Keeping with the love theme this week, China is a nation that is all about the love. Heck, it’s big on the color red, so everyday there must be like Valentine’s Day, right? Yes, and according to a document just released by the U.S. State Department, the chairman of the love was none other than Chairman Mao Zedong.
In 1973, during trade talks with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Mao offered to trade U.S. goods for Chinese women. Now that’s how you get the trade talks going!
“We don’t have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands.”
Mao later upped his offer to 10 million Chinese women, apparently the Chinese women market had been hit hard by China’s struggling economy and the failed Great Leap Forward. This blog remembers the day when you could sell a Chinese woman for a single barrel of oil. Ah …
Kissinger, no stranger to love himself (he once said, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”), did not flatly turn down the offer. Instead, he said the U.S. would have to “study” the offer. One can only imagine the long nights of studying Chinese women Kissinger had to put in after that. But he did it for the good of the country.