MAO Zedong suddenly began talking about chrysanthemums. “Do you know what the chrysanthemums were called, at the last Hangzhou show? The drunken dancer, the old temple in the setting sun, the lover powdering his fair one”.

André Malraux noted these words in his Anti-Memoirs, in the section where he recalls meeting Chinese leaders in the 1960s.

That day, Mao seemed to be comparing societies to chrysanthemums, as a complex organism. Societie