Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (60 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 196
religion. Therefore, it is obvious that further analysis of the phenomenon is necessary.
The present Mao cult is different from the past in that it constitutes a popular deification of Mao, not a politically orchestrated one. People now seek the protection of the Mao-God when they build houses, engage in business, and drive vehicles. Old ladies place images of Mao over their stoves and in niches built for statues of the Buddha and burn incense to him morning and night. Traditional folk religion provides the real basis for the present Red Sun Craze.
In Chinese culture, the power of the gods is always reliant upon the authority of the ruler. As early as the
Zuozhuan,
in the Record of the Fourteenth Year of Duke Xiang, we find the unequivocal statement: "The ruler is the host of the spirits and the hope of the people."
5
Politics and religion formed a mutually cooperative whole or, as [the late-Qing politician and military leader] Zeng Guofan put it, "The way of the kings rules in this world; the way of the gods in the other world." Both ways witnessed a plethora of rulers, however, with dynasties rising and falling in the human world and, in the other world, rulers like the Jade Emperor, Maitreya Buddha, and so on, gaining ascendancy at one time or another. The only thing that did not change was the immutable link between politics and religion.
With the communist takeover in 1949, popular religion in China underwent the most violent change in its history. First, in the 1950s, there was a movement to wipe out superstition, which was followed in the 1960s by the call to "eliminate the Four Olds"
6
and the suppression of virtually all forms of religious activity in the country. The effects were particularly devastating as both movements took place in tandem with the creation of grass-roots Party cells and nationwide Thought Reform. In traditional society, at the county level and lower, political life was ruled by popular clan bodies that also had responsibility for other activities including religious observances. The post-1949 organization of society, however, saw this traditional arrangement uprooted and the monopoly rule of Party committees at every level. Folk religion was deprived entirely of the social and organizational basis for its activities. Nonetheless, habits and practices that have weathered changes over the millennia and provided spiritual succor for people for so long are not so easily obliterated. Frustrated in its traditional form, it is only natural that popular religious sentiment would find new ways to express itself. In post-1949 China, the only sanctified form it could take was in worshipping the Red Sun, Mao Zedong.
The legacy of this intermingling of political and religious life is that the people tend to view divine providence and spiritual power in political terms. Not only were the sage-like figures of King Wen and Duke Zhou
7
respected

 

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and worshipped as religious personages, all other rulers with life-and-death power over individuals were cloaked in an aura of religiosity. Historical records show that from the time of [the legendary tyrant] Chi You, and in the case of [less than benevolent figures like] Qin Shihuang, Xiang Yu, Wang Mang, Dong Zhuo, Cao Cao, and Su Jun,
8
harsh rulers were treated with awe and commemorated in special temples with religious observances by later generations. Because of this venerable tradition Mao's actual sentiment for the people, or his munificence, or even his tyranny that was expressed so succinctly in his line that "for the 800 million Chinese, struggling is a way of life," is not really a major issue.
9
With the consolidation and expansion of his power it was inevitable that he become deified.
Mao's deification was synchronous with his political apotheosis. According to reports in the
Beijing Evening News,
Mao badges made an appearance in and around Yan'an as early as 1945. After 1949, Mao's transmogrification continued apace.
In 1950 the famous writer Lao She produced a play called "Fang Zhenzhu." It was a story about a performer of traditional theater who benefits from communist rule. Lao She was particularly pleased with the opening line: "A True Dragon and Son of Heaven has appeared in Yan'an; he's liberated Beijing and now sits on the Imperial Throne." Although the personality cult of the Cultural Revolution was dressed up in revolutionary garb, in essence its well-springs can only be found in traditional folk religious belief and practice. To speak of Mao [as in the lines of the song "Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman"
10
] in terms of being "the Sun, sustainer of all things" is no different from the ancient belief in the nourishing powers of divinity.
Faith in the omnipresence of nonworldly power was reinforced during the Cultural Revolution. When everything elseall belief systems and cultural normswas swept away and overthrown, Mao Zedong became the supreme and all-powerful super god, the "Sun that never sets." Mao was invested with a type of power equal, if not superior, to all other religious systems, expressed in such beliefs that he was the Sun, "sustainer of all things," a being who "turned the universe red." Because he was both omnipotent and omnipresent, people felt they could invest themselves with an "ever victorious" power through quasi-religious practices not dissimilar to shamanistic ritual and self-flagellation. They therefore paid homage to his image, sang Mao quotation songs, chanted his sayings, performed the Loyalty Dance, ''struggled against self-interest and repudiated revisionism,"
11
and so on.
Faith in the power of the Red Sun in the Cultural Revolution was very much like ancient shamanistic belief. Both held that the power of the spirit

 

