Mark English recounts some details of the life, character, beliefs and attitudes of a remarkable woman. Her father was a Chinese general and a colleague of Mao Zedong. As a very small child -- during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution -- she was sent to the countryside for a time to live with peasants. She was a professional gymnast from the age of seven to the age of fourteen. After a bad fall, she went back to school and built a career in an area of applied science. Her deep knowledge of traditional culture came mainly from her mother (an opera singer) and from her maternal grandmother who had been a concubine in the old China.
Personal and political values can be intertwined in complicated ways and, even within close families, there are often serious, politically-driven divides. Mark English talks...
Mark English talks about his general goal of presenting and defending a form of individualism which takes seriously our cultural embeddedness, noting that universal...
Great powers in decline are often more dangerous than rising powers. The leaders of such countries (today's United States?) may be tempted to take...