By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN
Associated Press
BEIJING – With his image gracing bank notes and staring out from Tiananmen Gate, Mao Zedong remains a constant presence in China 120 years after his birth, revered as a hero who founded the communist state and restored national pride — even as China moves ever further from his vision of a communist society.
China is marking Thursday’s anniversary of his birth with relatively understated celebrations, a far cry from the cult of personality that once surrounded Mao, and a sign of how far China has traveled in the 37 years since his death and more than three decades since the junking of orthodox Marxism.
President Xi Jinping invokes Mao in his fight against corruption and borrows Maoist concepts such as the “mass line” to extol the virtues of close ties between the rulers and those ruled. Yet he has also proposed giving the free market a “decisive role” in the economy, a concept that would have been anathema to the “Great Helmsman,” as Mao was called.