The other day a newspaper supplement arrived, tagging along with the Daily Telegraph. It was China Watch, produced and published by China Daily in the People’s Republic of China.
It contained articles on protecting Tibet, flooding on the Yangtze River, diplomatic problems with islands in the South China Sea and so on. I read it with some curiosity, having just finished reading The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History 1962-1976, by Frank Dikotter.
I couldn’t help thinking how strange to be reading a bland and unexciting piece of advertising when, a mere 40 years before, with the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, the country had just come to the end of a 10-year period of appalling social engineering, industrial and agricultural chaos that had resulted in millions of deaths.
