with liberal and hardline factions taking opposing views. In the end, liberal forces lost.''My childhood was spent in war and hardship. The poverty, turmoil and famine left an indelible imprint on my young soul … I realised only science, truth-seeking, democracy and hard work can save China,'' Mr Wen said.

As the 69-year-old gets ready to step down next year he has made a flurry of speeches calling for ''urgent'' political reform and the loosening of the party's iron grip on the state. However, there is little sign that reform is forthcoming. Some have suggested that Mr Wen is merely trying to paint himself on the right side of history, while others have noted that he lacks a broad enough power base within the party to effect any change.
 
I'd rather take cultural revolution than late qing dynasty or guomingdang era. No thanks to you, Wen! Good-bye and good riddens!
So you're okay with an exploding population growth with vast majority of them being dirt poor. You're also okay with an educational system in ruins and a military that's not fit for the modern battlefield. Instead, you prefer that some thugs can enter your home and beat/torture you and your family members because you are suspected of being disloyal to some misguided cause and a dictator.

Good to know. Don't let the door hit you on your way out.
 
Nobody messes with Mao's China and that's all you need to know!

Economic development was far better in Mao's days than in Empress Dowagers' reign or Guomingdang era. The past 30 years of economic growth was founded on the relatively peaceful security environment purchased dearly with the blood of revolutionaries and early PLA. Now the relatively peaceful security environment has come to an end, war is on the horizon, and China needs patriotic heros, not more "foreign educated experts" in "reform and opening up."

Deprecating PRC's first 30 years is spitting on the martyrs who willingly sacrificed their lives so future generations of Chinese can live a better life free from western imperialism and exploitation. The fact that you arrogantly write them off as "dirt poor" from your "adopted home" Canada is so ironic I don't even have to point it out.

Long live Xi Jinping, Bo Xilai and good riddens to Wen and Hu. For thirty years the river flows West and for thirty years the river flows East. By March 2012, the East will be Red again!

:china:
 
Nobody messes with Mao's China and that's all you need to know!

Economic development was far better in Mao's days than in Empress Dowagers' reign or Guomingdang era. The past 30 years of economic growth was founded on the relatively peaceful security environment purchased dearly with the blood of revolutionaries and early PLA. Now the relatively peaceful security environment has come to an end, war is on the horizon, and China needs patriotic heros, not more "foreign educated experts" in "reform and opening up."

Deprecating PRC's first 30 years is spitting on the martyrs who willingly sacrificed their lives so future generations of Chinese can live a better life free from western imperialism and exploitation. The fact that you arrogantly write them off as "dirt poor" from your "adopted home" Canada is so ironic I don't even have to point it out.

Long live Xi Jinping, Bo Xilai and good riddens to Wen and Hu. For thirty years the river flows West and for thirty years the river flows East. By March 2012, the East will be Red again!

:china:

late qing < guomindang < mao's ccp < current ccp
 
Nobody messes with Mao's China and that's all you need to know!

Economic development was far better in Mao's days than in Empress Dowagers' reign or Guomingdang era. The past 30 years of economic growth was founded on the relatively peaceful security environment purchased dearly with the blood of revolutionaries and early PLA. Now the relatively peaceful security environment has come to an end, war is on the horizon, and China needs patriotic heros, not more "foreign educated experts" in "reform and opening up."

Deprecating PRC's first 30 years is spitting on the martyrs who willingly sacrificed their lives so future generations of Chinese can live a better life free from western imperialism and exploitation. The fact that you arrogantly write them off as "dirt poor" from your "adopted home" Canada is so ironic I don't even have to point it out.

Long live Xi Jinping, Bo Xilai and good riddens to Wen and Hu. For thirty years the river flows West and for thirty years the river flows East. By March 2012, the East will be Red again!

:china:
Nobody messed with Mao? There were far greater areas of land in dispute under his regime, which later leaders negotiated/taken back. The military had no credible navy or air force to speak of, and would have been toast if Soviet Union gunned south. The Chinese military was 20 years behind its time, and still lags quite a bit thanks in large part to Mao.

You used Late Qing and KMT era as a measurement of Mao's economic success? No wonder you guys are damn fools and mocked as such. Those periods were filled with civil disorder, internal war and foreign invasion. Even if you put a rock as top of the government in a relatively peaceful environment you can get better results. Why don't you use economic development in other Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan as measure? I'll tell you why, because Mao lovers can only find comfort in the fact that there are worse out there, never able to look to the better.

