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"I have never heard of Watergate," a close friend told me a few days ago. "All I know is that Nixon was the first president of America to connect with China. He was a great man." There are very few Americans from the past 50 years who Chinese people will laud and defend as ardently as Richard Nixon. To the Chinese, Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing in the winter of 1972 was an early landmark in China’s quest to 'open doors' and promote development.The visit is also remembered fondly by many here as the first time that an American head...

Around the time of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, a small crowd of foreign sympathisers came to help build the Maoist dream. Sixty years later, one of them is still there. Michael Donohue meets Sidney Shapiro. On January 31 1949, when the People’s Liberation Army came marching into Beijing – heralding the imminent demise of Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang regime in mainland China – Sidney Shapiro, a bespectacled 33-year-old lawyer from Brooklyn, New York, rode his bicycle up to Xizhimen, the city’s north-west gate, to take a look at the soldiers. There, he remembered years later, he saw a parade of...

Pushpa Kamal Dahal, who led a revolutionary insurrection that claimed 13,000 lives over 10 years, was elected prime minister of Nepal on Friday night, becoming the first Maoist to lead a democratic government. The election of Mr Dahal – who used the nom de guerre Comrade Prachanda (”the Fierce One”) – follows four months of political wrangling as the Maoists struggled to garner sufficient support from other parties to form a government, and even gave up at one point after their rivals united to elect a president opposed by the party. Dahal, 53, led his Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)...

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While Mao’s body has been amazingly preserved since his death in 1976, it seems that his spirit has not survived the test of time. He may lie in eternal peace inside his Mausoleum but the world around him has changed considerably; China is no longer the gray and drab country that it was during Mao’s time. It is now a place where people can dream and then go out and make that dream come true. It is not like the old days. People other than just high government officials can drive cars. Chinese people can do business and store up...

China is abandoning Chairman Mao's dream to make Beijing a workers' paradise, rebuilding it under the cover of a "green" Olympics as a capital for its 21st century empire. In a display of the city's determination to improve its air quality, officials this week vaunted the closure and relocation to the coast of its biggest polluter, the smoke-stacked mini-state of Capital Steel. Three of its blast furnaces stand blackened and idle, along with two of its three steel mills. A fourth furnace will shut on Sunday, when for the sake of the Olympics industrial production will be reduced across five...

At a town hall meeting in Kansas City, Missouri, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said that rival Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, had the "most extreme" record in the Senate. Kansas City Star reporter Dave Helling later asked McCain about that comment. "Extreme?" Helling asked. "You really think he's an extremist? I mean, he's clearly a liberal." "That's his voting record," responded McCain. "All I said was his voting record, and that is more to the left than the announced Socialist in the United States Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont." Asked Helling: "Do you think he's a socialist, Barack Obama?" "I don't...

There are times when art should be the last thing on an art critic's mind. The thunderous popularity of a number of contemporary Chinese artists compels a political analysis. Much of the work is powered by a startling and completely delusionary infatuation with Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. This is more sinister than anything we have seen in the already fairly astonishing annals of radical chic. We are witnessing a globalized political whitewash job, with artists and assorted collectors, dealers, and sycophants pouring a thick layer of avant-garde double-talk over the infernal decade of suffering, destruction, and death that...

A federal investigation is under way into the organization raising funds for a memorial to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in the nation’s capital, according to two people interviewed as part of the inquiry. Word of the investigation comes as the foundation is drawing scrutiny and complaints over its decision to commission a Chinese sculptor, Lei Yixin, to create a statue, made from Chinese granite, to become the centerpiece of the King memorial just off the National Mall in Washington. Last month, a federal panel that has final approval over such memorials, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, said...

BEIJING (AFP) - China bluntly told the world Olympics chief Thursday to keep out of politics, in a tart exchange on human rights following days of protests that have shadowed the Olympic torch around the world. International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge said the Games were in "crisis" following the demonstrations, and urged China to respect its pledge to improve its rights record before the event begins in August. China fired back that Rogge should keep politics out of the Olympics, which Beijing hoped would showcase its much-touted "peaceful rise" to power -- but which have instead become a public...

An intellectual is someone who thinks ideas matter more than people. If people get in the way of ideas they must be swept aside and, if necessary, put in concentration camps or killed. To intellectuals, individuals as such are not interesting and do not matter. Indeed individualism is a hindrance to the pursuit of ideals in an absolute sense. The individual, with his quirks and quiddities, his mixture of good and bad, intelligence and stupidity, longing for justice but anxiety to promote his own selfish interests, does not fit into a utopian community. Hence utopians, if they are in earnest,...

