Masisi is 2nd world leader to visit Mao Zedong’s museum in Mt. Kushan
President Mokgweetsi Masisi goes into history books as the first African and second world leader to visit the renowned mountain resort known as Mount Kushan in China. Mount Kushan started off as a missionary outpost of the British and was later taken over by the Chinese and used by the nationalists as they fought the war with Kuomintang and finally taken over by Mao Zedong as a retreat area for his Communist Party. Masisi told a press briefing Saturday on his return from China at SSKA VIP Lounge that this was one of the “highlights” of his visit to China. Here he saw the Museum that was originally the house that Mao Zedong – the founding father of the People’s Republic of China and Chairman of the Communist Party of China – lived in with his wife. The first world leader to visit the place, Masisi, said, was the Vietnamese President and the second was “thy truly and the first African, so we have one up” he enthused. Masisi says he toured the Museum and saw the bed that Mao slept in including the linen and walked around the premises, sat on the chairs that Chairman Mao sat on as he wrote his poetry and some of his ideologies that have since come to be known as Maoism. Chairman Mao died in 1976. During the state visit and the Forum on China Africa Cooperation summit, Masisi extracted concessions from China that include a grant of P340 million and a debt cancellation for P80 million. He also used the visit to reaffirm Botswana’s commitment to One-China Policy as well as to deepen the diplomatic ties between the two nations. Overall, Masisi and his entourage that included ministers, senior government officials and the private business leaders hailed the visit as a “resounding success.”