When the Chinese Communist party took power in 1949, Mao Zedong declared to a party conference, “The Chinese people, comprising one quarter of humanity, have now stood up. The Chinese have always been a great, courageous and industrious nation; it is only in modern times that they have fallen behind. That was due entirely to oppression and exploitation by foreign imperialism.” Mao’s regime thereafter turned China into a totalitarian society for decades, but the nationalist mantra — China had ‘stood up’ — became an enduring aspect of the Communist party’s legitimacy. Subsequent Communist revolutions made the same claim …read more
Source: The Huffington Post
