Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (13 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 48
unique Great Leader but as a homebred luminary who deserved a position in the galaxy of Hong Kong and Taiwan pop stars popular on the Mainland. Some of these fans, or "star-chasers" (
zhuixingzu
) as they were called in Chinese, indulged in necrolatry, lavished attention on Mao for a time, enjoyed the Cultural Revolution songs that had been revived from 1991, and read books related to him and his role in modern Chinese history. Mao was such a complex and overwhelming figure that his star shone bright while other Mainland icons lost what luster they still enjoyed. There was an unbridgeable gap between those who had lived through the Mao years and those who had not; the Cult provided a common ground and a hazy realm of consensus in a society in which the generation gap was increasingly making its impact felt. Young converts to the new Mao Cult also found in it a perfect way to express adolescent rebelliousness and romantic idealism. Here was a politically safe idol that could be used to annoy the authorities, upset parents, and irritate teachers. But after a while even this attraction palled; Mao was not really an up-to-date or hip figure, and his dress sense, and that hairstyle!
Not all adolescents were impressed by tales of Red Guard devotion to him. Rebuked for her infatuation with contemporary pop singers by an ex-Red Guard, one teenage girl chided: "You have your idol, I have mine. Why does there only have to be one sun in the sky? Like, you're so lacking in imagination!"
239
For the young, especially middle school students, fashions and styles were now being set by Hong Kong and Taiwan singers, crooners of Canto Pop. By 1993-94, the fans might have accepted Mao but they were still more involved with their own (mostly offshore) teen idols, referred to by the Mainland media with the generic expression the "Four Great Devaraja*" (
sida tianwang
).
240
At about this time Mainland propagandists attempted to "obliterate the star chasers" (
mie zhuixingzu
)
241
by limiting performances by non-Mainland singers and promoting local songs. These efforts, however, did little to undermine the popularity of the offshore stars and tended only to encourage Mainland singers to emulate more closely Hong Kong and Taiwan icons.
242
Mao's stellar fate was not only problematic among the young. In 1993, as part of the centenary activities, a satellite was launched with a payload consisting of a Mao medallion made of 18K gold and embedded with forty-four diamonds. The "8341" satellite, named after Mao's guard corps, went missing only days after the launch. It was originally expected to be recovered a week after liftoff, but the reappearance of "8341" was now calculated to occur sometime in March/April 1996, more than two years late. The delay was expected only to add to the value of the cargo, and plans were soon afoot to auction the gold Mao medallion once it was recovered.
243
(For the significance of the name "8341," see ''Mao, a Best-Seller.")

 

Page 49
More so than any of the other short-lived fads, cults and fashions China experienced from the late 1970s, the Mao Cult revealed to a fearful extent the paucity of the cultural resources of Mainland China. Reading the selections in this book, one could claim that the Cult was a manifestation of how an age-old living folk tradition had finally co-opted Mao Zedong, the ultimate icon of communism, and converted him into a native god. Similarly, one could cheerfully observe that the "ironic" inversions of Mao in pop art, music, and mass culture indicated a further rejection or devaluing of ideology. It could also be claimed that the revivalists have used Mao creatively, that they have not become slaves to the past but have proved they could "enslave the past and transform it into a vehicle for the expression of their own tastes."
244
To an extent, all of these views are valid. The Mao Cult came at the end of a decade of fads that represented the voracious consumption and rejection of both nativist and foreign cultural "quick fixes'' to the dilemmas China faced as a nation that had lost both its value system and its sense of purpose (apart from a crude economic imperative).
245
In this context, the Mao Cult reflects a state of anxiety and a real sense of cultural emptiness, or what Svetlana Boym termed a "totalitarian nostalgia."
246
After the heritage of communism has been worked through, variously commercialized, lampooned, and sanctified, what's next?
This study of the waxing and waning of Chairman Mao's posthumous cult was written at a time when Deng Xiaoping, the man who was neither Mao's chosen successor nor close comrade-in-arms, was approaching his own apotheosis. While the corporeal Deng lingered at death's door, his achievements were being commemorated with gold-plated badges, Deng quiz shows on TV, and the production of a CD-ROM which would provide easy, interactive hi-tech access to his published works.
247
It may be too early to say whether Mao's shoes were figuratively too big for Deng, but we do know that Deng was so impressed with the cloth shoes (
qiancengdi buxie
) especially handmade for Mao's corpse that he ordered a pair of leather-soled shoes from the same cobbler for himself.
248
On 5 April 1995 it was reported that a Beijing publisher of traditional-style books was offering Chinese speculators a limited clothbound edition of Deng works, and it is probably only a matter of time before the entire body of works is engraved on grains of rice or slivers of jade. For those with a taste for the gargantuan, on the other hand, there was already a calligraphic scroll of the diminutive man's works measuring 4 kilometers (2.4 miles) in length.
249
While irony was a major element of the Mao revival in the realm of nonofficial culture, the greatest irony was perhaps reserved for Deng Xiaoping himself. Intimately involved in attempts to limit the personality cult of