How did Lenin come to be a socialist? I think the first thing you want to take into consideration is this sort of passion which drove him. It was not idealism. Not so much hope for a better future for humanity, the creation of a new human being, it was above all a passionate hatred for the established regime. And that has a lot to do with personal biography. When he was a teenager, his brother was executed for plotting an assassination attempt on the life of the Czar. That did not, I think, affect him so much because he...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Amid a discussion of trade in 1973, Chairman Mao Zedong made what Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger called a novel proposition: sending tens of thousands, even 10 million, Chinese women to the United States. "You know, China is a very poor country," Mao said, according to a document released by the State Department's historian office. "We don't have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands." A few minutes later, Mao circled back to the offer. "Do you...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US grocery chain Trader Joe's said Monday it would stop selling food imported from China due to customers' concerns about the products' safety. "Our customers have voiced concerns about products from this region and we have listened," Trader Joe's spokeswoman Alison Mochizuki said in a statement. "All single ingredient food items sourced from mainland China are scheduled to be out of our stores by April 1," she said. "We will continue to source products from other regions until our customers feel as confident as we do about the quality and safety of Chinese products."

Maoists are turning cannibals. They eat human flesh to terrorize villagers. This was revealed by the residents of Bandiguda, 45 km from the district headquarters town of Malkangiri. The district police, under the leadership of daredevil SP Satish Kumar Gajbhiye, risked in organizing a community policing programme in a far-flung area, known as the Red Terror Zone of the district. On August 3, 2007, the people of Bandiguda saw Mukunda Madhi of their village being lifted by 'Papular Dalam Commander' Bhagat, as Mukunda was suspected by the Maoists as a police informer. Next morning, Mukunda was brought back to the...

The man responsible for our image of Mao Zedong never actually took a photo of the founder of the People's Republic of China. He worked in the dark room, where he retouched the State leader's photos to create the iconic images we are familiar with today. Chen Shilin is not as famous as those photographers who took the shots, but his influence remains, from the portrait of Mao hanging in Tian'anmen Square, to his image on 100-yuan bills. "I can tell you one thing I never told anyone else before," the 78-year-old Chen says in his three-room apartment in Beijing....

(SHAOSHAN, China) - It's difficult to say what Mao Zedong would make of China today, but there is no question his hometown would amaze him. During the 130-kilometre drive from Changsha -- the capital of Hunan Province -- it becomes evident that something is going on when the local driver confides that on the 100th anniversary of Mao's birth in 1993, flowers bloomed in January in the tiny village where the Chairman was born. "I saw them myself," he swears. The middle-aged driver has a Mao portrait on his dash where in other countries at other times people might have...

(BEIJING) -- Tourists who flock to Jinggangshan — the "cradle of the Chinese revolution" — seeking spiritual enlightenment from late revolutionary leaders usually get much more than that. Magnificent mountains intertwined with heroic stories make Jinggangshan an unparalleled scenic spot for both learning and relaxing. Jinggangshan, a city named after Jinggangshan Mountain in Jiangxi Province, has become one of the most popular places for patriotic education with the growing popularity of "red tourism," which refers to visits to areas related to China's "red" revolution from 1921, when the Communist Party of China was established, to 1949, when New China was...

China's former communist leader and revolutionary hero Mao Zedong amassed a fortune from book royalties. Mao persecuted thousands of writers, along with other artists and intellectuals, for their Western, capitalist ideas. But at the same time he had a steady income from his own writing - a sum now believed to be more than 130 million yuan ($17.6m, £8.8m). A recently-published article in a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) magazine has reignited a debate about who should inherit this fortune. Millions of books containing Mao's essays, poems and thoughts have been published around the world. Perhaps the best known publication is...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- 3Com Corp. said Friday it's agreed to sell itself for $2.2 billion to Bain Capital Partners LLC and Huawei Technologies Co., the largest networking company in China. .................................. Boston-based Bain, one of the biggest private-equity firms in the world, would own a majority stake. 3Com Chief Executive Edgar Masri said in a conference call that Bain has great connections in China as well as Europe, markets where the company is seeking to expand. A minority interest in 3Com would be sold to affiliates of Huawei. 3Com previously operated a joint venture with Huawei in China called Huawei-3Com...

