Interestingly enough, the Mao statue at ECNU now looks out over a haven of the ever expanding bourgeoisie capitalist system Chairman fought against all those years ago. I felt like this picture showed, quite visually, some of the conflicts of ideas present in modern China and the contradictions of a Communist Party & a People's Republic watching over, arguably, the capitalist system's greatest success, the lifting of millions of Chinese out of extreme poverty.
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I kind of wanted a picture of both the Mao statue and the school Motto on East China Normal's campus. I knew it was a thing that could be done except the only angle that worked required me to stand in the middle of a busy street. That is, a busy street until National Day when the traffic lightened up enough so I could get the photo. On this day, September 9th, in 1972 Chairman Mao Zedong died after a period of poor health in Beijing, China at the age of 82. Despite his important role in founding the Communist Party and the People's Republic, the anniversary of his death has gone almost completely unmentioned at ECNU. Nothing out of the ordinary happened by Mao's statue on the ECNU campus nor was anything mentioned at ECNU's International Opening Ceremony. While the Communist Party has admitted some, but not all, of the many failings of the Mao years and has tried to keep celebrations around him low key, individual Maoists, both in and out of the government, have organized their own events commemorating the 40th anniversary of his death. According to Chinese newspaper The Global Times "an online flower-laying campaign on WeChat, a popular mobile networking app, has garnered 2,451,833 participants." Update: |
AuthorI am a junior at Juniata College spending a year studying abroad at East China Normal University. Please feel free to join my on my journey to China and beyond. Archives
November 2021
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