Even though both Mao Tse-tung (1893–1976) and Chiang K’ai-shek (1887– 1975), mid-century essay paper strongmen who led the People’s Republic of China on the mainland and the Republic of China on Taiwan, respectively, imposed repressive political controls on writers whose obedience they doubted, the heavyhanded measures they often took to silence unwelcome writers worked in favor of these writers in the long run. Readers often shrewdly assumed that any novel that the paramount leader found infuriating enough to denounce must be well worth taking the trouble to read. Many writers have custom writing wryly pointed to an angry and vengeful political leader as their best publicist. Some political leaders even resurrected a centuries-old novel in order to make a contemporary political point. In 1975, Mao Tse-tung and his followers essay writing made a noisy if indirect assault upon Teng Hsiao-p’ing’s (1904–1997) relatively pragmatic economic ideas through headline-grabbing denunciations of the rebel leader Sung Chiang of the Ming novel Shui-hu chuan (Water Margin; custom essay see chapter 35). Insisting that Sung Chiang was a “capitulationist” who had sold out his band of virtuous outlaws to the corrupt imperial court, Mao implied that Teng’s support for using some material incentives custom essays in economic production amounted to a sellout to capitalism. Mao’s attempt to thwart the growth of Chinese economic pragmatism would fail miserably in the end, essay paper but this eleventh-hour gambit unwittingly underscored the significant public role that fiction has been widely thought to play in the twentieth custom writing century.