Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (6 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

BOOK: Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader
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Page 17
mid-May. Depending on whom you spoke to at the time, interpretations of Mao's joining the protests varied: He wouldn't have allowed the situation to deteriorate to such an extent without taking action, said one school of thought; he provided moral vision and a sense of self-worth in a way that the new leaders could not, said another.
Yet wit, protests against corruption, and portraits were not the only signs that Chairman Mao had a role to play in the movement. His spirit inveigled itself into the proceedings in a number of ways. The 26 April
People's Daily
editorial declaring that the student protests that erupted after Hu Yaobang's death were instigated by a small handful of plotters intent on overthrowing the Party, immediately revived memories of the official Maoist invective used to denounce the 5 April Tiananmen Square Incident in 1976.
Nor was the rhetoric of the protesters free of hoary political associations. Many of the slogans and much of the speechifying and posturing were also familiar from the Maoist past. Even the language of a key document of the protests, the students' Hunger Strike Declaration, reflected the style of the Chairman. Indeed, some of the lines were an unconscious paraphrase of one of Mao's earliest articles.
65
He also made his presence felt in a more ethereal manner. On the afternoon of 23 May, the massive picture of Mao hanging on Tiananmen Gate was splattered with paint by an errant group of protesters from Hunan.
66
Immediately after this incident a dramatic storm struck the city. Many were convinced that Mao, infuriated with the protests and the desecration of his image, had "manifested his supernatural power" (
xianling
) and struck out at the demonstrators.
67
Among the student leaders, Mao's pervasive influence also made itself felt after this. There were constant purges at the top and endless covert meetings. The general lack of democratic principles, in particular from the time of the hunger strike (mid May) onward, as well as the shrill rhetoric of demagogues such as Chai Ling
68
and the demonizing of opponents in the ranks of the students, teachers, and intellectuals as "traitors," ''collaborators," and "capitulationists" who were supposedly engaged in plots and conspiracies to sell the movement out to the government, clearly reflected the political heritage of the long-dead Chairman.
There were other reasons for the reappearance of Mao among workers from the late 1980s (and not only in 1989), as we have indicated in the story referred to in the opening paragraph of this essay. The revival of the Stalin cult in the Brezhnev era may also be instructive in our investigation of the renewed popularity of Mao in the Chinese Reform era. Victor Zaslavsky says of the late 1960s' nostalgia for the days of Stalin:
The terror increased social mobility, eliminated re-emergent class barriers, and functioned as a socio-psychological mechanism by creating the sensation

 

Page 18
of a "negative" equality, or even of protection for individuals against the arbitrariness of local authority. At the end of the 1960s, when various enterprises began massive layoffs of superfluous workers in order to carry out economic reforms, workers often had fond recollections of Stalin's "justice," when factory administrators "lived in fear''in contrast to this new period, when they could "do as they pleased." . . . With the atomization of the working class and in the absence of any workers' democracy, of the right to association and strike, a strong central power comes to be seen as a guarantee of workers' economic rights against the arbitrariness of local administration.
69
As for the young, the general mood of helplessness in the 1960s only added to the nostalgia for the past. As Zaslavsky notes in words that adumbrate some of the attitudes that appeared among various strata of China's urban youth in the 1990s: "The young neither fight against communism, argue against it, nor curse it; something much worse has happened to communism: they laugh at it." In the Soviet Union the youngworkers, students, and otherswere witnessing their society turning into a realm of consumers and found their own lives increasingly meaningless and without goals. Their creativity frustrated and deprived of a positive direction, "the young look[ed] back nostalgically to the period of social revolution inseparably linked with Stalin's name."
70
There was, however, another level of the abiding reputation of Stalin in the Soviet Union. As the Soviet dissident philosopher Alexander Zinoviev observed, Stalin's rule was the ultimate expression of popular will and the mass personality.
71
He was the embodiment not only of history but of the national spirit as well. To deny him was to negate not only one's own history but also vital facets of the national character. Large numbers of people had participated in the terror that marked Stalin's rule, just as in China the nation had enthusiastically responded to the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the ceaseless political purges that Mao had directed from the early 1950s. To "rediscover" Mao in a period of rapid change and social dislocation was for many also a grounding act of self-affirmation.
In China, the events of 1988 and 1989natural disasters and economic uncertainty followed by a fear of national collapse, mass protests against corruption and the lack of freedoms followed by the ill-managed government suppression of the 1989 protests, the equivocal response of the Western democracies, and the fall of communism in Eastern Europeall served to encourage the nascent Mao Cult. As is so often the case when people face economic uncertainty and social anomie, old cultural symbols, cults, practices, and beliefs are spontaneously revived to provide a framework of cohesion and meaning to a threatening world. To many, Mao was represen-

 