Mao is back, not with a vengeance but in an uncanny and pervasive way. Try to knock Mao down here, and he pops up there. The symbolic game of Whack-a-Mao has been going on for some time; his portrait transformed into avant-garde art, his Little Red Book -- real and counterfeit -- unloaded on hordes of undiscriminating tourists. By and large, the Mao statues that were once so ubiquitous in Beijing are gone, but Mao never really went away. In fact, one can hardly make a purchase in China without seeing his dreamy visage, especially on the 100-yuan bill, the...

Chairman Mao's Long Arm Strikes Korean Pet Shop The signboard of a pet shop in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province which provoked a diplomatic incident by substituting Mao Zedong's picture for a dog. This picture was posted on Web portal xiangshu (http://www.xiangshu.com). A pet shop in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province has bowed to international pressure over a sign in its window that showed the head of a dog emblazoned on Tiananmen gate. The gate in fact bears the likeness of chairman Mao Zedong. According to China抯 Global Times, the shop has now removed the offending composite picture after the Cheoin-gu district office...

Chairman Mao's Long Arm Strikes Korean Pet Shop The signboard of a pet shop in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province which provoked a diplomatic incident by substituting Mao Zedong's picture for a dog. This picture was posted on Web portal xiangshu (http://www.xiangshu.com). A pet shop in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province has bowed to international pressure over a sign in its window that showed the head of a dog emblazoned on Tiananmen gate. The gate in fact bears the likeness of chairman Mao Zedong. According to China’s Global Times, the shop has now removed the offending composite picture after the Cheoin-gu district office...

PATNA, India, July 1 (Reuters) - Maoist rebels killed nine people, including five policemen, in eastern India's remote Bihar state early on Sunday during an attack on two police stations, officials said. Some 200 rebels were involved in the pre-dawn raid, stripping dozens of wounded policemen of their weapons after the raid before they fled into the darkness. Sunday morning's attack came after a two-day strike against the government's economic policies that was called by the Maoists earlier this week. The Maoists operate out of jungle bases across a swathe of 13 Indian states running up the eastern flank of...

Red Star Ignorance - Cameron Diaz and the great Peruvian faux pas By Court Pearman Epoch Times Washington, D.C. Staff June 30, 2007 Oh, Poor Cameron Diaz! She got roasted for wearing a bag with a red star and a quote from Mao Tse Tung on it in Peru, a country that suffered massive bloodshed at the hands of Maoist rebels. People who survive civil wars are so uptight. It is not like she was wearing a bag with a Hitler quote and a black swastika on it. That would have been really bad. And she wasn't wearing a KKK...

New Delhi - In revelations that could jar improving India-China relations, recently declassified CIA documents detail what the US saw as Chinese deception and Indian naivete that led to the 1962 war between the Asian giants, Indian media reported Thursday. CIA documents on the India-China border dispute that were declassified on Tuesday offer insights on how the US intelligence agency viewed the former Soviet Union and China in the darkest days of the Cold War. In three chapters dealing with the 1962 border war that India lost, CIA analysts suggested that the Chinese government under Premier Chou En Lai deceived...

Cameron Diaz recently apologized for showing up in Peru sporting a Mao bag, offending locals who remembered how seventy thousand Peruvians perished in Peru's Maoist War. Michael Ramirez has a cartoon on the rest of Diaz's wardrobe here.

Cameron Diaz Apologizes for Maoist Bag Jun 24 09:52 PM US/Eastern LIMA, Peru (AP) - Cameron Diaz apologized Sunday for wearing a bag with a political slogan that evoked painful memories in Peru. The voice of Princess Fiona in the animated "Shrek" films visited the Incan city of Machu Picchu in Peru's Andes on Friday wearing an olive green bag emblazoned with a red star and the words "Serve the People" printed in Chinese, perhaps Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong's most famous political slogan. The bags are marketed as fashion accessories in some world capitals, but in Peru the slogan...

Actress Cameron Diaz appears to have committed a major fashion faux pas in Peru. The voice of Princess Fiona in the animated "Shrek" films may have inadvertently offended Peruvians who suffered decades of violence from a Maoist guerrilla insurgency by touring here Friday with a bag emblazoned with one of Mao Zedong's favorite political slogans. While explored the Inca city of Machu Picchu high in Peru's Andes, Diaz wore over her shoulder an olive green messenger bag emblazoned with a red star and the words "Serve the People" printed in Chinese on the flap, perhaps Chinese Communist leader Mao's most...

