Chairman Mao Zedong was China’s founding leader, a great thinker, military leader, strategist, statesman, and proletarian revolutionary.
Before him, China was impoverished and weak, carved up by foreign powers, and its people were subjected to indiscriminate slaughter. Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship of great landlords and warlords brutally oppressed the working people. The landlords’ returning militias treated tenant farmers as their tools. China’s industrial capacity was so feeble that it could not even produce a single match. Capitalists controlled the market.
By the time Chairman Mao was gone, China possessed atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, satellites, and missiles—the achievements known as “Two Bombs, One Satellite.” It was a country with a basic industrial foundation, a country that had largely eliminated infectious diseases. The illiteracy rate had fallen from thirty percent—no, from eighty percent—to twenty percent. Society’s industrial productive capacity had been greatly unleashed.
For the first time, the people became masters of their own country, no longer subjected to oppression by landlords, feudal warlords, and capitalists.
He also actively supported internationalist struggles, helping dismantle the world’s colonial system and enabling the peoples of the Third World to regain their freedom.
The leader of steel is dead, but the leader’s steel still defends his people.