Cultural Revolution

China had the Red Guard, America has the Gingrich Gang. ARNE HANSEN Balboa

NEW YORK - "A snake swallowing an elephant" is how the Chinese artist Wu Guanzhong described himself. The snake was the Chinese artist in him, and the elephant was Western art. The stylistic fusion that made him one of China'sleading modern artists is on view at the Asia Society Museum here in "Revolutionary Ink: The Paintings of Wu Guanzhong," which also reflects the artist's long life amid the turmoil of China's 20th century. Wu died in 2010 at 90, and these works from his last decades - depicting nature and architecture, some more naturalistic, others mostly abstract - show his easy cohabitation of two cultural hemispheres.

From the time she was 12 until more than a decade later, Li Huai lived alone, in a small Chinese town or in the countryside. She had been separated from her family by the Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution, which took hold in her homeland in 1966. More than two decades later, Li Huai lives in La Jolla, in the shadow of Mt. Soledad, in circumstances far different from those she found herself in as a peasant farmer, planting rice.

Han Song predicted the destruction of the Twin Towers a year before 9/11. In his novel "2066: Red Star Over America," Han, China's premier science-fiction writer, depicts a disturbing future. It is the year 2066. China rules the world while the U.S. festers in financial decline and civil war. A team has been sent to America to disseminate civilization through the traditional Chinese board game Go. But during the critical Go match held at the World Trade Center, terrorists strike.

Zhang Chunqiao, a member of the Gang of Four blamed for many of the excesses of China's 1966-76 Cultural Revolution -- a period that saw the economy derailed, thousands of moderate party officials and intellectuals purged and the nation traumatized -- has died. He was 88. China's official Xinhua News Agency reported the news Tuesday, nearly three weeks after his April 21 death from cancer.

When Fang Lijun was 5 years old, something happened that would shape his life, and his art, forever. At the time, 1968, China was in the early, most emotional phase of the 10-year Cultural Revolution. Fang was the happy son of a railroad engineer and his wife, living in the sooty, gray northern Chinese city of Handan, Hebei province.

Forty years ago, during China's Cultural Revolution, traditional opera was banned and replaced by propagandistic works known as Yang Ban Xi. Yan Ting Yuen's documentary, "Yang Ban Xi -- The Eight Model Works," explores the decade these extravaganzas ruled the country's stages and movie screens and the nostalgic pull they maintain for some people.

Chairman Mao banned the sport during China's cultural revolution as imperialist poison. Baseball, though, is a tough game to kill. Shouts of "wo lai!" ("I've got it") and "bern lei!" ("throw it home") echo across the practice fields of Scottsdale Community College this spring.

In 1933, Elizaveta Kishkina fell in love with the dashing Chinese revolutionary Li Lisan. From their romance sprang a tale of suffering and love that spans the gulag of Josef Stalin and the labor camps of China's Cultural Revolution. Purged twice in China and jailed in the Soviet Union, Li died in the custody of China's Red Guards in 1967. Kishkina and their two daughters live on.

They are the first Chinese men and women allowed to study Western classical music after Mao's decade-long Cultural Revolution, composers and musicians who have come to be known as Beijing Central Conservatory's "Class of 1978," named for the year they entered the school. Their memories of the preceding period in which their families were shattered and their educations truncated include breaking into Red Guard storehouses of forbidden records, books and musical scores, and listening to Western pop music smuggled in by children of diplomats.

In the latest political tumult in China, it is the Maoists who find themselves in trouble. Maoist websites have been shut down, ostensibly for "maintenance. " A public park in Chongqing where retirees sang and twirled to patriotic anthems while waving red flags posted a notice saying the music was now banned because it disturbed the neighborhood. A former television host, known for his Maoist views, found his scheduled speeches abruptly canceled. The crackdown started late last week during the conclusion of the National People's Congress.

How do you turn Bad Samaritans good? The question has become a national obsession since the shocking death of a 2-year-old named Yueyue who was ignored by 18 passersby as she lay bleeding on the street after a hit-and-run last month in southern China. Nearly every day brings a new outrage — an 88-year-old man suffocating in his own blood after falling and breaking a nose, people rushing to photograph a suicide attempt without bothering to help — and another hand-wringing editorial about how to cultivate the kindness of strangers.

Mao Tse-tung, Confucius and Louis Vuitton have been mixing it up lately on China's most-renowned stage: Tiananmen Square. For decades, Mao's portrait has hung over the Tiananmen Gate at the far north of the square, at the entrance to the Forbidden City, even as his embalmed body has lain in the mausoleum built immediately after his death in the center of the square. Chairman Mao, the Great Helmsman, founder of the People's Republic of China, looms mightily over the square, reminding the Chinese people of the Communist Party's achievement in raising the country out of its "feudal" and impoverished past and restoring it to prosperity and global influence.

Although her musical tastes run to Mariah Carey and Norah Jones, Vicy Zhang didn't hesitate when she received an instant message inviting her to sing paeans to Mao Tse-tung at a celebration of the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. "How could I refuse?" said Zhang, a 26-year-old graduate student at Chongqing University who hopes to join the party and have a career in civil service. "I thought it was boring and useless, but I didn't dare say no. " More than 10,000 students and faculty members participated in the event last month.

Confucius says, "Study the past if you would define the future. " Not long ago, it was a disgrace to carry the surname Kong, which indicated one was a descendent of the philosopher better known in the West as Confucius, a man vilified by the staunchest Communists as a throwback to China's feudal past. Here in the town where Kong Qiu was born in 551 BC and where about 20% of the population still bears his surname, corpses were once dug up from their graves at the Kong family's cemetery and hung from trees.

China and the West are embroiled today in lively, sometimes rancorous exchanges about Internet freedom and search-engine censorship. But since the late 1830s, another revolutionary technology, also imported from the West, has been radically reshaping Chinese culture, chronicling the nation's internal upheavals and providing a snapshot of its shifting relations with the outside world: photography. FOR THE RECORD: China photography: A photo caption with an article in the Feb. 23 Calendar on China photography exhibits at Southland museums misspelled the name of Li Hongzhang as Li Johngzhang.

Confucius, the venerable sage who lived in the 6th century BC, is enjoying a 21st century revival. His rehabilitators? The Chinese Communist Party. Yes, that party, the one celebrating the 61st anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China on Oct. 1. The same party whose chairman, Mao Tse-tung, vilified Confucius' "stinking corpse" during the Cultural Revolution and ordered the Red Guards to destroy all temples, statues, historical landmarks and texts associated with the sage.

Girl Power The Nineties Revolution in Music Marisa Meltzer Faber & Faber: 162 pp., $14 paper Culture Is Our Weapon Making Music and Changing Lives in Rio de Janeiro Patrick Neate and Damian Platt, preface by Caetano Veloso Penguin: 224 pp., $14 paper Riot grrrls influenced and inspired young Marisa Meltzer. "I can't think of anything more exciting to my nascent feminist fourteen-year-old self," she writes, "than photos of girls in halter tops, torn fishnets, and smeared red lipstick."