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Leading the 130th birth anniversary celebrations of Mao Zedong, Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday hailed the thought of the ruling Communist Party founder as "invaluable spiritual wealth" and will remain the party's guiding spirit. Mao's thoughts contained in his Red Book which once resonated across the world and sparked Communist movements paled into insignificance after his death as it was overtaken by his successor Deng Xiaoping's widespread economic reforms, propelling China into the second largest economy next only to the US. Deng's opaque Socialism with Chinese Characteristics gave wide room for the successive Chinese leaders to expand reforms including the introduction of private property, shunned by Mao. The party theoreticians in recent years were also critical of some of Mao's political and economic campaigns, especially his disastrous Cultural Revolution (1966-76) in which thousands were killed in the name of purging capitalists and traditionalists. The Communist .
China's ruling Communist Party is set to slide back to its founder Mao Zedong's era soon as President Xi Jinping is set to break the decades-old 10-year term rule to cling in power and perhaps for life, amid mounting pressure from the US-led West against Beijing's aggressive quest to become a dominant world power. On Sunday, 2,296 delegates elected under the ideological parameters set by 69-year-old Xi, will attend the carefully-choreographed Communist Party's once-in-a-five-year Congress which is widely expected to endorse his continuation in power. The outcome of the in-camera Party Congress is expected to end two very strict five-year term limits followed by Xi's predecessors to avert the danger of the one party state becoming a country with a single leader dominating the political scene. In the century-old history of the CPC, Mao remained at the helm until his death in 1976, ruling the most populous country and subjecting it to his ideological experiments like the Cultural ...