建国 (jiàn guó)

??...I will try to think and answer

Sometimes a people get complacent with their development...as those that helped them or gave

them something to emulate or to strive for and THEN something happens in the relationship that one

had not anticipated....It may be a compliment for nation-building; trump and nixon have helped to

strengthen the foundation of PRC by Mao Zedong in 1949...in 1972 and 2020...?

Thank you Robert. I wasn't sure what the reporter thought was important about it but she said the Chinese phrase and then translated it. She didn't say who specifically she meant, she just said something like "over here, they..." and she seemed to think it was significant. I'm just starting to learn Chinese history so I don't know if it was a positive or negative reference.

I wondered if it might have something to do with the Japanese in WWII.

Yes, that definitely was a major cornerstone of the foundation of PRC by Mao Zedong in 1949

Is Mao out of favor now with the Chinese people?

Inevitably, as we moved from place to place, the full implications of the long career of Mao as a revolutionary leader came up in the discussion. There are varying opinions with the emphasis of the ‘mistakes’ of Mao when he became the leader of the Party. For some there is an elaborate formula on whether he was 50 per cent good and 50 per cent bad, or whether he was 20 per cent good and 80 per cent bad. It became apparent in small discussions, that the degree to which his ‘mistakes’ outweighed his contribution, depended on whether there was support for the idea of building a socialist project in China, a mixed market socialism or simply a recomposition of capitalism. For the Marxists from the Party school, the confusion about the place of Mao was most evident. The official line about market socialism and prosperity had taken such deformed paths that one could not have a clear discussion on the real challenges facing the building of a society with the real implications of financialisation and militarism in the midst of a capitalist depression. Whatever the balance sheet, there is universal agreement that Mao’s idea of a cultural revolution had been an unmitigated disaster for the Chinese people.

https://www.pambazuka.org/global-south/mao...