Of course, how could anyone mention Mao's reign without mentioning the mass starvation that killed millions because of his failed economic policy. On top of that, he plunged China in political and social turmoil while trying to purge his opponents. No one will ever know the true scale of how many people were imprisoned, beaten, tortured or killed during the Cultural Revolution. No one will know how much of China's history and culture was damaged beyond repair. Education around the country suffered, and that strong military you trumpeted so much was unfit for combat due to lack of proper training/equipment, instead focused on political indoctrination. In fact, China was so poor that when United States offered F-16s, China could not afford them.

If you enjoyed being ruled by a dictactor that sends his Red Guard minions to whack you if you showed the slightest hint of dissent, you will love Mao's era. If you enjoy starving and having to live with food rationing, you will love Mao. If you enjoy having a military that lacked proper training and equipment, you will love Mao. If you enjoy having your education disrupted and sent to the countryside to keep the population systematically stupid, you will most definitely love Mao.

For the rest of us that want strong economic growth, a high tech military and better governance, Mao should have died 20 years earlier than he did. A country needs educated individuals and pragmatic leaders, not Mao's minions.
 
I would rather know about what Xi jinping's thinking about Mao.
Wen just make no senses as he used to do.And we all know he came out from Yixingfu area of Tianjin where a big Hanjian named Wen shizhen came from.
 
The Tyrant Mao, as Told by His Doctor

Mao Zedong, China's "Great Helmsman" whose brilliance, the official doctrine insists, led a vast nation to restored greatness, was actually an irritable, manipulative egotist incapable of human feeling who surrounded himself with sycophants and refused even to be treated for a sexually transmitted disease, though he knew he was spreading it to the numerous young women who shared his bed.

Those are among the elements of an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Mao drawn by Li Zhisui, who was his private physician from 1955 until Mao's death in 1976 at the age of 82.

Dr. Li, who has lived in the United States since 1988, has written "The Private Life of Chairman Mao," a 663-page memoir of the imperial court of Mao that, in absolute contrast with the official image, portrays it as a place of boundless decadence, licentiousness, selfishness, relentless toadying and cutthroat political intrigue. Excerpts from the book, which will be published soon by Random House, will appear in the coming week's issue of U.S. News and World Report.
"In outer appearance, Mao was very easygoing, easy to contact," Dr. Li said in an interview at his home in suburban Chicago. "But when you stayed longer with him, you found that he was a merciless tyrant who crushed anybody who disobeyed him."

Dr. Li's memoir contains very little in the way of major revelations about the political or diplomatic history of the Maoist epoch. No new light, for example, is shed on the most mysterious event of the period, the abortive coup engineered by Mao's supposed hand-picked successor, Defense Minister Lin Biao, in 1971, or on such matters as Mao's role in the Korean War or the diplomatic opening to the United States.

But Dr. Li's book, even in focusing on the private side of Mao, contains numerous new details about the nature of his rule, including his associations with other major figures. Jiang Qing, Mao's third wife and later the head of the radical faction known as the Gang of Four, is portrayed as a flatterer and a hypochondriac who, by the time Dr. Li arrived on the scene, no longer had conjugal relations with Mao. Other major figures of the time are seen as reliably sycophantic toward Mao. Those very few who were not were purged as a result. Zhou, Like Others, 'Was Really a Slave'

"Mao was a man who had no friends," Dr. Li said. "He saw everybody as a subject, a slave. The mistake of those who got purged was to see themselves as equal to him. He wanted everybody to be subservient."

"Zhou Enlai was really a slave of Mao," Dr. Li said, speaking of the Chinese Prime Minister, whose reputation in the West was for sophistication and finesse. "He was absolutely obedient. Whenever I saw him with Mao he acted like a servant with his master. A lot of people think that Zhou protected people, that he was such a good man. But actually everything he did he did under Mao's orders. Mao was on the sedan chair and Zhou was one of his bearers."

Dr. Li, who is now 74, comes originally from Beijing but studied medicine during World War II at the West Union University Medical School in Sichuan Province in south-central China. The school was founded by American missionaries, so Dr. Li's training was mostly in English, which he speaks well.

