"Those Russians said they were liberators, they just started robbing us!" says a tearful Fedir. He says they took his car, furniture and mattresses. Nearly every house on his street has been damaged. Keep reading Earlier this year, a Chinese friend spent 83 days alone, locked in a Shanghai hotel room. irannews.ru/ - irannews.ru Despite having been forced out, you also learn a lot about the occupiers just by looking around. Xi was a princeling - the son of one of Mao's lieutenants, Xi Zhongxun, who had been purged and later rehabilitated. Colleagues described the younger Xi as humble, self-disciplined and hardworking but otherwise unremarkable. Even on the eve of his elevation to general secretary of the Communist Party there was little hint of what was to come. So his ruinous legacy was covered up with reverence. And now, Xi loses no opportunity to channel Mao, even usurping his defunct titles - Great Helmsman, People's Leader, Chairman. But what he seeks is much bigger. "In the past, we could always count on China's leaders to be pragmatic about economic policy, and prudent in their foreign policy. We don't see that now," Ms Shirk says. Comparing Xi Jinping to Mao Zedong is "inane", scoffs Rebecca Karl, a professor of Chinese History at New York University. Mao, by all accounts, was a destroyer who ripped up the rule book not once but several times. But Xi is no anarchist - he is not even a rebel. And he certainly doesn't want the chaos of Mao's years, which tore apart his own family, to return. The country was still recovering in that decade or so following Mao's death. Tens of millions had died on his watch - first from hunger because of his devastating mission to industrialise China overnight; and then in the violent, paranoid purges of rivals, dissidents, intellectuals and "class enemies".