MAO, Zedong.

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Quelle est la muraille vraiment indestructible? ("What is a true bastion of iron?") A compelling example of Chinese Cultural Revolution propaganda in French, printed in comparatively small numbers. The quote captures the Cultural Revolution's emphasis on the innate energy and power of the masses, an ethos that chimed with the mass protests happening contemporaneously across France.This quote, featured in chapter eight of the "Little Red Book" under the theme of "People's War", originally comes from a concluding speech given by Mao to the Second National Congress of Workers' and Peasants' Representatives held in Jiangxi province in January 1934. At the time, the Chinese Communist Party could only boast control of a few scattered and predominantly rural pockets of China, and it relied on mass mobilization in its base areas, combined with underground insurgencies in the cities, to grow its revolutionary movement. Fast forward three decades, and Mao had once again unleashed the power of the masses through the framework of the Cultural Revolution in order to overcome what he perceived as a gradual stagnation of the revolution in the hands of cautious technocrats.Blind to many of the horrors of the Maoist mass movement, French left wing activists and intellectuals were a prime audience for Maoist talk of the people and their revolutionary potential. The Chinese Communist Party had always been closely linked to France - after all, several members of its first generation leadership c

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