He went to work as a ship's doctor in Australia but, when the Communists took power in China in 1949, he returned home at the behest of his older brother, also a doctor, who had been a Communist since the mid-1930's.

Through his well-connected brother, Dr. Li was assigned to be a physician at a special clinic set up to treat China's new top leaders. In 1955, he was named Mao's personal doctor. He lived with his wife, Lillian Wu, and their two sons in a home in the Zhongnanhai Compound, a closely guarded part of China's imperial-era Forbidden City where Mao and other senior leaders lived and worked.

From then until Mao's long illness and death in 1976 (after which Dr. Li presided over the efforts to preserve his body), he remained very close to Mao, according to his account. He not merely treated Mao's various illnesses, most of them very minor, but also accompanied him on his trips around the country, serving as his tutor in English and visiting him in response to his extremely frequent summonses, which often came in the early hours of the morning. How Real Is Memoir? Photos Offer a Clue

Is Dr. Li's account authentic? Can future historians rely on this memoir? One important piece of evidence that Dr. Li is indeed who he says he is comes from the numerous photographs of himself with Mao taken at various periods throughout Dr. Li's stretch of service to the Chairman. Many of the photographs are included in the book.

In fact, there may never be any rock solid corroboration for many of the details that Dr. Li gives, or for the many anecdotes that he tells. But Chinese living in this country have no doubt that Dr. Li was Mao's doctor, while American specialists on China have been impressed by the consistency between Dr. Li's accounts of events and what was already known.

Dr. Li immigrated to the United States in 1988 to seek medical treatment for his wife, who died later that year. He now lives with one of his two sons and his family in a suburb of Chicago.

"It boils down to the fact that the person who worked with him on the book did a tremendous amount of checking," said Andrew J. Nathan, a specialist on Chinese politics at Columbia University said in an interview. Professor Nathan was referring to Anne F. Thurston, another expert on China, who worked as Dr. Li's editorial assistant.

"In helping to create the book for an American audience, she needed him to explain a lot of the material and he was able to do so in a way that checked out," he said.

Some of the descriptions in the book, minus the numerous details on Mao's very active sex life, have appeared in other memoirs, especially those concerning Mao's imperial way of life, his residence and swimming pool in Zhongnanhai, his chronic insomnia and the very odd hours that he kept, as well as the atmosphere of sycophancy that surrounded him. But nobody before has provided anything like the full, elaborately detailed portrait that Dr. Li presents in his book.

"Here's a picture of the daily life of a man who has absolute power, and the fascinating thing is how absolute power sort of deranges the possessor of it, so that the boundary between fantasy and reality is obliterated because there's nothing to check his will," Professor Nathan said. "He was insulated in his own cocoon while everybody danced to his whims, and that has a lot to do with the tremendous disasters Mao wrought on the country as a whole because he was insulated from reality. His fantasies became reality."

Indeed, in Dr. Li's voluminous description, Mao emerges as a kind of Chinese Caligula, whose bohemian and decadent life contrasted utterly with the images of it so carefully fashioned by Chinese propaganda. In a Land of Denial, Vast Sexual Excess

The most salacious elements of Mao's career, in Dr. Li's portrait, certainly involve Mao's sexual life, which reached openly lascivious proportions in a country where sexual license was rigorously prohibited for almost everybody else.

Along the way, Dr. Li provides some medical details, including the fact that Mao had an undescended testicle and that he suffered from bouts of impotency. Mao was married three times and had several children but, Dr. Li writes, sometime in midlife, and for undetermined reasons, he became infertile.

"So, I've become a eunuch, haven't I," Dr. Li remembers Mao saying after hearing the news.

Mao, Dr. Li says, used women for three purposes, the first and most important having to do with his pleasure. At Zhongnanhai, and wherever Mao traveled, Dr. Li writes, there were dance parties -- this at a time when ballroom dancing in China was deemed bourgeois and actively discouraged. Young women from cultural troupes or from the Communist Party secretariat, women who Dr. Li says were "selected for their looks, their talent and their political reliability," came to the dances and Mao commonly chose one or more of them to be entertained in his room, or in his special train, or in the guesthouses where he stayed when on one of his many "national inspection tours."

