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This Restaurant Celebrates a Brutal Era in Chinese History

Sichuan is full of restaurants themed around the Cultural Revolution, when millions of Chinese were exiled, tortured, and killed by the Communist regime.

At the 18 Qingnian Road branch of Captain Themed Hot Pot Restaurant in Chongqing, an enormous city in China's southwestern Sichuan province, depictions of Mao Zedong's face are seemingly as ubiquitous as Mickey Mouse's big-eared silhouette at Walt Disney World in Florida.

The late founder of the People's Republic of China is everywhere: wearing a red star-adorned cap on the side of white tin mugs full of Budweiser; arm aloft, painted in vivid full colour on the wall; as a young man, staring earnestly from the circular metal badges pinned to every member of staff's jacket.

The restaurant's guestbook is stuffed full of hand-written praise for the man considered by many to be a great, innovative revolutionary, and by many others to be a ruthless dictator responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people and, via his 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, the strangling of intellectualism and the arts.

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