The image of Mao will always be associated with toilets for me. After taking this photo of Mao by Tiananmen Square, I started reading The Great Shatsby and had to run to find the nearest squat toilet and I missed my target leaving a peanut butter smoothie all over the bathroom floor.
It must be said that Mao had a great vision for China, which in many ways has lived up to his vision. It just achieved its greatness through means very different than those that Mao would have preferred. Deng Xiaoping’s embrace of a more market-based economy and his Open Door Policy of 1979 basically lifted somewhere between 250 and 300 million people out of poverty, which is a lot to be said.
“The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history” Mao 1945
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