The second reason was political. Dr. Li reports that the husband of one of Mao's girlfriends, for example, was a subordinate of Lin Biao, and that she reported back to Mao on Lin's plot against him.

Finally, Dr. Li says, Mao believed in the Daoist lore that sexual activity leads to longevity, or, at least, the Daoist lore "gave him an excuse to pursue sex not only for pleasure but to extend his life."

"By the early 1960's, as his power rose to new heights, he rarely complained about impotence," Dr. Li writes. "At the height of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960's, he and Jiang Qing were sexually estranged, but Mao had no problems with the young women he brought to his bed -- their numbers increasing and their average ages declining as Mao attempted to add years to his life according to the imperial formula."

Once, Dr. Li recalls, Mao sent him one of his sexual partners, a young woman who had come down with trichomonas vaginalis, which is sexually transmitted. Dr. Li treated her and several others who got the disease.

"The young women were proud to be infected," he writes. "The illness, transmitted by Mao, was a badge of honor, testimony to their close relations with the Chairman."

Mao himself showed no symptoms of the disease, though he was clearly a carrier of it, Dr. Li said. When Dr. Li suggested that he take some antibiotic to protect his sexual partners, Mao told Dr. Li: "If it's not hurting me, then it doesn't matter. Why are you getting so excited about it?"

Many of Mao's personal habits, as described by Dr. Li, seemed related to his godlike status. He lived virtually without regard to the clock, often sleeping during the day and, even when not sleeping, staying in his bed, remaining in his bathrobe for weeks at a time. He lived in rooms built near a swimming pool in Zhongnanhai and would often summon his closest advisers to see him well after midnight.

Mao never bathed or even washed his hands or face. Dr. Li says that during the day his bodyguards went into the room and wiped his body, his hands and his face with hot towels. He never brushed his teeth, which Dr. Li says were coated with a green patina. Mao's habit, shared by many peasants in China, was to wash his mouth in the morning with tea and then to eat the tea leaves. When, once, Dr. Li suggested to him that he should use a toothbrush, Mao's reply was, "A tiger never brushes his teeth."

Mao, in Dr. Li's portrait, became utterly convinced by the power of his own fantasies. If, for example, provincial party leaders transplanted rice near railroad tracks to impress Mao when he went by on his special train, he never seemed to want to notice that it was a fake. He appeared to be utterly indifferent to the immense suffering and even the death on a large scale that some of his utopian fantasies produced, whether through vast purges of intellectuals or policies like the Great Leap Forward.

"Mao never said a word about the suffering of people to me," Dr. Li said, "The word regret was not in his dictionary."

How did Dr. Li survive for so long so close to Mao when so many others were purged, or killed?

"He once told me," Dr. Li said, "that you can play with a dragon, but you have to be very careful not to touch a single spot on the dragon's neck where it is very sensitive. If you touch it, you're done for. He told me that he is that sort of dragon."

"I never said anything roughly or straightforwardly," Dr. Li continued. "In other words, if you worked for Mao, you had to disobey your own conscience. You can never say anything as you think it. You have, first of all, to think what Mao will say."

Dr. Li acknowledges that for his first few years with Mao, he was held in his spell, and admired him as China's savior. As the years passed, however, Mao's cruelty and selfishness filled him with loathing.

"If I had known what I was getting myself into in 1949, I would have stayed in Australia," Dr. Li said. "For so many years, I did yes-man work, just to survive."
 
The Sex Life of Chairman Mao
How and Why He Slept with So Many Virgin Girls


Chairman Mao Zedong had a long and varied sex life, both with his several wives and the many young girls procured for his longevity.
As Eric Hobsbawn has pointed out in Revolutionaries, the widespread belief that there is some connection between social revolutionary movements and permissiveness in sexual behaviour actually has no basis in fact. Indeed, there is by contrast a strain of Puritanism in many revolutionary movements. This seems to be particularly true in the Maoist forms of revolution, since they have tended to focus on the movement (as represented by for example the Chinese Communist Party or the Angkar of the Khmer Rouge) taking the place of the family. The young Chinese Communists who supported Mao Zedong as he emerged as the leader of the movement were in fact positively forbidden from any kind of personal intimacy. Despite the constant threat of death or serious injury, not to mention capture by the enemy, the young men and women had to endure without physical comfort from each other.

