Nien cheng biography of barack obama

  • She was impressed with President Obama and liked how he seemed to be cooling international tensions.
  • Her background made her an obvious target for the fanatics of the Cultural Revolution: educated in London, the widow of an official of Chiang Kaishek's regime.
  • Nien Cheng, an anglophile and fluent English-speaker who worked for Shell in Shanghai under Mao, was put under house arrest by Red Guards in and.

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    Nien Cheng told her story of defiance, until the very end

    WASHINGTON &#; Sitting on the couch in her apartment near the Washington National Cathedral this summer, Chinese author Nien Cheng said: &#;I don&#;t want you to write about me. When I die, you can write about it. I will die soon.&#;

    CNBC was blaring in the background. Cheng had just finished cleaning up after frying a week&#;s worth of vegetables, she had e-mails to return, and the central fact of her of life had been pared to its seven-word core, prompted by a glance at a beautiful and haunting black-and-white portrait in her tidy study: &#;That&#;s my daughter. She was Terrible.&#;

    In , years after that photograph was taken, Cheng was hauled from her elegant Shanghai home filled with antiquities to the No. 1 Detention House. That was the start of more than six years of shackles, beatings and bouts of pneumonia as one of the 20th century&#;s great spasms of political insanity and violence unfolded in Mao Zedong&#;s Chi

  • nien cheng biography of barack obama

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    The China Project Book List — time period: Mao to Tiananmen

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    Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China

    Paul Theroux (Putnam, )

    Riding the Iron Rooster is a fine antidote to the colonialist travelogues of the first half of the 20th century, as well as the self-serious immersive reportage books that came to dominate in the first half of this century. Theroux spent a year crisscrossing the country by rail, going as far as Xinjiang in the west and the Shandong coast in the east, often accompanied by government minders. As in all of his travel writing, he is unfailingly human, at turns prickly, lascivious, poetic, or just plain fed-up. If you were lucky enough to take a tr

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    When I first heard it, I didn’t believe it. Alas, it’s true.

    Last week, New York City’s Empire State Building was aglow in red and yellow. Why? To commemorate the 60thanniversary of the victorious revolution of the People’s Republic of China—i.e., the establishment of Mao’s Red China.

    I’m not kidding. This took place not in Beijing, or Pyongyang, or Havana, or, say, Moscow in the s. It was done in New York City, in , at its highest building, the very symbol of the Empire State.

    In effect, New Yorkers basked in the glow of a nation that killed more people more quickly than any nation in world history—under the glorious colors of kinesisk communism.

    Had this happened in America 60 years ago, Harry Truman would have thrown a fit. Joe McCarthy would have called hearings to find out who was responsible. And that was before the Chinese killing-machine ramped up and got down to business.

    Of course, I’m not shocked. For years, I’ve written and spoken about the appalling failure of A