“Mao is very great and famous, and he saved the whole of China,” exclaims an 18-year-old woman from Wuhan in Hubei province. “Both young people and old people love Mao very much!” The woman is accompanying her 75-year-old grandfather to Mao Zedong’s birth town of Shaoshan in Hunan province, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the capital Changsha — and the juxtaposition is as intriguing as it is telling: A woman born after the Tiananmen Square crackdown and a grandfather born during the Long March, joined in a pilgrimage to celebrate the founder of the 60-year-old Chinese republic