This restriction did not, of course, apply to Mao himself. Anchee Min&#8217;s Becoming Madame Mao describes the sound of passion coming from Mao&#8217;s quarters, as he made love to the young actress who was to become the terror of the Cultural Revolution, quite unnerving the young guards posted outside. Mao of course was by then onto what was to become marriage to his third wife. However, these marital liaisons were but one part of his sexual life. Throughout the period of his ascendancy, as reports of his personal life have made clear, young and virgin girls were brought to his bed on a regular basis. Agents, they might equally be termed pimps, roamed the Chinese countryside searching for suitable girls and explained the situation to their parents. They were sold the idea that a great honour was being provided for them and their daughter. Perhaps financial or material inducements were also provided at need. Presumably, there are a number of these women living still in China with Mao&#8217;s children, although this is not a subject which is discussed very much in the public sphere.

As for Mao himself, an endless series of young girls and a sense of entitlement would be strong enough inducements for most men but, in his case, he did seem to have a genuine intent to reach an advanced age, which he managed to achieve to a reasonable extent. There has been a longstanding belief in Chinese society that men can reinvigorate themselves by absorbing life energy from younger women through sexual contact. In fact, older women could receive the same favour from younger boys but, apart from the Empress Wu and her like, much fewer have been able to take advantage of the possibility.
 
What Mao Traded for Sex

AUSTIN, TEXAS &#8212; As sex and politics danced a pas de deux in the Beijing of Mao Tse-tung, the self-indulgence of the top leader spanned the personal and the political, and private excesses had consequences for bystanders and public policy. Despite enormous differences in the Chinese and U.S. political systems, Mao's conduct may provide some insights into President Bill Clinton's alleged problem.

Jiang Qing, like Hillary Rodham Clinton, had a career (stage and screen) that she gave up for her husband's sake. Both women remained ambitious, but as their husbands rose to supreme power, both stood at a tangent to the lines of political authority. "Jiang Qing could only make suggestions," a bodyguard recalled, "not make decisions." But what suggestions she made during the Red Guard turmoil of the Cultural Revolution! The structural ambiguity made Jiang the object of excessive fear, flattery and scapegoating.

Both Jiang and Hillary Clinton knew the pain of seeing power act like an aphrodisiac on their husband. Mao recruited young military women at dance parties arranged in close proximity to his bedroom. He drew to his custom-built, sloping, wooden bed a number of nurses on duty in the Forbidden City. Sometimes, if a favored female told Mao she planned to marry, a loud quarrel ensued, which aides would overhear. One day a male guard touched one of Mao's mistresses on her buttocks. Mao had the man sent to prison, and no one at Mao's court ever heard of him again.

Mao said to his doctor in reference to his wife, "Only Jiang Qing supports me." Commented Dr. Li Zhisui: "He was right. Jiang Qing always supported Mao in all that he did. She had to." The wife of Mao had few cards to play in the last 25 years of their 38-year marriage. Her predecessor had been dispatched to a mental asylum in Moscow to make room for Jiang herself.

But Jiang did have one card to play: Mao's philandering, deeply hurtful to Jiang in the 1950s, led to a quid pro quo between the two a decade later. She would hold her tongue as he took other women to bed if he gave a nod to her left-wing politics. A bonus for Mao was that Jiang fiercely pushed her husband's interests and assailed his enemies.

Hillary Clinton sees a "vast right-wing conspiracy" threatening her husband. Jiang saw a "capitalist-road conspiracy" undermining her husband. Since both women were politically ambitious, their husband's philandering could be seen as a secondary matter. Saving him was saving herself. The young female friends could fall as they may.

Mao's steps into promiscuity coincided with his growing isolation from longtime colleagues. A pivotal quarrel had Defense Minister Peng Dehuai criticize Mao both for the disaster of the Great Leap Forward (communes, back-yard steel furnaces) and for his emperor-like habit ofgoing with young females from military circles.

The link between philandering and disdain for trusted co-workers during the Great Leap Forward was Mao's growing self-indulgence. Extramarital sex at home and purges in the office were equal parts of an obsessive quest for rejuvenation, both personal and political. Ultimately, it was a story of vanity after years in power, petulance in the face of political opposition and the growing specter of mortality as middle age passed.

