Chinese villagers construct massive golden statue of Chairman Mao

A group of villagers and business people have constructed a gigantic golden statue of Chairman Mao in the open countryside at a cost of around 3 million yuan.

The statue towers 37 metres in the central province of Henan and depicts the man who ruled China with an iron fist for nearly three decades seated in thoughtful repose with his hands crossed.

Its construction was reportedly funded by several local entrepreneurs and completed in December after nine months of labour, the HMR.cn portal said on Monday.

Despite being blamed for millions of deaths, Mao is still widely revered in China, where the Communist leadership tightly controls public discussion of history and attempts to use Mao’s legacy to shore up its support.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has praised Mao as a "great figure" and revived some of his rhetoric and centralisation of power, while following the party's 1980s conclusion that he also made "mistakes".

However, some Chinese people criticised the statue, pointing out that its location in Henan, the centre of a famine in the late 1950s resulting from Mao's economic policies estimated to have killed as many as 40 million people.

"Have you forgotten about the Great Famine, building that?" asked one poster on Sina Weibo, a Chinese equivalent of Twitter.