Page 19
tative of an age of certainty and confidence, of cultural and political unity, and, above all, of economic equality and probity.
The Maoist past reflected badly on Deng's present. Yet perhaps it was only with the relative economic freedoms allowed by the reforms that people could afford to indulge in an anodyne wave of pro-Mao nostalgia. Certainly, the new Cult suggested alternatives to the Reformist economic and social order, but it did not offer new or viable political solutions to China's problems. If anything, the Mao Cult looked fondly on strong government, coherent national goals, authority, and power. Mao was, first and foremost, an unwavering patriot who led the nation against foreign imperialism and expelled foreign capital.
72
The formulas of the Mao era also offered simple answers to complex questions: direct collective action over painful individual decisions, reliance on the State rather than a grinding struggle for the self, national pride as opposed to self-doubt. Many could indulge in Mao nostalgia because due to bans on remembering the past they had forgotten its horrors. Unlike Europeans, for example, who are exposed to a continuous media barrage related to World War II, Chinese government censorship of most information on the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution meant that the populace had not had to deal with unadulterated memory and horror through film, television, newspaper articles, memoirs, and so on. Emotionally, therefore, many people, and in particular the young, could partake in the luxury of a positive nostalgia for the past.
As folk religion flourished outside urban centers from the 1980s, the eclectic nature of Chinese popular beliefs meant that the Chairman could be subsumed within a larger system of faith. Many commentators have noted that Mao has finally found a niche in the traditional Chinese pantheon alongside such martial heroes as Guan Gong, Zhuge Liang, and Liu Bei. The real Cult of Chairman Mao was no longer determined by Party fiat, and the authorities knew it. The old propaganda line "Chairman Mao will forever live in our hearts" (
Mao zhuxi yongyuan huo zai women xinzhong
) had literally come true. But Mao no longer ruled as he once did through Party organizations, overt propaganda, and ceaseless political campaigns. His spirit was more ineffable, perhaps even more omnipresent.
EveryMao
There was something for everyone in the Mao persona. As Edgar Snow wrote in the early 1960s: "What makes him [Mao] formidable is that he is not just a party boss but by many millions of Chinese is quite genuinely regarded as a teacher, statesman, strategist, philosopher, poet laureate, national hero, head of the family, and greatest liberator in history. He is to

 

Page 20
them Confucius plus Lao-tzu plus Rousseau plus Marx plus Buddha. . . ."
73
In the 1990s, Mao remains a patriotic leader, martial hero, philosopherking, poet, calligrapher (surrounded as he so often was with the bric-a-brac of the traditional literatusclothbound books, writing brushes, and ink stones). But he is also widely seen in a positive light as a strong and irascible figure, a wily infighter, a man who was both emperor and oracle, the ultimate Machiavellian manipulator who knew, many would argue, just how to keep the restive Chinese nation in place.
74
Mao consciously played on the contrasting Chinese traditions relating to the sage-emperor and rebel chieftain,
75
as a modern-day itinerant worker (
mangliu
) observes at the end of this volume (see "Musical Chairmen"). As one academic has notedand it is a remark that remains significant todaythe Communist revolution (and we could include here Mao as both an individual and symbol) had "carried through [an] . . . attempt to reconstruct the world in the spirit of inner-worldly transcendence inherent in Confucianism."
76
For many people Mao represented not only national but also physical potency. Most of the Mao-related jokes current from the early 1980s cheerfully reflected the leader's prowess in bed, and they often used figures like Zhou Enlai or Hua Guofeng as foils. On one level such humor represented a transgression against the august figure of the Leader and allowed a popular invasion of the "forbidden zone" (
jinqu
) relating to the person of Mao. On another level, they were also indicative of a gradual process that has seen Mao become more human, approachable, and, in the new Mao Cult, the familiar of the Chinese masses. Through this process, one often described by Chinese critics as "secularization" (
shisuhua
), Mao has been enlisted in the ranks of the people in contrast and even opposition to the present leaders, who were increasingly perceived of as being sectarian, corrupt, and lackluster.
77
The fascination with the details of Mao's everyday life, as given in the plethora of books published from 1988 (discussed below, and see "All That's Fit to Print''), is also an indication of this process. Despite the Chinese authorities' denunciations of the BBC for broadcasting Dr. Li Zhisui's revelations concerning Mao's sex life in late 1993, one could speculate that popular opinion in China was probably neither particularly outraged nor surprised by the latest proof of the Chairman's talents. If anything, people may well regard Mao's voracious appetites as further evidence of his exceptional stature, superhuman energy, and unequivocal success.
It could also be argued that Mao, the ultimate father-mother official (
fumu guan
), enjoyed such a broad appeal because, to an extent, he was a love object
78
(see the comments on the "young Mao" by the woman taxi driver in "CultRev Relics" and the poem "Dreaming of Chairman Mao" in "Praise Be to Mao"). One could argue that he was also a bisexual or om-

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