"He came to trust women far more than men," said Dr. Li in a remark that tied together Mao's personal and political mood. "He craved affection and acclaim. As criticism of him rose within the party, so did his hunger for approval." An excellent way to get it was from the adoring lips of innocent girls.
There was a certain dignity to Jiang Qing's indirect references to Mao's womanizing. "In the matter of political struggle," she remarked, "none of the Chinese and Soviet leaders can beat him. In the matter of his personal conduct, nobody can keep him in check, either." One must respect also the dignity of Hillary Clinton in the face of complex feelings that must underlie her staunch support for her husband.

In Canton on Mao's 65th birthday, a dinner party was thrown in Mao's honor, but he excused himself, sending his wife instead--he had other plans. During the night, Jiang Qing, searching for her nurse, found the young woman in bed with Mao. Jiang lost her temper with Mao. He left for Beijing in the middle of the night. Soon, however, Jiang wrote Mao a note of apology, which quoted a line from "Journey to the West." In the novel, when the Chinese monk travels to India in search of Buddhist scriptures, he leaves Monkey behind in Water Curtain Cave. Monkey is upset. But he says to the monk: "My body is in Water Curtain Cave, but my heart is following you."

Jiang quoted this line. Mao was pleased. Finally, she appeared to have accepted that her husband's high calling gave him the right to a personal life exactly as he pleased.

---------- Post added at 11:17 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:15 AM ----------

sex lives of the great helmsmen

Hitler, Stalin and Kim Il-sung famously didn&#8217;t much go in for that sort of thing. Mao Zedong and the younger Kim did and do like to put it about a bit.

Mao&#8217;s habits were first brought to general western attention in his doctor Li Zhisui&#8217;s expose, The Private Life of Chairman Mao. The book&#8217;s pre-publicity hinted with lip-smacking disapproval at sexual monstrosities on a Caligulan scale.

But that wasn&#8217;t how it turned out.

Instead of a Suetonious, Dr Li turned out to be a kind of grumpy amateur Tacitus, wittering on about decadence and citing as proof Mao&#8217;s liking for naked wrestling with a succession of young women from People&#8217;s Liberation Army song and dance troupes This is bad enough. It&#8217;s seigneurialism, and there&#8217;s a strong argument to be made that seigneurialism is a form of rape.

But it isn&#8217;t the kind of depravity that marked Ceasarian Rome, the kind which set rulers and ruled apart and confirmed the rulers in their belief that they could do absolutely anything. Mao&#8217;s preferences for enormous feather beds filled with giggling busty lasses was bucolic by comparison. You can imagine a man plodding behind a water buffalo way out in the Chinese sticks dwelling on exactly the same things. In this way, Mao&#8217;s sex life actually served to connect him with the population at large, at least the male half of it, and may go some way towards explaining his success as a tyrant. He was doing it for the lads.

Philip Short&#8217;s biography confirms Dr Li&#8217;s account, at least in the details. He reports the comment of a French diplomat that Mao bathed in women, filling his bed with up to eight at a time. One imagines naked pillow fights. Or rather, I imagine naked pillow fights.

Short also makes the case that Mao genuinely liked women and that freeing women from the Confucian order that subordinated them to their husbands and fathers was one of his higher political priorities. Prior to 1949, red occupied areas introduced laws on &#8220;democratic marriage&#8221; as a first order of business, before land reform and other classical socialist preoccupations. The Guomindang forbade footbinding, but it was the Communists who often made the prohibition stick. The Maoist solution to Shanghai&#8217;s prostitution problem also had an appealing simplicity: shoot the pimps and find the women jobs. Given his sex life, these measures just show Mao up as a rank hypocrite. But in my experience, it&#8217;s older Chinese women who are most likely to have a soft spot for the old bastard and I wouldn&#8217;t be surprised if this was confirmed by a more general survey.

