Yang Jisheng’s newly translated history could be a cautionary tale or a sign of things to come.
…The World Turned Upside Down picks up roughly where Tombstone left off, in 1966, with Chairman Mao Zedong seeking to eradicate the remaining conservative and pragmatic leftist forces in his country by declaring a wenhua geming, a “cultural revolution” that would mobilize “the broad masses from the bottom up to expose these sinister phenomena.” Mao, contemptuous of the “Four Olds” (old ideas, old culture, old habits, and old customs) and eager to establish the “Four News” (new ideas, new culture, new habits, new customs), was under no illusion that the process would be straightforward; indeed, he declared that it was only “great disorder under heaven” that could create “great order under heaven.”
A luxury UK auction house has withdrawn from sale a rare watch given to Chinese soldiers as a reward for their part in the Tiananmen Square massacre, after it said the vendor had received online threats.
In July 2019, Mehmet Tohti was just hours away from speaking publicly to politicians about the Chinese government’s horrific abuse of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang when he received a message on Twitter:
