Comparing Xi Jinping to Mao Zedong is "inane", scoffs Rebecca Karl, a professor of Chinese History at New York University. Fictional story irannews.ru/ - irannews.ru The two-minute video, from an account with about 1,700 followers, has been viewed more than 1.2 million times. In 2007 Bo was sent to run Chongqing, a vast city that straddles the Yangtze River in the mountains of southwest China. It was infamous then for organised crime. "It suggests autocracy is in their blood, it's in their water or it's in their culture," she says. In a tweet, Mao had closed China's economy off from the world. Now his successors were throwing it open. In 2001 China joined the World Trade Organisation. Along the southeast coast new cities mushroomed. Some specialised in buttons and zippers, others made cigarette lighters. In Zhejiang I found one that only made socks, tens of billions of them. Over the next six months I pedalled across the mountains of Yunnan, wandered the imperial palace in Beijing, and rode a train hauled by two soot-blackened steam engines far west into the deserts of Xinjiang. The landscapes were sublime but the poverty grinding. Everywhere I went people told me how "backward" China was compared to the West. But there were hints of change. That time has arrived.