"Where is China, mother?" -a 4 year old girl

 

Jung Chang was born in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China, 3-25-1952.  She was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen and then worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,” a steelworker, and an electrician before becoming an English-language student and, later, an assistant lecturer at Sichuan University.  She left China for Britain in 1978 and was subsequently awarded a scholarship by York University, where she obtained a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1982, the first person from the People’s Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a British university.    https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/-WZ3j4USEzgC?hl=en

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8-2-2005  Every morning as many as 20,000 people flock to Tiananmen Square to join the vast queues of pilgrims, often stretching a kilometre long, at the entrance to the tomb of Mao Zedong.

 They stand for an hour or more in blazing sun or winter cold waiting patiently to pay their respects to the Great Helmsman.  They place flowers at the foot of a Mao statue.  They gaze reverentially at the chairman's crystal coffin, often bowing to the waxy corpse inside.

  Almost 30 years after his death Mao remains the sacred symbol that China dare not touch.  His massive portrait still looms above the entrance to the Forbidden City.  His face is on every banknote in the country.

  Yet while he continues to be worshipped in China a shocking new book has concluded that Mao was the bloodiest mass murderer in history, a sadistic thug who enjoyed torture and was willing to sacrifice half of China's population for his dream of global domination.

 The biography, based on 10 years of archival research and interviews with people in Mao's inner circle, is a stunning challenge to China's conventional view of the Communist leader….

  One of the book's two authors is Jung Chang, the Chinese writer whose family memoir, Wild Swans, became one of the biggest-selling non-fiction books of all time.  Her co-author is her husband, Jon Halliday, a historian who gained access to Soviet archives on Mao.

  Their 814-page biography, Mao: The Unknown Story, is to be published in Canada and the United States in October. The book is already a bestseller in Britain, where critics have hailed it as a major work.  A Chinese translation is planned, although the Chinese edition is unlikely to circulate outside Taiwan and Hong Kong.  https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/mao-zedong-sacred-symbol-and-bloodiest-mass-killer/article1122479/
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https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/-WZ3j4USEzgC?hl=en&gbpv=1