MAO AND LINCOLN Part 1: Demon and deity Chairman Mao Zedong, the greatest revolutionary in modern Chinese history, has been unfairly vilified by the neo-liberal West, but he set a decaying China on the path to renewed greatness and provided a vision for a new China that will survive for centuries to come. In fact, Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, is deified, while Mao is demonized. Lincoln's assault on due process was decidedly more violent than Mao's alleged autocratic leadership style. The difference between Lincoln and Mao is that Lincoln's high-minded quest for equality in practice...

A man who is believed to have killed up to 100 million people in his life is to be the subject of a positive $60 million biographical film portrait, if a Hollywood producer gets his way. "Challenging Heaven" by Steven North will tell the story of the founding of Communist China with Mao Zedong in the role of George Washington. North is currently trying to romance Beijing into offering support for the project. "This is a very positive portrayal of Mao, and we are hoping that once the script clears the approval process, China will come forward with services and...

MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) -- Presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton outlined a broad economic vision Tuesday, saying it's time to replace an "on your own" society with one based on shared responsibility and prosperity. The Democratic senator said what the Bush administration touts as an "ownership society" really is an "on your own" society that has widened the gap between rich and poor. "I prefer a 'we're all in it together' society," she said. "I believe our government can once again work for all Americans. It can promote the great American tradition of opportunity for all and special privileges for none."...

Vandal damages China's iconic Mao portrait Sat May 12, 12:20 PM ET A vandal damaged the giant portrait of China's late Chairman Mao Zedong that hangs over the Forbidden City on Saturday, prompting police to clear the area and adjacent Tiananmen Square, witnesses said. Most of the picture was intact, but workers could be seen in a crane cleaning the lower left area of the huge portrait, which appeared damaged by soot after the vandal hurled a burning object at it. Police were swarming the area. Traffic could pass by, but Tiananmen, the symbolic heart of Communist China, was temporarily...

BEIJING (Reuters) - A vandal damaged the giant portrait of China's late Chairman Mao Zedong that hangs over the Forbidden City on Saturday, prompting police to clear the area and adjacent Tiananmen Square, witnesses said.

The following are a series of short clips documenting the death of Bian Zhongyun, the first female principal beaten to death by the Red Guards in the beginning of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China.     Part I   Part II   Part III   Part IV   Part V   Part VI   Part VII   Part VIII   Part IX   Part X

Exclusive: Higher Ed’s Support for Terrorism http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/homeland.php?id=727930 Exclusive: Higher Ed’s Support for TerrorismJason RantzAuthor: Jason RantzSource: The Family Security Foundation, Inc.Date: February 13, 2007 Many of us are aware of how bad things are on college campuses regarding free speech, but when colleges silence those who speak out to defeat our enemies, this is where FSM Contributing Editor Jason Rantz draws the line.     Higher Ed’s Support for Terrorism   By Jason Rantz   A dangerous trend is brewing on our college campuses, and it’s empowering our enemies. As bastions of far left political thought, college campuses are doing...

You make too much money! And you make too little! Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., put it somewhat differently. But the new chairman of the House Financial Services Committee vowed to tackle the growing, festering problem of "income inequality." "Government doesn't have to interfere with the free enterprise system," says Frank, "but we can work along with it to reduce inequality." Railing against Home Depot's $210 million severance package for its fired CEO, Frank called it "further confirmation of the need to deal with the pattern of CEO pay that appears to be out of control." What does Frank propose to...

The World is About to Change... In the last few months, a massive wave of ordinary Chinese people have publicly renounced their affiliation with the Chinese Communist Party, bringing one of the last Communist strong-holds to the brink of collapse. Just fifteen years after the Berlin Wall was dismantled, a massive movement for freedom and democracy has emerged in China, and its momentum is shocking the world. To date, over 14 million Chinese citizens have publicly renounced their membership in the Chinese Communist Party, with the number growing by up to 40,000 more people each day. Many more have declared...

Re: NY-Times article: China Pursues Major Role in Particle Physics December 06, 2006 That Lovable Old Coot, Mao Zedong Yesterday's New York Times gave noted Chinese parliamentarian Mao Zedong a warm tonguebath of affection, in the Science Section, of all places. The lead story, "China Pursues Major Role in Particle Physics," made Mao sound like a lovable old coot full of folk wisdom: "Mao Zedong dreamed of splitting an electron. This was no idle diversion. According to natural dialectics, which formed the philosophical underpinnings of Marxism, the entire universe, from top to bottom, was seething with tension and change. As...

