China in Ten Words (4 page)

Our teacher offered him a chance to rephrase his statement: “You think maybe you said it, or you think maybe you didn’t say it? ”

The panic-stricken boy responded with a welter of sobbing and confusion, one minute saying he thought maybe he’d said it, the next minute saying he thought maybe he hadn’t. Right to the end of the denunciation meeting he was still going back and forth between one answer and the other. By sowing doubt in the minds of his listeners, “I think maybe” turned out to be his salvation, for in the end nothing came of it.

F
or a brief period when I was small, I was under the impression that Chairman Mao was our leader’s full name. “Chairman Mao” was on everyone’s lips, and one said it unthinkingly, with even more warmth than when one said “Grandpa” or “Daddy.” With time, because people were always chanting “Long Live Mao Zedong Thought!” and singing “The east is red, the sun is rising, / China has brought forth a Mao Zedong,” I came to understand that Chairman Mao was actually a combination of surname and official rank and that Mao Zedong was his true name. To refer to him in that way in normal conversation, of course, would have been the height of disrespect.

During the Dragon Boat Festival of 2009 the following text message began to circulate:

New China News Agency, May 28: The Chinese Academy of Sciences has successfully cloned Mao Zedong; the clone’s physical indicators match those of Mao in his prime. This announcement has elicited a powerful reaction internationally. U.S. President Obama has declared that within three days the United States will repeal the Taiwan Relations Act and withdraw all military forces stationed in Asia. The prime minister of Japan has ordered the demolition of the Yasukuni Shrine, acknowledged that the Senkaku Islands are Chinese territory, and approved reparations for the 1937 invasion of China to the tune of 13 trillion dollars. The European Union has lifted its ban on arms sales to China. Russia’s President Medvedev has conceded China’s claim to a million square miles in eastern Siberia. Mongolia has signaled to the United Nations that it has always been part of China. Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou has promised to abide by all arrangements proposed by the mainland regarding reunification and has applied to be a scholar at the National Archives. North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has sent instructions to his representative at the Six Party Talks to handle things according to Chairman Mao’s directives. There has been a rapid turnaround in domestic affairs: in just twenty-four hours officials from the county level and up have returned their ill-gotten gains, to the tune of 980 trillion yuan;
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privately run businesses have converted to public ownership; 25 million sex hostesses have become honest women overnight; the stock market has soared; house prices have declined by 60 percent; the Chinese people once more are singing the anthem of the age: “The east is red, the sun is rising, / China has brought forth another Mao Zedong.”

By changing “China has brought forth a Mao Zedong” to “China has brought forth another Mao Zedong,” popular humor has resurrected this long-dead leader, imagining how his comeback would awe the world, strike fear into the hearts of China’s corrupt bureaucrats, and solve at one fell swoop the historical problems, diplomatic issues, and domestic crises that plague China today. What, I wonder, are the wider implications of this overheated fantasy? A sign of discontent with contemporary realities? Evidence of neonationalist fervor? Or is it just a joke, a wry reflection on the time and place in which we live? All of these, perhaps, and probably other things as well.

In the thirty-odd years since Mao’s death China has fashioned an astonishing economic miracle, but the price it has paid is even more astounding. When I left South Africa at the end of a visit during the 2010 World Cup, the duty-free shop at Johannesburg’s airport was selling vuvuzelas—Chinese-made plastic horns—for the equivalent of 100 yuan each, but on my return home I learned that the export price was only 2.6 yuan apiece. One company in Zhejiang manufactured 20 million vuvuzelas but ended up making a profit of only about 100,000 yuan. This example gives a sense of China’s lopsided development: year after year chemical plants will dump industrial waste into our rivers, and although a single plant might succeed in generating a thirty-million-yuan boost to China’s GDP, to clean up the rivers it has ruined will cost ten times that amount. An authority I respect has put it this way: China’s model of growth is to spend 100 yuan to gain 10 yuan in increased GDP. Environmental degradation, moral collapse, the polarization of rich and poor, pervasive corruption—all these things are constantly exacerbating the contradictions in Chinese society. More and more we hear of mass protests in which hundreds or even thousands of people will burst into a government compound, smashing up cars and setting fire to buildings.

