Quotation

The word here rendered as “copycat”* originally denoted a mountain hamlet protected by a stockade or other fortifications; later it acquired an extended meaning as a hinterland area, home to the poor. It was also a name once given to the lairs of outlaws and bandits, and the word has continued to have connotations of freedom from official control. === In China’s overheated political campaigns, revolution was just a short step away from counterrevolution. In popular idiom it was a matter of “flipping pancakes”: everyone was just a pancake sizzling on the griddle, flipped from side to side by the hand of fate. Yesterday’s revolutionary became today’s counterrevolutionary, just as today’s counterrevolutionary would become tomorrow’s revolutionary.