Once upon a time in China, Ella Fitzgerald sang in Shanghai's jazz clubs; bright neon lights with English advertisements shone in the dark; and, even in provincial Kunming, people saw 166 shows of the Hollywood movie I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now. This was before 1949, when the communist peasants' army entered the cities and turned China in the first decade of Maoist rule into "one of the worst tyrannies in the history of the twentieth century, sending to an early grave at least 5 million civilians and bringing misery to countless more" (p. ⅷ). This tyranny is the focus of Frank Dikoetter's The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-57.
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