China's long journey from Marx to Adam Smith

摘要

If you'd asked Mao Tse-Tung how he'd be remembered after his death in 1976, it's a fair bet he wouldn't have said 'as a soup salesman'. But the executioner of millions has ended up as the Colonel Sanders of China, his smiling image decorating restaurants in Hunan Province just the way the Colonel's does in high streets from Detroit to Doncaster. Mao's metamorphosis from terror of class enemies to super-salesman mirrors China's own journey from Marx to Adam Smith. But where one has gone from deadly serious to amusing, the other has done the opposite.