Former Vice President Joe Biden quoted former Chinese dictator Mao Zedong for at least the second time in a campaign appearance Sunday.
The moment came in an interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts, where Biden referenced one of Mao’s sayings regarding women’s rights. Mao’s declaration of gender equality came as part of his “great leap forward,” an effort to modernize a then-rural China that resulted in the deaths of more than 45 million people.
“As that old expression goes, ‘women hold up half the sky,’ and in order to be able to succeed, you’ve got to be dealt in across the board,” Biden told Roberts.
In new ABC interview, Biden quotes CHAIRMAN MAO to explain why he chose Kamala Harris as his running mate.
“As that old expression goes, ‘women hold up half the sky,’ and in order to be able to succeed, you’ve got to be dealt in across the board.”https://t.co/H9ogimg2W7
— Vince Coglianese (@VinceCoglianese) August 24, 2020
Biden has referenced this quote from Mao at least one other time on the 2020 campaign trail during a digital campaign event July 14, saying it in reference to economic relief for women amid coronavirus.
“We’ve got to get real economic relief into women’s hands now,” Biden said, later adding that “women hold up half the sky,” according to Fox News.
One of Biden’s senior advisors, Anita Dunn, has said Mao is one of her “favorite political philosophers,” telling a group of graduating high schoolers in 2009 that he and Mother Theresa are “the two people that I turn to most” when seeking to break out of a political mold. (RELATED: China Wants Trump To Lose 2020 Election, Russia Wants Him To Win, US Intelligence Says)
President Donald Trump has been heavily critical of China since gaining office in 2017, and has ramped up those efforts further since coronavirus spread out of China to the rest of the world.
He has taken to referring to COVID-19 as the “China virus” or “the plague from China,” often saying that the Chinese government prevented planes from traveling out of infected Wuhan to the rest of China, but allowed planes to travel from there to the rest of the world.