The chairman will see you now

摘要

THE NAMES of the 2oth century's bloodiest dictators are synonymous with evil. Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin: even to joke about them is in poor taste. Yet one tyrant's name has a milder impact. Indeed, many still revere him. His face is on almost every banknote in circulation in the world's second-largest economy. Thousands of people queue up daily to see his embalmed body lying in state in a glass sarcophagus. When Barack Obama was president, a designer in China produced an image blending the despot's garb with the American's face and put it on T-shirts. Many people-including Western tourists-bought them for their kitsch appeal. It probably did not occur to them that they were, in effect, equating America's leader with a figure who caused tens of millions of deaths.