China And The New Maoists Kerry Brown Simone Van Nieuwenhuizen by Kerry Brown; Simone Van Nieuwenhuizen 9781350219090, 9781783607600, 1350219096, 1783607602 instant download after payment.

Forty years after his death, Mao remains a totemic, if divisive, figure in contemporary China. Though he retains an immense symbolic importance within China’s national mythology, the rise of a capitalist economy has seen the ruling class become increasingly ambivalent towards him. And while he continues to be a highly visible and contentious presence in Chinese public life, Mao's enduring influence has been little understood in the West.
In China and the New Maoists, Kerry Brown and Simone van Nieuwenhuizen look at the increasingly vocal elements who claim to be the true ideological heirs to Mao, ranging from academics to cyberactivists, as well as at the state's efforts to draw on Mao’s image as a source of legitimacy. This is a fascinating portrait of a country undergoing dramatic upheavals while still struggling to come to terms with its past.

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China 2016: a country of many contradictions. Top-of-the-range Bentleys, Porsches and Ferraris belt around the ring roads that seem to sprout up every other year in the capital, Beijing; yet, in the centre of the city, the residual ghost of the influence of the Soviet Union, where 99 per cent of the country’s economy was in the hands of the state, lingers in the main public space. The world’s largest urban open space, Tiananmen Square is also a place of powerful symbolism for the People’s Republic, overshadowed west and east by immense public buildings erected in the 1950s, and north and south by the highly renovated remnants of the imperial era before. On the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the northernmost of these, marking the outer entrance to the Forbidden City, hangs a massive portrait of an ageing Chinese man, staring down with a slightly ambiguous smile, hair receding, and a very visible mole on his chin.