Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (12 page)

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Authors: Geremie Barme

Tags: #History, #Asia, #China, #Literary Criticism, #Asian, #Chinese, #Political Science, #Political Ideologies, #Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, #World, #General, #test

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Page 43
stage productions. It is hard to imagine that 1990s Chinese politicians, the gray bureaucrats of Reform, will ever achieve such a reputation unless, of course, an ironical, popular penchant for retro "nonpersonality cults" springs up in the years to come.
Numerous teleseries and documentaries related to Mao's life were produced in the lead-up to the centenary. Some of them included rare archival footage, as in the case of the hagiographic twelve-part TV documentary "Mao Zedong (1893-1993)," which screened in December 1993.
198
Then there were TV programs such as the Mao quiz show called "The Sun and Truth," with its competing teams parroting Mao quotes and giving publication details, dates, place and so on.
199
Other programs, such as the successful 1990 multiepisode TV soap "Aspirations," used Mao or rather Mao-period nostalgia to highlight the worldly cynicism of the Deng era. "Aspirations" contrasted the human closeness of the past (despite the attendant horrors of the Cultural Revolution period) with the heartless materialism of the present.
200
The 1992 sitcom ''The Editors" treated Maoist diction and style with playful irreverence,
201
and in the popular 1993 series "A Beijing Man in New York," Mao appeared as the patron saint of struggling entrepreneurs. In episode 9, the protagonist Wang Qiming launches into an impassioned soliloquy before starting up his knitwear sweatshop. Imitating the tone and delivery of a Party secretary, he satirizes the Party and authoritarian rule while still affirming that for things to be run effectively you have to have a transparently bad person in control. It's better to be up front about how bad you are, he argues, than to pretend to be good. Wang concludes his speech with an admonition to a roomful of imaginary workers to "abandon your illusions," a reference to the title of a famous article Mao wrote criticizing the United States in 1949, and get to work.
202
After a hiatus of three decades, Mao reappeared on both stage and screen in the early 1980s.
203
The veteran PLA actor Gu Yue came to specialize in the mature Mao (see "In a Glass Darkly"), while Wang Ying of the Central Experimental Theater Company concentrated on playing the handsome young Mao.
204
With the enormous popular success of such character actors, it soon seemed that everyone wanted a Mao of their own, and places as far flung as Inner Mongolia found Chairman look-alikes to perform at local benefits and shows.
205
While official biopics have been common in China for years, starting in the early 1990s, Mao also featured one way or another in many non- or semiofficial films, such as Shi Jian and Chen Jue's
Tiananmen
(1991),
206
Wu Wenguang's
My 1966
(1993), a droning documentary about exRed Guards, Chen Kaige's epic
Farewell My Concubine
(1993), and Zhang Yuan's
The Square
(1994). In Tian Zhuangzhuang's
Blue Kite
(1993), one

 

Page 44
of the most brooding historical films made in China, Mao did not play an on-screen role, but his presence is felt throughout the film. In 1995 Chen Kaige planned a new project titled
To Kill a King,
a film about the assassination attempt on Emperor Qin Shihuang, to whom Mao had compared himself (see "The Mao Phenomenon"). The screenplay of
To Kill a King
was the work of the ex-army writer Wang Peigong, the author of
WM,
207
the controversial 1985 play about the Cultural Revolution, and an activist jailed for his support of the 1989 student demonstrations who, like Bai Hua and so many others of his generation, was bedeviled by a fascination with Mao.
208
Theater productions have featured Mao for many years, although in the centenary year attempts were made to depict the Leader as something of a tragic hero. In late 1993, for example, the PLA staged a work titled
The Sun Never Sets.
Set in January 1976, shortly after Zhou Enlai's death, it shows Mao as a solitary figure, fearful of death, superstitious, and wary of the karmic punishment that awaits him. He receives news that a massive meteorite has fallen in the Northeast of China and sees it as an omen of his imminent demise. Despite these more human touches, Zhu Shimao, a noted actor and the producer of the play, averred that "Mao was a god," and in the production the Chairman spouts quotations about hard work, thrifty living, and sacrificing personal interest in the service of the state even as death approaches. Some critics, not surprisingly, saw the play as a veiled criticism of the corrupt values rife in contemporary China.
209
Although John Adams and Alice Goodman's opera
Nixon in China
appeared in the West in 1987, the first traditional Chinese opera featuring Mao was not staged in Mainland China until 1994.
Mao Zedong in 1960,
a
pingju
-style opera created in Mudan, Heilongjiang Province, and featuring an aria-singing Chairman, premièred in Beijing in November 1994. The story reflects, to quote official propaganda, "how a Great Man dealt with everyday life while also confronted with the ever-changing complexities of international politics, the natural disasters faced by China, and the confusion experienced by both the Party and the People."
210
To date, no overtly critical stage representation of Mao has appeared.
211
At the same time as a second spate of state-sanctioned iconoclasm aimed at removing the remaining public statues of Mao Zedong saw the demolition of Mao monoliths at such symbolic sites as the entrance to Beijing University in 1988,
212
artists such as Wang Guangyi, as we have noted above, began including reworked images of Mao in their paintings. The humorous use and abuse of Mao in Mainland works did, to an extent, reflect what Li Xianting (see "The Imprisoned Heart") called a "Mao obsession." As Li remarks, it was a fixation "that still haunted the popular psyche," combining ''both a nostalgia for the simpler, less corrupt, and more self-as-

