Mao’s Lesson for Trump’s America
In the summer of 1966, Mao Zedong—the father of the Chinese revolution, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, and leader of the People’s Republic of China—called upon Chinese citizens to rise up in revolt against the very government and party he had been so personally responsible for establishing. “Bombard the headquarters!” he implored.
For months prior, radical acolytes of Mao, none with formal positions in the Communist hierarchy, had been circulating outlandish conspiracy theories about counterrevolutionary plotting and anti-Mao cliques in the highest echelons of the Chinese system, in which the party and the state were one. Unable to press their accusations through the highly bureaucratized and tightly controlled media channels of the party center in Beijing, the radicals, with Mao’s quiet urging, published their claims in a Shanghai newspaper, far from the nation’s capital.
[Anne Applebaum: How China outsmarted the Trump administration]
In the resultant miasma of disinformation and innuendo, opportunists in politically.
