China is rattling sabers again.
I really have an immense fascination for 20th century Chinese history. It's just so bizarre. I sometimes wonder if Mao wasn't just conducting an experiment to see if he could cause 800 million people to lose their minds. In the Hundred Flowers Movement he encouraged China's intellectuals to actively criticize the Communist Party, supposedly to show what a generous and open government they were. But really he just wanted to know who his enemies were so he could send them all to labour camps.
Then there was the Great Leap Forward, in which Chairman Mao ordered the entire nation to melt down all their iron in home-made foundries, so that China could make the leap into the modern age and be on a par technologically with the West. But the scrap metal was pretty much useless, and since everyone was so busy hunting for rusty nails and such, no one was growing food, and the country plunged into a severe famine.
And of course, there was the absolute disaster that was the decade-long Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, in which hordes and hordes of bright-eyed Mao-worshipping teenaged Red Guards basically took over the country and terrorized it in the name of the Great Helmsman. Schools and universities shut down for the duration (1964-1974).

Simon Leys, a brilliant Sinologist who has a gift for wryly describing the complexities and alienness of Maoist China, on navigating the minefield of being a communist cadre in the Mao Dynasty:

Judge for yourself. One should avoid leftism, neither should one fall into rightism (sometimes, as in the case of Lin Biao, leftism is a rightist error), but between these two pitfalls, the cadre will seek in vain for the "middle way"- this being a feudal-Confucian notion. Since the right, the left and the center are equally fraught with danger, the cadre may be tempted to shut his eyes and follow the successive and contradictory instructions of the Great Leader without a murmur. Another error! "To obey blindly" is a poisonous error invented by Liu Shaoqi in pursuit of his unmentionable project of capitalist restoration. In such a situation, the downcast and fearful cadre has his courage renewed by daring new watchwords: one must dare "to swim against the current"; "not be afraid of being in the minority"; "not be afraid of disgrace, even of exclusion from the (Communist) party." However, before jumping in the water to swim against the current, the cadre cannot but recall that "the current of history is irresistable" and the Communist Party that embodies it is "grandiose and infallible." His resolve weakens; then he is reminded that "rebellion is legitimate." Ready to act now, he gets another cold shower: "in all circumstances, strict Party discipline should be maintained." Whom to believe? "Truth is quite often the position of the minority." This helps, but its value is reduced by another basic axiom: "the minority must always submit to the decisions of the majority."

(From Chinese Shadows, by Simon Leys. I love the absurdity of the following quote, the context of which is too convoluted to get into: "In [Lin Biao] is manifested the true nature of an apparently-leftist-deviation-which-is-in-fact-rightist-sabotage.")