Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers.

I'm your host, Andrew Heaton.

I have been to China twice, and I don't plan to go back a third time.

The first time was at the tail end of my college days when I was doing a study abroad in China. At the time, China was still

in the process of opening, or at least it very much felt that way. China was enjoying a prolonged

economic boom from the market reforms of Deng Xiaoping. I recall the president of my

college, David Boren, talking about how China had started out communist, but was drifting

towards liberal democracy, whereas America had began as a laissez-faire society, but was increasingly

appreciating the need for regulation. And we were meeting in the middle, you see. And there was this

feeling at the time that China was opening up, liberalizing, joining the world. When I visited,

there was a new book out that was considered very controversial, Mao Zedong, only human. What made

this book so salacious and controversial was twofold, first,

that a writer would feel comfortable describing Mao as a human being instead of a god.

People still thought of Mao as something more than human. I saw his preserved body at the Forbidden City in Beijing

and watched as people would genuflect and cry in front of his remains the way you might

honor a saint, the relics of a saint. But the other thing, which made the book controversial,

was that the government had allowed such a track to be published.

I didn't read the book. It's in Mandarin, but I gather that the author had acknowledged that Mao,

while a great man, a great man with very good intentions for the greater good of China,

he had made some miscalculations. Now, I would say those miscalculations were about 50 million people that starved to death,

but there were probably some other things in there.

Either way, acknowledging that Mao had screwed up was not something which would have been

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