National Public Radio (NPR) reminisces over a landmark in the history of Communism, in the latest of their love letters on the Last (Big) Great Hope for Marxist ideology, China. (Lesser Great Hopes linger in the form of Cuba and Venezuela.)

Today, NPR bestows a Big Leftist Smooch on obscure-to-all-but-dedicated-Communists, Montargis, France:

In the 1920s, Montargis was home to hundreds of Chinese young people who came to study and work here. At that time, the French communist party had just been born and Montargis was a hotbed of leftist sentiment.

The young Chinese visitors were looking for ways to change their feudal homeland. The list of those who passed through Montargis reads like a revolutionary Who's Who, including Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai and even a young Mao Zedong himself.

Peiwen Wang, who is head of the Montargis Chinese-French Friendship Association, recently led a group of Chinese civil servants on a walking tour of the town. They stopped in front of a plaque in a park where it is said that some of the young idealists wrote their first revolutionary poems.

Ah, the beauty and passion of revolutionary poems, with not a trace of irony in the NPR piece.

Meanwhile, in other news from Communist China, the ever eager entrepreneurs for state run Capitalism desperately seek to recover from recent extremely bad press. In perfect accord with the Red Chinese practice of show trials, self confession, and public execution, China scapegoats the hapless former head of the Chinese quasi-equivalent to our Food and Drug Administration:

Zheng, 63, was convicted of taking cash and gifts worth $832,000 when he was in charge of the State Food and Drug Administration.

His death sentence was unusually heavy even for China, believed to carry out more court-ordered executions than all other nations combined, and indicates the leadership's determination to confront the country's dire product safety record.

Fears abroad over Chinese-made products were sparked last year by the deaths of dozens of people in Panama who took medicine contaminated with diethylene glycol imported from China. It was passed off as harmless glycerin.

(snip)

In North America earlier this year, pet food containing Chinese wheat gluten tainted with the chemical melamine was blamed for the deaths of dogs and cats.

Since then, U.S. authorities have turned away or recalled toxic fish, juice containing unsafe color additives and popular toy trains decorated with lead paint.

One must wonder at the extreme cognitive dissonance this must cause for nostalgic Leftists, such as those who wrote paeans to China at NPR.

One the one hand, those determined state planners in China surely represent the ideal of state control of production and the protection of the public against Evil Greed, Big Corporate Interests, and their own misguided preferences and desires.

In stark contrast to these sentiments, China runs brutal state enterprises based on slavery, forced organ donation, intellectual property rights violations, fraud, forgery, and economic and environmental devastation of almost unimaginable proportions.

And, quite contrary to the proclivities of the ever-sentimental Left, China likes to use public execution as a primary policy of state coercion of their often errant public. How this must be-twitch those otherwise admiring of the Communist Monolith in China.

Yet, in their heart of hearts, looking way beyond the chimera of Impeachment, the Western Collectives furtively consider whether their consciences would permit making a Death Penalty Exception if the condemned were a certain President or Vice President.

So perhaps the dissonance is quieter than one might imagine.