Abstract

A recent spate of exposés about Mao Zedong's China, in English and Chinese, announces a finality to the tendency toward the temporal-spatial conflation of twentieth-century Chinese and global history. This sense was confirmed when the New York Times reported in late January 2006 that George W. Bush's recent bedtime reading had been Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story,1 or when, later in 2006, according to a column in the British paper The Guardian, “the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly voted to condemn the ‘crimes of totalitarian communist regimes’, linking them with Nazism.”2 The temporal-spatial conflation hence is,…