“... Mao Zedong’s long, wicked life has generated some lengthy biographies in English. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s is the longest, having overtaken Philip Short’s Mao (1999) and Li Zhisui’s The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1995 ...”

“... attender on the upper echelons of global power. He longs for the world of Tito, Churchill and Mao Zedong, at whose feet he sat. He says whose side he’s still unfailingly on, by sucking up to Iran’s leaders and explaining that Salman Rushdie had no right to cause offence to the Muslim world. His favourite theatre of ...”

“... with the Chinese way of breaking with the Maoist past. As Richard McGregor shows in The Party, Deng Xiaoping’s ‘reforms’ proceeded in a radically different way. In the organisation of the economy (and, up to a point, the culture), what is usually perceived as ‘Communism’ was abandoned, and the gates were opened to what, in the West, is called ...”

“... On 1 October 1949​ , Mao Zedong stood on top of the Gate of Heavenly Peace to proclaim the victory of his revolution, and told the world that the long-suffering Chinese people had finally ‘stood up’. After decades of tremendous violence and turmoil, China was going to relaunch itself into the arduous and disorienting task of embracing modernity ...”

“... creative legacy, and China is no exception. For some years, especially from the late 1940s until Mao’s death in 1976, the question was sidestepped as the Party imposed its own vision of Soviet-inspired socialist realism. But for the generation of Chinese born during the 1940s, who reached adulthood in the mid-1960s ...”

“... second paragraph – the guide to action – gets longer and longer. Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought are followed by Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Three Represents of Jiang Zemin, the Scientific Outlook on Development (by Hu Jintao) and now Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with ...”

“... remote areas like Tibet. He was a far more informed and perceptive observer than he had been with Mao’s army in 1948 and 1949. At first he liked what he saw, despite a lack of affection for the ideologically rigid and often oppressive cadres of the Chinese Communist Party. Later, he was increasingly outraged by China’s ...”

“... five overlapping stories, four about individuals and one about a country. The people are Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, Ayatollah Khomeini and Pope John Paul II. The place is Afghanistan. The year 1979 mattered to all of them. It was the year Thatcher won her first general election. The year Deng embarked on the economic reforms ...”

“... years after the Communist Party came to power, the state restored a national examination system.Mao, like Hong Xiuquan, hated exams. On the centenary of the fall of the Taiping Rebellion, a movement he admired, he railed against standardised testing: ‘Our method of conducting exams is a method for dealing with the ...”

“... visit of major importance, extended their stay for more than seven weeks and erected a statue of Mao before Buckingham Palace. Would Mrs Thatcher have parleyed with the students, and been televised in the Palace of Westminster four weeks in, while the President of the NUS, in his dressing-gown, rebuked her with a wagging ...”

“... we still asked questions about the future of Chinese socialism. Then, after the trauma of 1989, Deng Xiaoping got China moving again by declaring that isms no longer mattered, only economic reform. As China embraced the global economy and adopted the values of an emerging pan-Asian consumerist society, we stopped asking where it was heading, because the ...”

“... though the objective is to penetrate the two companies and oversee every key decision they make. Mao called this steady infiltration ‘mixing the sand into the hardened soil’.In the new iteration of the anti-corruption drive, foreign companies won’t be left alone. According to our party’s entrenched grassroots ...”

“... again to the woman’s tiny dormitory room in a former brothel, where he stares at a portrait of Deng Xiaoping on the wall and at the Selected Works of Mao Zedong on a shelf, unable to reconcile the national model-worker’s dutiful life with the sexy underwear in her cupboard and the ...”

“... red flag was hoisted on Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing, and Chairman Mao exulted: ‘China has stood up!’ Now, for the first time in 156 years, no alien flag, no foreign soldier, no uninvited official defiles any part of the Chinese motherland, with the exception of nearby Macao, but that tiny ...”

“... traders.The ingredients of the Hefei Model can be traced back several decades. Ever since the late Mao era, the city has benefited from the presence of one of China’s leading research institutions, the University of Science and Technology of China – which ranks among the top universities in the world in certain hard ...”