The people have spoken in the U.S. The precious gift of democracy has been savored once again. Such unimaginable freedom we have, and yet, there are those who take liberty for granted, and live (talk) the illusion that the grass is greener "over there" -- wherever "there" is. But think of those who lived through the Soviet years, or those who now live in the "People's Republic" of China. Listen to this: Some poor Chinese shmuck had a truly brilliant marketing scheme for selling condoms. He put the images of Lei Feng and Mao Zedong on the wrappers. You've got...

“I am reminded by looking at the crowd that Chairman Mao once said ‘If you give me three people in each village I will rule the country.’” – John Nichols, writer for The Nation, responding to the tiny audience at Sunday’s “Camp Democracy” event calling for President Bush’s impeachment

The L.A.Times published a story on the 13th that treated Chinese dictator, "Chairman" Mao, as a beloved and "iconic" figure but found no room in their story for any mention of the "great leader's" human rights abuses, tortures or the many, murderous pogroms which took the lives of millions of his fellow citizens decade after decade as he ruled with an iron fist. The story, sporting the title "Mao is Their Canvas", was a puff piece investigating the secretive artists who painted the massive Mao portrait that hung at Tiananmen Square during and after the dictator's lifetime. Certainly the lives...

BEIJING (Reuters) - Thousands queued at Beijing's Mao Zedong Mausoleum on Saturday for a glimpse of the embalmed corpse of the former Great Helmsman on the 30th anniversary of his death but Chinese state media kept coverage of the event low-key. Police and undercover agents infiltrating crowds outside the squat building on Tiananmen Square were a reminder of government sensitivity about how the man who founded "new China" -- but then plunged it into bouts of famine and chaos -- is remembered. Five years after his death the Communist Party, which uses Mao as an ideological prop to help govern...

Senate Democratic leadership threatens Disney with legal and legislative sanctionsby John in DC - 9/07/2006 06:02:00 PM This letter was sent today by the entire Democratic leadership of the US Senate. This letter is such a major shot across the bow of Disney, it's not even funny. It is FILLED with veiled threats, both legal and legislative, against Disney. US Senators don't make threats like this, especially the entire Democratic leadership en masse, unless they mean it. Disney is in serious trouble. Read it, then read my analysis of it below:September 7, 2006 Mr. Robert A. Iger President and...

BEIJING, Aug. 31 — When high school students in Shanghai crack their history textbooks this fall they may be in for a surprise. The new standard world history text drops wars, dynasties and Communist revolutions in favor of colorful tutorials on economics, technology, social customs and globalization. Socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese Communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in a sentence. The text mentions Mao only once — in a chapter on etiquette. Nearly overnight the country’s most prosperous schools have shelved the...

CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuela President Hugo Chavez said he could seek "indefinite" re-election through a referendum if the opposition boycotts upcoming presidential elections. Chavez made the remark late Friday, saying if the opposition pulls out of the Dec. 3 vote or makes false claims of electoral fraud to the Organization of American States, "I would call a national referendum to have the people decide if I can continue here indefinitely or if I have to go after six years in 2014."

Totalitarian killers in pursuit of a murderous utopian agenda can always count on the New York Times to transform them into noble representatives of the popular will. Whether Stalin or Hitler, Pol Pot, or Mao, Fidel, Che or Arafat, the Times will humanize them. The archetype was cuddly Uncle Joe Stalin as seen through the eyes of Walter Duranty. Count on Duranty's successors to enlighten us about how personable these tyrants are...

House passed the minimum wage bill 230-180.. The bill would increase the minimum wage to $7.25 over the next three years. Republican 196-21 Democrat 34-158-1 Will post voting lists as soon as possible. Bill was HR 5970 if you want to look it up.

My boss just released the following at the MRC's Business & Media Institute Web site. Liberal Democratic Senator Ron Wyden inadvertently (?) compares his push for "tax reform" to Mao Zedong's push for communism: If you want to read between the lines for politicians, it helps if you know what book they’re reading. In the case of liberal would-be tax fixer Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), it appears to be Mao’s “Little Red Book.” Wyden, according to the July 24 Washington Post, “has made it his mission to force Congress to rewrite the entire tax code.” Wyden’s plan isn’t particularly new –...