 

Page 50
Mao from the 1950s, in particular from the time of the Eighth Party Congress in 1956 and the engineer of the demystification and ultimate subjugation of Mao for the sake of the Reformist agenda, in his last years Deng was increasingly perceived of as being an autocrat whose style of rule was not, in essence, very much different from that of Mao Zedong.
250
Narrow and unfair though such an evaluation may be, Deng lived long enough to witness the decline of his own prestige and the mass-based popular rebirth of Mao Zedong. The man he had so assiduously worked to reinvent was given a new lease on life just as Deng was losing a grip on his own. Deng had been able to shunt aside and move beyond the festering abscess of the Cultural Revolution and deny the legacy of Maoist extremism without ever really finding an effective treatment for the ills of Chinese political life.
251
The opponents of the Reforms, fearful of the ideological laxity that thrived because of them, tried manipulating the Mao legacy in their own favor.
252
Supporters of Reform, however, responded by manufacturing a lame cult of the "Grand Architect of Reform" (
zong shejishi
)the preferred sobriquet used for Deng following the Party's Fourteenth Congress in October 1992, when it was announced that forthwith the Party was "to be armed with Deng Xiaoping's theory on building socialism with Chinese characteristics."
253
Not surprisingly, this did not enjoy the mass appeal, or playful commercial possibilities, of the Mao revival.
Even on the cusp of Mao's centenary year it was obvious that it was Deng's Thought, not Mao's, that was being hailed by the official media as the nation's guiding light. In early 1993, a sycophantic tome on Deng was published by the Central Party School,
254
and later in the year, the third volume of
Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping
appeared amid nationwide clamor just as the Mao celebrations were getting under way.
255
Deng Thought was commended as representing and developing the kernel of the best of Mao.
256
On one level the centenary was being used to mark the symbolic end of Mao's official career in China. From the pronouncements made at the time (see "Sparing Mao a Thought" and "The Last Ten-Thousand Words") it was evident that the authorities who were now basking in the radiance of Deng's utilitarianism no longer felt that they were in Mao's shade (see Figure 44).
Perhaps in the future in China the Mao revival itself can be revived. Mao, at least, will continue to be a figure whose varied legacy can be drawn on, reworked, modified, and exploited to suit the exigencies of the day. This is something Mao had perceived, albeit in narrow political terms, in the famous letter he wrote to Jiang Qing in July 1966 (see "Chairman Mao Graffiti"). In it Mao speculated on his posthumous fate:

 

Page 51
I predict that if there is an anti-Communist right-wing coup in China they won't have a day of peace; it may even be very short-lived. That's because the Revolutionaries who represent the interests of over 90 percent of the people won't tolerate it. Then the Rightists may well use what I have said to keep in power for a time, but the Leftists will organize themselves around other things I have said and overthrow them.
Rightists and Leftistsnot to mention activists on all points along the political spectrumhave been engaged in a tussle over the legacy of Mao ever since. In 1993, Party Central reportedly received some 3,500 letters a month opposing any commemoration of Mao, while others lobbied for a full re-evaluation of Mao and a thoroughgoing denunciation of his years of misrule at a future Party Congress.
257
But so far had the pendulum swung in Mao's favor that some "revisionists," such as the leading Party historian Hu Sheng, attempted at the time of the centenary a further positive reassessment of Mao's record. In a lengthy defense of Mao published in the
People's Daily,
Hu argued that the devastation wrought by the Chairman's "experimentation" (
tansuo)
a clinical code word for the murderous policies initiated from the 1950s
258
seen in context was unavoidable as China struggled to break free of the Soviet economic model.
259
Furthermore, Hu claimed, it was Mao's refusal to be at the beck and call of the Soviets that laid the basis for the success of the Reforms and helped China weather the storm of 1989 and survive the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.
260
Even without Hu's benediction, there were those who construed the 1990s popular "reversal of the verdict" on Mao as a kind of validation of their heinous acts, as well as the cowardice and complicity of which they had been guilty in the past. The Chairman's renewed credibility was a relief from the burden of history. As the Marquis de Custine had remarked about Russia more than 150 years ago: "Sovereigns and subjects become intoxicated together at the cup of tyranny. . . . Tyranny is the handiwork of nations, not the masterpiece of a single man."
261
The Party's pronouncements in the early 1980s on the Cultural Revolution and the purges that had preceded it had effectively banned public discussion of the past; there had been no opportunity for people to debate seriously the issues of historical responsibility or even to be apprised of the scale and extent of the depredations of Mao's rule. Thoughtful critics had been silenced long ago or were reduced to publishing in the overseas Chinese press. By the 1990s, peoplepast victims, their persecutors, as well as the innocent who had not experienced the grinding horror of the pastcould participate in the new Mao Cult because its moral dimensions and ramifications were, for the most part, still unclear. For many middle-aged and young Chinese the Mao era was

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