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“... Mao Zedong used to point him out to foreign visitors. ‘That little man,’ said the Chairman, ‘will go a long way.’ Such praise was belittling in more than one sense and Mao made sure during the Cultural Revolution that Deng went nowhere ...”

“... and surgeons to sew back severed fingers and remove a 99 pound tumour as big as a football’. Mao and his men rated the power of words higher than most, and this may explain why they went to such lengths to suppress non-aligned literature in China. From the early 1960s until the mid-1980s almost all Western books were ...”

“... I arrived by bus at a dusty crossroads outside Shaoshan, the birthplace of Mao Zedong, in a fine mist which stippled the dark water of the paddy fields. An out-of-work student with a motorbike for hire drove me to the Shaoshan Guesthouse. It was damp and empty except for a group of civil servants visiting at official expense ...”

“... did not contain it because natural phenomena were not its cause. The famine occurred because a Mao Zedong brainstorm turned into a government policy; its limits were the administrative boundaries of the Chinese state. As Jasper Becker writes: ‘...”

“... still know remarkably little about China’s secretive leadership. Compared to what it was under Mao, China is now a vastly different and more open society, yet it is still well nigh impossible to scrutinise the workings of the Party, and its fifty million-plus members. It remains an organisation, a state within a ...”

“... million Chinese died, and millions more suffered, in the great revolution associated with Mao Tse-tung’s leadership, but at the very least, he laid the foundations on which it became possible to build a modern industrial society. The great revolution has now entered its fifth phase: an era emblazoned in neon ...”

“... the most liberal and economically successful phase of Chinese Communist rule, under the reforms of Deng Xiaoping. It seems now that we are in for a new period of suppression of political and intellectual freedom. The courageous students who tried to confront and defeat China’s experienced political leadership on the open ground of Tiananmen Square in Peking ...”

“... while Zhao was in Pyongyang, Li and officials close to him visited the retired senior leader Deng Xiaoping at his home and told him that the student movement had turned into a riot and Deng himself had been attacked by name. Outraged, Deng said this was clearly a ‘well-planned ...”

“... in it for us?’ Rather than Sinology proper, they are Sino-Americana. Ezra Vogel’s biography of Deng Xiaoping is an instructive example. Detached for duties on the National Intelligence Council under Clinton (he assures the reader that the CIA has vetted his book for improper disclosures), Vogel is a fixture at Harvard, where the house magazine hails ...”

“... it’s easy enough to make out the visitors from the impoverished countryside, in their faded blue Mao jackets and dusty shoes, gazing at the super-malls on Nanjing Lu and the throbbing neon lights of Pudong. The novelist Wang Anyi, sitting in the lobby of my hotel in one of the kitsch towers of Pudong, said: ‘There is no ...”

“... that the Government is encouraging market forces. Most older people are dressed in blue or grey Mao suits, and the young in faintly awkward approximations of 1970s Western styles. Bicycles pass constantly, bells ringing. There is little other traffic. Up trees and on roofs loudspeakers rehearse cheerful tunes and good ...”

“... other organisations not under state control. This civil society was unique in Chinese history and Mao Zedong and the intellectuals who joined the Communist Party resolutely crushed every trace of its existence. Mao effectively returned China to the ...”

“... because of health problems. When the College Entrance Examination (gaokao) was reintroduced after Mao’s death, he performed so well that he was allowed to skip undergraduate study altogether. At the age of thirty, he was appointed professor of international politics at Fudan – the youngest appointment in the ...”

“... 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 ...”