Editor's note: President Xi Jinping delivered a speech at a symposium commemorating the 120th birth anniversary of Chairman Mao Zedong on Dec 26. Following on this page are excerpts from the speech:

National liberation and socialism with Chinese characteristics

Comrade Mao Zedong was a great patriot and national hero of the modern times, the core of the first generation of Chinese leadership and a great figure who changed the face of the nation and led Chinese people to a new destiny. He was a great Marxist, a great proletarian revolutionary, strategist and theoretician, and a pioneer of the application of Marxism in China.