Mao's+Last+Dancer

Mao's Last Dancer: resources [|What is communism?] [|The Great Leap Forward documentary] [|BBC Communist China site]Covers all of the major events and people. The cultural revolution website - [|Morning Sun] Thinkquest -[| cultural revolution] Thinkquest - [|red guards] [|Yinong Young-Xu]
 * General**
 * Stories of brutality in the cultural revolution:**

[|The text]
 * Little red book**

Politicians Hall of Fame - [|Mao] [|Quotations]from Chairman Mao
 * Mao Tse Tung** (Mao ZEDONG) Why are there variations in the spelling of his name?

Overview of narrative

Li was born into [|poverty] in the Li Commune near the city of [|Qingdao] in the [|Shandong] province of [|People's Republic of China]. At the age of eleven and a half, he was selected by [|Madame Mao]'s cultural advisers to attend the [|Beijing Dance Academy], where students endured 16-hour days of training. He was one of the first students from the Beijing Dance Academy to go to the United States with Zhang weichang.

During the 1970s, he joined [|Ben Stevenson]'s [|Houston Ballet] company as an [|exchange student]. He began to question his allegiance to the [|Chinese Communist Party], and began a relationship with an aspiring American dancer, Elizabeth Mackey. They rushed their marriage so that Li could remain in the United States while avoiding deportation. Li wanted to be able to return to China to visit his family, but the Party detained him at its Houston Consulate. This caused a 21-hour international incident at the [|Consulate-General of the People's Republic of China in Houston], when the [|Federal Bureau of Investigation] surrounded the consulate while American and PRC diplomats debated the issue. Li was eventually allowed to stay, but his Chinese citizenship was revoked.