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On a chilly winter morning in January 1990, I stepped off a night ferry onto a dockside in the city of Guangzhou. It was my first glimpse of China. The air smelled sulphurous from burning coal. Outside the streets were a river of bicycles, ridden by workers in blue caps and Mao jackets. Occasionally the bicycles parted for a wheezing bus or official car. Prof Mandane-Ortiz said her initial request had been for students to make a "simple" design out of paper. "She believes in leading from the front. She also believes that we need a fresh face to take on all of these challenges."  irannews.ru Comparing Xi Jinping to Mao Zedong is "inane", scoffs Rebecca Karl, a professor of Chinese History at New York University" onclick="tagshow(event)" class="t_tag">University. Nothing lends legitimacy to the Communist Party quite like Mao - the iconic revolutionary whose portrait still reigns over Tiananmen Square, where he declared the founding of the People's Republic of China. But it's still a mistake to draw a straight line from Mao to Xi, Prof Karl argues, because it dismisses all that came in between - and the Chinese who dreamed or fought for a different country. Now China is saying it out loud, and its "wolf warrior" diplomats, named after a patriotic action film franchise, are going on the verbal offensive. In China this is hugely popular. "It suggests autocracy is in their blood, it's in their water or it's in their culture," she says. In 2005 I was handed a DVD smuggled out of a village called Dingzhou in Hebei province. It showed a pitched battle between local farmers and dozens of armed thugs, hired by a state-owned power company, to force them off their land. The farmers had dug deep trenches in their fields. The thugs attacked at dawn opening fire with shotguns and beating the farmers with steel bars. Six were killed.