Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden quoted Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong this weekend.
Biden joined ABC News’s Robin Roberts on Sunday and was asked about choosing California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate and whether he felt “pressure to select a black woman.”
The former vice president responded that he wants his potential administration to “look like the people, look like the country,” a comment he’s made repeatedly on the campaign trail.
“Fifty-one percent of the people in this country are women,” he said. “As that old expression goes, ‘women hold up half the sky.’”
EXCLUSIVE: Choosing Kamala Harris as his running mate was “an easy decision to make,” Joe Biden tells @RobinRoberts, citing her role on the Senate Judiciary Committee: “I watched her just insist on getting the answers.” https://t.co/zqZAx4C01t pic.twitter.com/ladzXv7cW5
— ABC News (@ABC) August 23, 2020
The expression traces back to Mao and helped give certain women rights in mid-20th century China. It was also used in propaganda literature.
This isn’t the first time Biden quoted the dictator, whose Great Leap Forward policy led to the deaths of as many as 45 million people in China.
“We’ve got to get real economic relief into women’s hands now,” Biden said during a virtual fundraiser in July. He then reportedly quoted Mao, saying that “women hold up half the sky.
One of Biden’s senior advisers, Anita Dunn, also said in 2009 that Mao was one of her “favorite political philosophers.”
“Mao Zedong said, ‘You fight your war, and I’ll fight mine,’” she said to graduating high school students at the time. “Think about that for a second. You don’t have to accept the definition of how to do things, and you don’t have to follow other people’s choices and paths. You fight your own war. You lay out your own path.”
Biden accepted his party’s nomination for president last week during the Democratic National Convention, telling voters he will bring them out of the “darkness” that hangs over the country.
“The current president has cloaked America in darkness for much too long — too much anger, too much fear, too much division,” Biden said. “Here and now, I give you my word: If you entrust me with the presidency, I will draw on the best of us, not the worst. I will be an ally of the light, not the darkness.”
