No tears for Mao: 1976 death was an imperial fallBEIJING -- The death of Communist China's founding father Mao Zedong 40 years ago this week was akin to the demise of an emperor and helped pave the way for the modern nation, says one of the few Westerners in Beijing at the time. Ragnar Baldursson, a young Marxist from Iceland, was a student in Beijing in September 1976 when, after a year of upheavals, authorities announced the unthinkable — Mao was dead. "China today is a product of that period," Baldursson, today a diplomat at the Icelandic embassy in Beijing, told AFP. He himself fell asleep "dreaming of Mao," said Baldursson, who published a memoir, "Nineteen Seventy Six," earlier this year. The workers, he recalled, professed fierce nationalism but the tools that were supposedly "made in China" bore Western brand names.

Source: The China Post September 07, 2016 17:15 UTC