 

Page 45
sured period of Mao's rule with a desire to appropriate Mao Zedong, the paramount God of the past, in ventures satirizing life and politics in contemporary China." Practical political considerations, however, as well as the vagaries of the marketplace, meant that few of these works were openly iconoclastic, questioning, or even much more than comely pop trivia. All too often they displayed the tired tropes of po-mo, playing on the Chairman's image with all the resources that appropriation and pastiche could muster while rarely reflecting any of the true cultural complexity of the popular Mao Cult, or the residual social and cultural aftershocks of the original Cult.
Avant-garde Mao art, like so much of nonofficial Mainland culture after 1989 indulged itself more in consumer irony than in social critique (see Figure 32). As I have commented on such tendencies elsewhere: "When . . . irony itself is commodified and used `to grease the wheels of commerce, not . . . to resist its insidious effects,'
213
the cultural significance of market-oriented dissent becomes deeply disturbing."
214
The most threatening thing about the Shanghai artist Yu Youhan's noted floral-patterned Maos, for example, is that they could be easily mass-produced as bedspreads or curtains.
215
And many other artists have used Mao as a decoration, cultural wallpaper, in their work, rather than as a subject for serious depiction. Such playfulness does indeed have a liberating dimension, and this is evident in the work of Beijing artists such as Liu Wei, himself a product of the Cultural Revolution, whose paintings present the indulgent yet equally unsettlingly distorted vision of Mao, not unlike the image you'd get if you looked at the Chairman through a fish tank.
216
Zhu Wei, another Beijing artist (and former PLA soldier) whose work was exhibited in Hong Kong in 1994,
217
used Mao, his writings, and his poetry in the winsome, bloated literati fantasies of his
Beijing Story
series
218
(see Figure 33). Numerous other painters have also had a brush with Mao, including Yan Peiming and Yu Hong
219
and their works safely adorn the walls of expat collectors in China and of connoisseurs in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and can be found on display in museums and art spaces throughout the world. The Mainland has yet to produce a group like St. Petersburg's "necrorealists," howeverartists who have made much of the corpses and deaths of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler.
220
Liu Dahong, a Shanghai-based painter, has gone as far as any other Mainland artist to date in reworking Mao within the context of traditional subject matter to achieve a more layered and complex vision. This is particularly true of the four paintings
Mao for All Seasons
and in
The Honeymoon,
a colorful tableau showing the Great Leader lecturing a gathering of Party heroes in what can be construed as a satire on Mao's cultural policies.
221
Liu's later scroll painting
The Butterfly Longs for the Flower
shows

 

