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To me, the article plays this as slightly humorous and kitschy, whereas your comment makes it seem much darker, especially with the Dr. Tiller comparison. One thing you get wrong is, this began among workers at Tsinghua University, not rural dirt farmers. So if this be idiocy (and that seems uncharitable at best to me) it is urban and not rural in character.

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> To me, the article plays this as slightly humorous and kitschy,

It was all like that until you get to the end and find out that people (with at least on specific example) were _killed_ over making a disparaging remark about the "mango". Others were punished for not holding it "reverently" enough.

It sounds funny now it wasn't funny then though.

Idiocy started as urban but it was then pushed and taken advantage of. They built mugs and products with mangoes on it. It wasn't just a local fad.

Yes it seems incongruous to assume that factory workers were likely to be rural, or even that any reader of TFA would be likely to make that mistaken assumption. I'd hazard that few enough American factory workers would have had much contact with mangoes in 1968, so GP comment is doubly bizarre.

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