Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> On 1 October 1949 a fifty-six-year-old peasant stood on a balcony of the South Gate of the Forbidden City in Beijing. Tall for a Chinese with sloping shoulders a broad face high forehead and puffy cheeks he read from a flapping sheet of paper into a crackling microphone. In a high pitched voice whose accent denoted his Hunanese origins he proclaimed the creation of the People’s Republic of China. His name was Mao Zedong and he was the ruler of the most populous nation on earth. Mao had travelled a long road to be where he was on that day. In pursuit of his goals for China he had suffered and had made others suffer. He had had four wives and discarded three of them. He had sired ten legitimate children seen two of them die and watched while two others were taken into slavery. As a young man in Changsha during the 1911 revolution he had been an onlooker as soldiers methodically battered their prisoners to death. For two decades after 1927 he had been hunted across China by warlords and Nationalists seeking to destroy him and the Chinese Communist Party he had helped to found in 1921.