Like Mao, Kim Jong-il grazes happily on the women of the Korean People&#8217;s Army&#8217;s cultural troupes. But, says Andrei Lankov, he also has a certain sensual savoir faire, despite looking like a sawed off oriental Bernard Manning:

A lot of troubles for the succession seem to be created by Kim Jong-il's own personal lifestyle, which is certain to inspire a number of soap operas in decades to come. He is different from his father, in whose life women never played a major role (with the probable exception of his first wife, Jong-il's mother Kim Jong-suk). Kim Jong-Il is a ladies' man. He has had a number of love affairs with stunning beauties, some of whom bore his children. To give him his due, Kim Jong-il was a good father who denied his children nothing (needless to say, the money came from state coffers). He was a good ex-partner, too. Even after the passion burned itself out, his former partners still could count on very special treatment and an occasional shopping trip to Switzerland. These are admirable qualities in a private man, but for a quasi-feudal absolute monarch they could spell disaster - as emperors, sultans and sheikhs have known for millennia.
&#8230;

In the 1960s Kim Jong-il was dashing, even attractive. He loved motorcycles (yes, the Dear Leader was probably the first North Korean biker) and beautiful girls. Certainly, the austere official mores of Pyongyang did not approve of such pastimes, but the prince was above the normal regulations. He enjoyed success with women - and not only because of his family background, even though few beauties would dare to reject approaches from the son of the Great Leader. In spite of some excessive weight (typical for the family), Kim Jong-il was a nice guy: smart, charming and witty.

I can see it now: fine wines, Belgian chocolates, forced labour in uranium mines. From this I get a strong impression that Kim would have been happier as one of our sons-of-bitches &#8211; killing his enemies, rewarding his friends, paying his dues at the US Embassy and generally making it up as he goes along in the style of Suharto or Marcos.

Unfortunately he&#8217;s been left a ruinous inheritance. This is the monumental complete load of absolute ******* nonsense known as the Juche ideal. Supposedly a theory of autarky, in practice it&#8217;s a kind of monstrous memetic feedback loop of the kind described here:

...the most dangerous internal state of an OODA loop occurs when the Orientation process becomes so powerful that it force fits the organism's observations into fitting a preconceived template, even when those observations threaten the relevance of that template. ... When this happens, the loop has turned inside itself. It loses its capacity to adapt to changing external circumstances, and in effect, the open far-from-equilibrium system becomes an incestuously amplifying closed system&#8212;and echo chamber amplifying its own echoes: Any tendency toward self-correction breaks down, because Observations of the results of its Actions are fed through the same non-adaptive template, over and over again. The organism becomes increasingly disconnected from reality.
There&#8217;s been lots of speculation about whether or not Kim the younger is insane. What his sex life demonstrates is that he&#8217;s above the law and therefore above the mindbending effects of the Juche ideology. Could he be, in fact, the only sane man in North Korea? Given the fact that Pyongyang has just declared itself the proud owner of functioning nuclear weapons this might be worth some consideration.
 
Nobody messes with Mao's China and that's all you need to know!

Economic development was far better in Mao's days than in Empress Dowagers' reign or Guomingdang era. The past 30 years of economic growth was founded on the relatively peaceful security environment purchased dearly with the blood of revolutionaries and early PLA. Now the relatively peaceful security environment has come to an end, war is on the horizon, and China needs patriotic heros, not more "foreign educated experts" in "reform and opening up."

Deprecating PRC's first 30 years is spitting on the martyrs who willingly sacrificed their lives so future generations of Chinese can live a better life free from western imperialism and exploitation. The fact that you arrogantly write them off as "dirt poor" from your "adopted home" Canada is so ironic I don't even have to point it out.

Long live Xi Jinping, Bo Xilai and good riddens to Wen and Hu. For thirty years the river flows West and for thirty years the river flows East. By March 2012, the East will be Red again!

:china:

you must be smoking something,Mao was the founding father of PRC,yes.but he was also a monster and he ruined China big time.justice will be brought to him.
 
we are very lucky that we dont live under Mao's reign,He cared nothing about human lives,in order to achieve his goal both for the government and for himself personally,millions lives like you and me are just expendable.that's totally against the principles of humanity.
 
Chairman mao had his flaws But I thank god we had someone like him to finally to stand up to the corrupt chiang kai shek, my Great grandparents and Grand parents worked for the corrupt landlords allied to chiang they barely had enough to survive off of, No mao no unified china today he had his flaws yes very big flaws however he is the reason china is here today.
 
So Mao was mostly like China's Gaddafi except that he has no son want to inherit his power.
I saw many ordinary chinese people were crying for Mao's death.I would say whatever Mao is a charming leader as well as Col Gaddafi and Barack Obama no matter what they do for their people.
 

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