President of Congo surprised Chinese by taking picture with statue of Mao in his mausoleum
May 31, 2023
The visit of the President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to China caused an unexpected outcry. Felix Tshisekedi visited the mausoleum of Mao Zedong in Beijing and took a picture in front of the statue of the Great Pilot. Usually foreign delegations do not do this. Standard protocol includes only the laying of wreaths at the Monument to the People's Heroes in Tiananmen Square. In recent years, exceptions to this rule have been very rare: in 2018, the Mao mausoleum was visited by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and in 2022 by the head of Argentina, Alberto Fernandez, who arrived at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics.
At the same time, the DRC and China have a very complicated history of bilateral relations. Felix Tshisekedi's father, Étienne Tshisekedi, the former leader of the DRC, was an adviser to Patrice Lumumba in his youth. In 1960, Lumumba was overthrown, and the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko came to power, taking a pro-American and anti-Soviet position. In 1971, he visited Taiwan, but in 1973 he unexpectedly improved relations with the PRC. He visited China and North Korea several times, took Mao Zedong's jacket as a model of anti-colonial costume. Like Mao Mobutu Sese Seko, he began to call himself Pilot, and after the death of the first chairman of the PRC, he declared three days of mourning in the country. Zaire (as the DRC was called in those years) received significant economic assistance from China, the debts of which were written off by the "Chinese Gorbachev" Zhao Ziyang. Later, Mobutu Sese Seko was deposed and died in exile,
Photo: baike.baidu.com
It is all the more interesting that the visit of Felix Tshisekedi to Mao's mausoleum went unnoticed in the Chinese media. The same thing happened with the visits of the leaders of Venezuela and Argentina, about which the Chinese learned not from their own press reports, but from translations of foreign materials.
"Foreign dignitaries paid their respects at the Memorial Hall of Chairman Mao, the founding leader of China, and it was of great informational value. It should also be reported and made public so that the Chinese people and the peoples of the whole world can see this respect, friendship and continuity. It didn't take a big article, just one picture, one text message, one sentence, why is this so hard to do?I'm a small ordinary person, I have no education, so I'm just asking what I can't understand.Why isn't the mainstream media report foreign guests admiring the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall? What is the media intentionally avoiding?" — such reviews are now not uncommon in social networks.
Photo: mp.weixin.qq.com