Many Chinese have begun to pine for the era of Mao Zedong, but I think the majority of them don’t really want to go back in time and probably just feel nostalgic. Although life in the Mao era was impoverished and restrictive, there was no widespread, cruel competition to survive, just empty class struggle, for actually there were no classes to speak of in those days and so struggle mostly took the form of sloganeering and not much else. People then were on an equal level, all alike in their frugal lifestyles; as long as you didn’t stick your neck out, you could get through life quite uneventfully.

China today is a completely different story. So intense is the competition and so unbearable the pressure that, for many Chinese, survival is like war itself. In this social environment the strong prey on the weak, people enrich themselves through brute force and deception, and the meek and humble suffer while the bold and unscrupulous flourish. Changes in moral outlook and the reallocation of wealth have created a two-tiered society, and this in turn generates social tensions. So in China today there have emerged real classes and real class conflict.

After Mao, Deng Xiaoping drew on his own personal prestige to implement reforms and pursue an open-door policy, but in his final years he came to reflect on the paradox that even more problems had emerged after development than existed before it. Perhaps this is precisely why Mao keeps being brought back to life. Not long ago a public opinion poll asked people to anticipate their reaction if Mao were to wake up today. Ten percent thought it would be a bad thing, 5 percent thought it would have no impact on China or the world, and 85 percent thought it would be a good thing. I am unclear about the sample’s demographics, but since the respondents were all Internet users, I suspect they were mostly young people. Chinese youth today know very little about Mao Zedong, so their embracing the idea of Mao’s resurrection tells us something about the mood of the age. Gripped by the zeitgeist, people of diverse backgrounds and disparate opinions find a common channel for their discontent and—half in earnest, half in jest—act out a ritual of restoring the dead to life.

In an online discussion of this scenario, someone cracked the following joke:

Mao rises from his glass coffin and walks out onto the steps of his mausoleum as morning sunshine bathes Tiananmen Square. A bunch of tourists dash to his side. “Gu Yue,” they cry. “Give us your autograph, will you?”

Gu Yue, you see, is an actor famous for playing Mao.

W
hen I was in primary school, I firmly believed China to be the greatest country in the world. I had two reasons for thinking that way. The first was that we had a great leader in Chairman Mao, whereas the four foreign leaders on my classroom wall—Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin—had all died, so other countries did not have any great leaders. The second reason was that China had the biggest population, and Chairman Mao had said the more the people, the greater their strength.

When Chairman Mao’s Three-World Theory appeared in the newspapers and on the radio, I was shaken to the core. It had never occurred to me that the American imperialists and the Soviet revisionists would be the first world, Japan and European countries the second, and our great nation of China would be lumped together in the third world with the little countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

But how could an ignorant little boy like me appreciate Mao Zedong’s grand vision? After the victory of the Chinese revolution Mao was never content with what he had gained, never satisfied with just being leader of his own nation. He wanted to become the leader of all exploited and oppressed peoples. “Wherever there are contradictions, there will be oppression,” he said loftily, “and wherever there is oppression, there will be resistance.” As his attention shifted to a global agenda, he developed an urge to liberate all the proletarians of the world—and acted on this impulse by exporting revolution.

Many years have passed since then. Putting aside for the moment the question of Mao’s impact, positive and negative, on China, one thing is clear: Mao Zedong Thought has not perished just because his life came to an end. On the contrary, his influence beyond our borders is undiminished. For many people in many parts of the world, I have found, what Mao did in China is not so important—what matters is that his ideas retain their vitality and, like seeds planted in receptive soil, “strike root, flower, and bear fruit.”

