The only Chinese leader to qualify as an answer in a pub quiz leaves this vale of tears:
Hua Guofeng, who succeeded Mao Zedong as chairman of China's Communist Party, has died, state media is reporting.Xinhua news agency said 87-year-old Hua died in Beijing after suffering from an unspecified illness.
Meanwhile, our own Hua Guofeng struggles on.
Hua was such a nonentity the rumour was that he rose to power because he was Mao’s son. I never believed this: for one thing, Mao tended to neglect his children, and for another, CPC leaders have always tended to keep their children away from positions of real power. But Victor Shih, who certainly knows more than I do, endorses it.
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