Quotes from Julia Lovell

Mao's great talent lay in turning the Chinese people into slaves, while making them feel like they were the masters of the country…All the world's dictators have studied Mao.

Here he honed his talent for guerrilla warfare, the principles of which he condensed to a sixteen-syllable jingle for his illiterate peasant troops: Di jin, wo tui; di zhu, wo rao; Di pi, wo da; Di tui, wo zhui (when the enemy advances, retreat; when the enemy rests, harass; when the enemy grows tired, attack; when the enemy retreats, pursue).

This culture of pressure and rivalry tended to produce two, highly contrasted species of official: the creatively corrupt libertine, and the puritan. And it was the tension between the two that helped produce the Opium War, with all its unfortunate consequences.

Yet one long-term resident of Peru, a Belgian priest, disagreed: 'what such terrible conditions generated, usually and spontaneously, in the people that suffered them was not rebelliousness, but rather fatalism, passivity, or religious resignation…the explosions of violence could only be understood if given social conditions came together with an ideology that deliberately and consciously proposed exercising violence as a response'.2

Mao badges are pinned on West German student lapels, Little Red Book quotations are daubed on walls of Italian lecture halls.

Almost wherever Chinese communities went, they were accused of vice, violence and mutiny, of being a secretive, alien, xenophobic community that refused to integrate with Anglo-Saxon society.

The opium trade produced a rationale for the Christian presence in China, turning the country into a depraved mass of opium sots to be disciplined and improved by salvation-hungry missionaries.