A controversial gold-painted statue of communist founding father Mao Zedong has been destroyed after it apparently lacked government approval.
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Chinese officials told The People’s Daily the 121-foot statue some called “Mega Mao” has now been destroyed, because it was determined the “approval process” had not been properly handled, reported The Guardian.
A photo circulating on social media purportedly showed the statue being taken apart with a black cloth covering Mao’s head, according to the BBC.
The giant statue of the late communist leader, on farmland in Henan’s Tongxu county, was said to have cost almost 3 million yuan ($460,000; £313,000).
Earlier this month, news outlets and Internet users the world over gawked and jeered at new images of a 120-foot golden statue of Chinese communist revolutionary Mao Zedong, then under construction in an incongruously brown and frozen field.
It’s 40 years since Mao’s death and he is still regarded as a hero in China.
However, it sparked an outpouring of criticism and ridicule online, with some people arguing that it wasted resources and was located at an inappropriate location.
The leaders of the CPC in the last three decades including the present President Xi Jinping are the supporters of Deng’s reform and opening up policy while revering Mao as founder of the party and modern China.
The Henan province was one of the regions worst hit by China’s great starvation in the 1950s, a catastrophe that claimed tens of millions of lives that was caused by Mao’s “great lepa forward” – a bid for breakneck industrialisation.
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He was also responsible for the Cultural Revolution, a period of ideological fundamentalism which saw hundreds of thousands oppressed by Red Guard zealots.
