'The Chinese people have stood up' is probably the most famous slogan on the mainland. Quiz any Chinese, from employees of multinational companies in Beijing's skyscrapers to barefoot farmers who have never left their half-hectare of land in the mountains of Guizhou , and almost all of them will say they had heard it at some time in their lives.
The slogan was attributed to Mao Zedong when the People's Republic of China was established 60 years ago, and some will even tell you they recall vividly how Mao pronounced the words in Putonghua with his heavy Hunan accent while standing in Tiananmen Square on October 1, 1949.
The slogan trumpets the legitimacy of the Communist Party, which regarded itself as the saviour of Chinese civilisation by driving the Japanese, Western powers and the corrupt Nationalists off the mainland.
The slogan is a manifesto of the 'Chinese dream', which aims to bring back the power and prosperity that the country had historically enjoyed. The propaganda machine has created many slogans in the past six decades, but this is one of the few that struck, and remain in, the hearts of ordinary people.
Yet there is one problem. Mao did not say it in Tiananmen Square. He did not say it on October 1, 1949, either. And some historians say that - like 'Let them eat cake', which Marie Antoinette never said, and 'Play it again, Sam', which Humphrey Bogart never said - Mao never said the quote attributed to him.
The quality of the official film footage of the founding ceremony of the 'new' China was as bad as it could be, with black and white images that were often dark, shaky and blurred, and muffled soundtracks full of noise and crackling. Nonetheless, when Mao stood in front of a microphone in Tiananmen Square, speaking with a ribbon on his chest and a piece of paper in both hands, the slogan did not appear, nor did it anywhere in his address to the marching crowd during the rest of the ceremony.