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could exorcise evil. In the past, people thought they were surrounded by malevolent forces that had to be subdued or expunged. Similarly, in the Cultural Revolution, there was a general belief that the world was full of evil subsumed under such rubrics as Imperialism and Revisionism, the Five Black Categories, as well as the grab-all expression Cow Demons and Snake Spirits.
12
People lived in constant fear that there could be "a restoration of capitalism," or that they would "have to suffer the bitterness of the past again," or that ''millions would die" because of a disastrous counterrevolution. Since the Red Sun was a "Spiritual Atom Bomb" that could dispel all those evils, there is little wonder that the level of popular adoration and worship was so hysterical. The creation of a Red Sea (the ubiquitous displays of Mao's portrait, his quotations, slogans, and images that represented devotion to him) was a direct result of the "sweeping away of all Cow Demons and Snake Spirits" and "the rebellion against Class Enemies" that had seen the exorcizing of evil in the first place. More recently, Deng Liqun's attempts to use the new MaoCraze as a weapon to repel the "miasmal mist once more rising" is little more than a continuation of ancient shamanistic practice.
Another feature of shamanism is its proported power to subjugate nature and foster agriculture. Here again the Red Sun has an awesome power as evinced by the Movement to Learn from Dazhai.
13
One Party Secretary in a Shanxi commune issued the peasants with copies of the Three Standard Articles
14
with the words: "We don't need to rely on heaven or earth, all we need are these precious Red Booklets and we can dig through the mountains to irrigate our land." A member of a Tibetan commune even claimed that anyone armed with Mao Zedong Thought would become a Living Buddha.
Although such phenomena have disappeared since the Cultural Revolution, the cultural mechanisms that brought them into being in the first place are still influential. The habit of treating political leaders as spiritual guides is unchanged as witnessed in [the short-lived] praise for "the Wise Leader Hua Guofeng," or more recently in descriptions of Deng Xiaoping's [early 1992] trip to the south, an act that has been likened to manna falling from heaven to nourish the whole nation.
15
Although popular beliefs have gone a long way to undermining political authority since the advent of the Reform era, none of the new cultural developments have anything more than a utilitarian value. "Crossing the river by feeling the stones"
16
can hardly be expected to provide the nation with a new belief system. Traditional deities live on and this is why we see people throughout the country, in particular in the countryside, erecting temples to the God of Wealth, Door Gods, Guan Gong, Boddhisattvas, the King of Death, and other ancient icons to cure illness, for the begetting of male

 

Page 199
children, for help in making money, finding the right marriage partner, and for scholastic achievement.
The speed with which temples are being restored or built is comparable to the rate at which they were closed and destroyed in the 1950s and 1960s. According to the television documentary,
A Record of Modern Superstitions: Incense Burning,
broadcast on Beijing TV on 9 February 1990, more than a million people travel to the Southern Peak
17
to burn incense each year and spend some 100 million
yuan
on incense alone. The
Guangming Daily
has also reported that in recent years many shamans have appeared in Fang County, Hubei Province. Some of these are state cadres or retired cadres. Similar reports abound. Things are more controlled in the cities where years of centralized education have meant that primitive beliefs have to find new forms for expression. Because Mao has been the only all-powerful figure for so long, he was the obvious choice for popular adulation during the recent religious revival in China. He has become the idol to which the revived worship of the God of Wealth, Guan Gong, Guanyin Boddhisattva, and other gods is married.
It would seem farcical that Mao, a man who led the assault on capitalism during his lifetime, should in death be put on a par with the God of Wealth and inscribed with traditional imagery. But the misprision and distortion of gods, their reinvention and reinterpretation, is a central element of popular religious activity. As was said long ago: "In a temple that has stood for five generations you can find all manner of strange things." The [Song dynasty literatus] Ouyang Xiu noted nearly a thousand years ago that people often misunderstand the spirits they worship when he wrote: "Of all distortions in the world those that one finds in a temple are the most extreme."
Notes
1. In Chinese,
zhaocai jinbao.
2. "Peaceful evolution" (
heping yanbian
) was officially regarded by the Chinese authorities as being the greatest threat to the communist system. It was supposedly a Western stragegy that relied on peaceful rather than violent meanscultural, political and economicto undermine communism and eventually replace it with a Western-style, free-market democratic government.
3. See Deng Liqun, "Permanently On Heat" above.
4. Zhao Gong (Zhao Xuantan, or
Zhao Gong yuanshuai
), the God of Wealth. The Kitchen God (
Zao jun, Zaoshen
or
Zaowang
), the spirit who rules over the hearth, was said to report back to Heaven every Chinese New Year's Eve.
5. The
Zuozhuan
is a Confucian historical text of considerable antiquity. For this quotation, see James Legge,
The Chinese Classics (The Chu'un Ts'ew with The Tso Chuen),
p. 466, col. 2, and p. 462 for the Chinese original.

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