A couple of years ago Austrians raised aloft huge portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao at a big May Day parade in Vienna. Similar sights can be observed in other European cities, making one wonder whether the Mao revival is not just a mentality peculiar to China but more of a global phenomenon. If so, what does this mean? The simplest answer might be this: when the world is ailing, revolutionary impulses are stirred, just as when the body is ailing, inflammation ensues.

In November 2008 I visited Nepal as a member of a writers’ delegation. The Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) had claimed victory in the spring legislative elections and its leader, Prachanda, had recently become prime minister in the new government. During our visit we traveled through a United Nations peacekeepers’ base to visit a camp of the Nepalese Communist (Maoist) Liberation Army. Its facilities were primitive, and the troops lacked guns and ammunition, but this unarmed army maintained strict discipline. A memorable sight greeted us as we entered one of their huts: just as in my primary school classroom, on the wall were portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao—along with Prachanda, of course. The increase of faces from five to six seemed simply to demonstrate that revolution shows no signs of abating. That evening we had a get-together with the army members, and after several rounds of toasts we all stood up and sang “Long March,” a Cultural Revolution anthem inspired by one of Mao’s poems. We sang in Chinese, and the soldiers sang in Nepali. I doubt we were thinking about the same things, but when we sang the anthem in our two languages, it seemed as though we were all singing in one.

D
uring the Cultural Revolution it wasn’t just Mao’s poems that were put to music; his quotations were, too. They were sung by adults and children, by scholars and illiterates, by politically correct masses and by landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists. Seen in that light, Mao must be rated the most influential author in Chinese history.

Mao’s poems and quotations were everywhere, then. From city to village, on brick walls and mud walls, interior walls and outside walls, every space was covered with them, along with the gleaming image of Mao Zedong. On the bowls out of which we ate our rice was printed Mao’s maxim “Revolution is not a dinner party,” and the mugs out of which we drank our water were embellished with lines from Mao’s lyric on swimming in the Yangtze: “I have just drunk the waters of Changsha / And now I come to eat the fish of Wuchang.” In our daily encounters with Mao’s pronouncements, the most ordinary things would take on weighty meaning: as we got ready for bed, on our pillowcases we would read “Never forget class struggle” and, on our sheets, “Advance bravely through wind and waves.” Mao’s image was stenciled inside toilets, and sayings of his decorated our spittoons. Now I realize that these were two places where Mao clearly did not belong, but in those days, strange as it seems, this point escaped us. “Chairman Mao is at our side,” people used to say, and I believed that, too. I was certain he’d be happy if I did something good and disappointed if I did something bad.

The most blissful moments in my childhood were when I dreamed of Mao. This happened three times. In one of the dreams he came up to me, ruffled my hair affectionately, and favored me with a few words. What elation I felt! I went off, pleased as punch, to tell my little companions about my audience with Chairman Mao. To my dismay, not one of them believed me. “How could you possibly have seen Chairman Mao?” they snorted. “How could he possibly have come to talk to you?” They were right, of course. “Chairman Mao is at our side” was just one of those flights of fancy typical of the Cultural Revolution, conjured into being by the very ubiquity of those golden busts of Mao and those quotations in bold red script. The Mao Zedong of down-to-earth reality was hazy and distant; he existed only in symbolic terms. Mao was so remote that, as my childhood playmates said, there was no chance of our ever meeting him, not even in a dream.

During the Cultural Revolution one of the locals returned from a trip to Beijing claiming he had shaken hands with Mao Zedong. Crying tears of joy, he told everyone how warmly the chairman had greeted him—even asking him his name! Chairman Mao had shaken his hand for a good four seconds before somebody else had displaced him. “It would have been five if not for that other guy!” he lamented.

This man naturally became a hero in our town, and I would often see him striding proudly down the street with a faded green military satchel on his back. Because his right hand had held Mao’s hand, he did not wash it once in the year that followed, and somehow it looked bigger than his left hand—as well as black and grimy as a bear’s paw. Everyone in our town who knew him would make a point of shaking this bear paw of his. “I shook the hand that Chairman Mao has shaken,” they would tell their neighbors ecstatically.