Page 46
Mao as an aged emperor surrounded by his phantasmagoric court.
222
However, none of the Mainland artists mentioned here have matched the nuanced approach of the late 1980s
Chairmen Mao Series
by the New York-based painter Zhang Hongtu (Hong Tu Zhang)
223
(see Figure 34). Zhang's work, playful and deeply earnest, was used in dress, jacket, and T-shirt designs by Vivienne Tam of East Wind Code in late 1994
224
and enjoyed a commodified success in a way that was as provocative and even more commercial than his Mainland counterparts
225
(see Figure 35).
From 1987, the Beijing rock-pop singer Cui Jian recycled the detritus of Maoist culture to help create his own bad-boy image and, at the time, his wonderfully baneful renditions of old Party favorites such as "Nanniwan" outraged the authorities.
226
By the early 1990s, however, rearranged and revamped Party hymns were commonplace, and numerous wannabe rock stars invariably produced their own versions of songs such as "The East Is Red."
227
Now that everyone was "playing" (
wan'r
) with Party tradition there was nothing particularly risqué about the music; repackaged revolutionary rock was just another part of the cultural landscape
228
(see Figure 36a, 36b). Mao was also very popular among the stylishly naughty boys and girls of the Beijing rock demimonde, so much so that pro-Mao machismo was endemic to the scene.
229
As happened so often during the Mao revival, the Chairman was manipulated by diverse groups with totally conflicting interests, even achieving a new popularity with the urban subculture while still maintaining his status as an authoritarian figure.
At roughly the same time (1990-91), the Party began to orchestrate a response to the latest invasion of Canto Pop from Hong Kong-Taiwan by commissioning karaoke-versions of pro-socialist patriotic favorites for use in bars and clubs throughout the country
230
(see Figures 37, 38, 39). Many of the MTVs producedon videotape as well as laser diskwere risible, and some contained young male students longing for the Chairman in what I can only describe as "homoerotica with Chinese characteristics."
231
This trend for revamped revolutionary songs, sparked to a great extent by the paucity of new popular Mainland music following the boom year of 1988,
232
led to the production and success of "The Red Sun" tape in late 1991 (see "Let the Red Sun Shine In" [Figure 40]),
233
as well as of its numerous imitators
234
(see Figures 41, 42, 43).
While Mao has been part of the designer-wallpaper of the China Club in Hong Kong for some years, he generally enjoyed a more exalted public status on the Mainlandthat is, until the Beijing Hard Rock Café opened on 16 April 1994, when he was joined by members of the older generation of revolutionary rebels from the West. Linda Jaivin described the scene as follows:

 

Page 47
England's Fab Four and China's Great One come together, right now, over me. On the ceiling dome of Beijing's new Hard Rock Café, the Beatles, Chuck Berry, and other venerable ancestors of rock pose like tourists in front of Beijing's Temple of Heaven and Tiananmen Gate. Mao gazes down from his perch on Tiananmen at posters of the Sex Pistols, Chinese bartenders mixing cocktails under a sign that reads `Love All, Serve All,' Westerners scoffing burgers, and local DJs downing draught beers. It's hard to tell if he's still smiling.
235
Mao More than Ever
In fact, the new Mao Cult shared a number of features in common with the cult of Elvis, "the King," spirit guide of the Hard Rock chain. In
Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession,
Greil Marcus described the Elvis cult in terms that strike a familiar chord as we contemplate the abiding popularity of Chairman Mao in China:
When he died, the event was a kind of explosion that went off silently, in minds and hearts; out of that explosion came many fragments, edging slowly into the light, taking shape, changing shape again and again as the years went on. No one, I think, could have predicted the ubiquity, the playfulness, the perversity, the terror, and the fun of this, of Elvis Presley's second life: a great, common conversation, sometimes, a conversation between specters and fans, made out of songs, art works, books, movies, dreams; sometimes more than anything cultural noise, the glossolalia of money, advertisements, tabloid headlines, bestsellers, urban legends, nightclub japes. In either form it wasisa story that needed no authoritative voice, no narrator, a story that flourishes precisely because it is free of any such thing, a story that told itself.
236
In some ways the popular and "ironic" rehearsals of Mao and Mao-era styles are typical of what, in 1994, the now defunct London journal
The Modern Review
termed the "art of revival."
237
As critics writing for
TMR,
which specialized in "low brow culture for highbrows," state: ". . . although revivals don't offer convincing reconstructions of the past, preferring re-arrangements, the way one period re-arranges another certainly offers a telling impression of the revivalist age.''
238
This was certainly true of the new Mao Cult of the early 1990s. Economic reform and ideological decay had freed Mao from the carefully-cultivated persona fostered by Party propaganda.
Another aspect of the Mao Cult was that it capitalized on China's new teeny-bopper and youth culture marketthat is, the buying power of the young. Many consumers of Mao products were adolescents or people in their early twenties who were unfamiliar with the Mao era. Unconcerned with the burdens of the past, they could indulge their curiosity and be playful in their approach to Mao memorabilia. Young people often regarded Mao not as a

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