Mao’s ‘Proud Poplar’: Yang Kaihui

Executed at 29 by the KMT, Mao's Second Wife Remains a Mystery Despite Her Heroine Status

By Sheila Melvin on November 10, 2015

Yang Kaihui—who was killed 85 years ago this month—was the first of Mao Zedong’s three freely chosen wives. (Mao was forced by his parents to wed an older neighbor when he was just 14 but did not consider this a true marriage.) Yang’s dramatic, and tragic, life story is widely known in China. It has been turned into dance dramas, like the China National Opera & Dance Drama Theater’s 2015 When We Were Young, and figured prominently in films, including a 1995 biopic and the star-studded 2011 Birth of a Nation, in which the role of Yang was performed by Li Qin.

Can the China Model Succeed?

A ChinaFile Presents Transcript

By Daniel A. Bell, Timothy Garton Ash & more on November 9, 2015

Is this a new model? Is authoritarian capitalism, Leninist capitalism, something that has durability? Have the rules changed about how countries develop? That used to be, remember, that open markets led ineluctably to open societies. How does it stack up against the liberal, sort of democratic model of the West, which we have grown up with and believed, actually, was a kind of ineluctable historical force? Remember when President Clinton told Jiang Zemin he was on the wrong side of history? Is it a morally acceptable model? Is it exportable? And finally, I think most importantly, what should our posture be towards it, as the United States?