One of the many things I love about the book is that it brings back memories from when I was in China. I was recently reading and thinking Mao Zed0ng's rise to power (um, how often do you say that?) When I was in China in 2004, he was still very much "apart" of Chinese culture- or at least as far as Beijing tourism was concerned. He has a portrait about the size of 10 billboards (my over estimating strikes again!) hanging on the Forbidden city, tourists can buy his "little red book" on the street, and you can see his cryogenically frozen body (snow white style) for a few bucks.
I would have loved to chat with some of my native Chinese friends about what they thought about "all of that" (like I was able to do in Russia, talking with a lot of people about communism and Stalin and politics and what not). However, even besides the language barrier, people tended not to want to really open up to us about anything other than sights to see and kids to teach and things to sell us. Nothing negative really ever seemed approachable. Not that the Chinese people weren't very friendly towards us (like insanely friendly, wanting us to marry their sons and take pictures with their babies, friendly) but definitely not wanting to talk politics with us; although, that could have had to do a lot with the environment that we were in as volunteer teachers.
In front of Forbidden City/Tiananmen Square in Beijing
(see the picture of Mao in the background? he's there)
Me and Karina inside the Forbidden City
Giant picture of Mao on Forbidden City in Bejing
(compare to the guy you can see standing above it)
Mao's Little Book of Quotations or the "Red Bible"(cost me about 1 dollar, I think)
Tiananmen Square (different angle. differnet season, too) 
Outside Mao's "snow white" (as I like to call it) Mosolium Memorial
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