An ill wind in Beijing

摘要

Upon taking control of Beijing in 1949, Mao Zedong decided his communist capital would have to give up its centuries-old existence as a mere political and cultural centre that depended on the honest labour of others. Beijing, he decreed, would be transformed from a free-loading city of consumers into a city of producers. Within a decade, factories were built, furnaces fired and thick black smoke poured forth, bearing vivid, if noxious, testimony to Mao's unquestioned authority.