President Boris Yeltsin is exhibiting apparent symptoms of political schizophrenia. Yesterday he said a treaty on Nato-Russian relations was “98 per cent ready”, and that he might join Moscow talks in person next week to hammer out the last two per cent. Last year he put me off the whole Cultural Revolution shopping experience “Chinese people still feel very deeply about that period. And they feel uncomfortable to know that foreigners, as spectators, like the art and artefacts of the Cultural Revolution Everybody should know that it was a tragedy,” he said.. Ms Duan wanted to sell me a 1977 five-volume set of Mao’s extended Little Red Book.

When published they would have set one back 3.9 yuan (30p); her rather optimistic opening offer to me was 500 yuan (pounds 38).Yao Zhongyong was one of millions of young Chinese “sent down to the countryside” during the Cultural Revolution, and did not manage to return to Peking for 20 years. That just shows we really respect him,” he said.For an unwitting foreign tourist, none of this comes cheap. Does this amount to mercenary disrespect for the Chairman? “Only people who really like these will buy them Even the government produces watches with Mao’s face That does not mean we do not respect him. She also has a collection of Mao busts, in sizes to suit anyone’s needs. “In fact, we don’t know what the foreigners are thinking about when they buy these things,” she said.At his stall, Chen Guowei is offering a Cultural Revolution cloth portrait of Mao, made by the Hangzhou “The East is Red” Silk Factory.

Duan Xiuhua, who at 42 years old is part of the generation whose education was wiped out by the Cultural Revolution, is selling off her own family’s huge supply of Little Red Books in her Hong Qiao store. “Such is the case with kitsch from the Mao era, and particularly the late Chairman’s brainchild of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution – a mass movement that set back China’s economy and society incalculably, and cost the lives and careers of hundreds of thousands of Chinese.”Peking’s Chinese traders find it all rather improbable. Professor David Shambaugh, a Sinologist at George Washington University, admits to a collection of “more than 300″ Mao pieces including badges, statues, posters, copies of the Little Red Book in several languages, and a Mao clock.”It is indeed ironic when vestiges of totalitarian tyrants, after their demise, assume collector’s value and status as memorabilia,” he said. Few tourists have studied post-1949 Chinese history, and China itself still officially reveres Mao, so the issue of possible bad taste is easily sidestepped.Those who are steeped in Chinese contemporary history are fully aware of what they are buying. But they have a different viewpoint.Liu Min, at the Chinese Communist Party’s Department for Research on Party Literature, is sanguine He said: “Mike Tyson tattoos Mao’s face on his arm.