"Chairman [Mao] was very strict with his descendants, and he himself was also very incorruptible. Look at our family, among all those descendants of Chairman, can you find anyone who is an official or does business? You can find none! Why? Because Chairman had set a good example." more ›

Mao Xinyu (毛新宇), the PLA general who is famous for being the grandson of Chairman Mao and little else, has a new part-time gig -- teaching at the Guangzhou University Songtian College. The general will be the new brainwasher instructor for 66 students in Mao Zedong Thought (is anyone surprised?), which, far from dying out, has been enjoying something of a resurgence with the revival of the left in recent years. more ›

With all the media content reshuffling happening around the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party's foundation, Chinese actress Tang Wei has just suffered the same fate as time traveling and and spy shows. Tang was supposed to play Tao Yi, an early girlfriend of Mao's, but Mao's grandson, Mao Xinyu, intervened to have her cut out of the film.The late Chairman's family did not want the controvery that surrounds to cast a bad light on the family name. After being purged from the Chinese media before for her raunchy role in Ang Lee's erotic thriller Lust, Caution, she was briefly rehabilitated. Alas, it was still not enough to keep her inside the propaganda epic The Founding of a Party, due to open in mid-June. more ›

Earlier today, Fang Binxing (方滨兴), president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and the grand architect of the GFW, signed up on the Chinese microblog Sina Weibo, but not for long. The amount of vulgarities and curses that overwhelmed his page as soon as his account was opened forced him to delete his tweets just three hours later. Check out China Digital Times for a sample of comments that led him to swallow his own bitter pill. Fang's fate reminds us of the microblogging misadventures of General Mao Xinyu (毛新宇), the grandson of Chairman Mao. With just one tweet on Dec 4, Mao managed to attract over 46,000 followers, but Sina editors eventually had to delete all the comments that inundated that tweet. He has not been heard from since that fateful day. more ›

• In an exchange that has been making rounds on the internet, Mao Zedong's grandson lost his bearings last Friday and, beleaguered by journalists on all sides, asked "comrade, where is my car?" [AFP]
• He's not the only one to say a darndest thing though. Lots of officials have given meme worthy answers and opinions this week. [WSJ]
• The head of the environmental ministry in China has proposed that an environmental tax be studied - maybe it can help curb pollution? [Reuters]

• Grameen China & Alibaba’s True Ambition [CNReviews] "Grameen Trust of Bangladesh and Alibaba Group just announced the launch of the Grameen China initiative, that will be run by the Grameen Trust, with an initial charitable gift of $5 million from Alibaba Group. The New York Times highlighted this gift as a sign of a shift by Chinese corporations toward charitable giving… While altruism may be a motivating factor, Alibaba also stands to gain unique insights into serving the very poor by partnering with the Grameen Trust. I believe that this announcement represents an important strategic thrust-not just corporate philanthropy-that belies Alibaba’s intention to be the dominant B2B trading platform serving small and medium sized businesses (SMB/SMEs) globally."
• Can China's Economic Recovery Last? [Newsweek] "In response to the economic crisis, China deployed massive fiscal boosts, aggressive expansions of credit, foreign-exchange interventions, and tax rebates for the export sector. The short-term results have been impressive. The Asian Development Bank projects China's GDP to grow by 8.2 percent in 2009 and 8.9 percent in 2010—up significantly from forecasts made earlier in the year. The result: job creation. As The New York Times pointed out last week, the image of workers streaming back into Chinese factories stands in sharp contrast to the United States, where the unemployment rate continues to march toward double digits. During this week's G20 summit in Pittsburgh, China will have more weight to throw around on everything from climate change to macroeconomic imbalances. How should we interpret China's swift recovery from the financial crisis and what it means for the future? Here the consensus breaks down into different camps."
• "The Chinese people have stood up": The famous Mao slogan, that he never even used [SCMP] "The slogan is a manifesto of the "Chinese dream", which aims to bring back the power and prosperity that the country had historically enjoyed. The propaganda machine has created many slogans in the past six decades, but this is one of the few that struck, and remain in, the hearts of ordinary people… Yet there is one problem. Mao did not say it in Tiananmen Square. He did not say it on October 1, 1949, either. And some historians say that - like "Let them eat cake", which Marie Antoinette never said, and "Play it again, Sam", which Humphrey Bogart never said - Mao never said the quote attributed to him."

Lineage lovers take heed: another Mao has been added to the political mix! According to Singtao News, Mao Xinyu, the grandson of Mao Zedong, has become the youngest general in the Military at the ripe age of thirty nine. Besides being the youngest man to be appointed to such high office, he is also the first general to be born after 1970, which seems to explain his Aretha Franklin-eqsue hand movements. more ›