Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (5 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 12
knowledge of the Chinese to further his political ambitions. The results, as many would agree, were devastating.
A number of writers in this volume claim that Mao was the quintessential representation of China, the embodiment of the nation. There are also those who argue that Mao reconstructed the nation in his image, popularizing his personal traits of suspicion, deviousness, hauteur, manipulation, and power play through mass political movements, eventually infecting the whole country with a Mao malady, the effects of which are still felt today (see, e.g., Wei Jingsheng's essay "Who's Responsible?").
30
Regardless of whether he is regarded as a hero or a monster, Mao the man and the leader still enthralls many Chinese.
There is no way of effectively gauging Mao's shifting popularity in a nation that lacks media openness. One intriguing survey of 1,500 college students carried out by the Beijing-based
University Student
magazine in 1993 found that 65 percent of those questioned knew neither when Mao was born nor when he died. Others were vague about exactly who he was and what he had done.
31
With the collapse of belief in the Party and the cause it represented in the early 1990s, patriots have tended, at least publicly, to uphold the farrago of Mao myths.
32
The results of another survey, by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, were published in late 1993 by
Beijing Youth News,
a slick propaganda organ of the Communist Party's Youth League. This survey offered a more layered yet equally unsettling view of popular perceptions of the dead leader. The majority of respondents, regardless of the suffering they might have experienced as a result of his aberrant policies, said they still admired Mao as a great man and leader. Some of the younger people questioned in one poll were even skeptical about the horrors of the past, in particular those of the Cultural Revolution period. They even questioned whether Mao should be blamed for what had happened (see "Galluping Mao"). While the tenor of reports regarding the public standing of Mao in the official media was basically positive, closely reflecting the official verdict on Mao, it would appear that the Party told a very different story to its members in private.
In October 1993 Party Central reportedly distributed for internal reference (i.e., secretly) the results of four nationwide polls conducted by central government offices indicating that the majority of respondents believed that Mao's faults outweighed his achievements and that the new Mao Cult was a social aberration.
33
But in 1994, openly published surveys conducted by
China Youth Daily
in June and October found that Mao had outstripped both Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping as the most popular Chinese leader in recent history.
34
Regardless of these confusing results, at least most Beijing residents knew that Mao was dead, for at one time or another they

 

Page 13
had trooped past his corpse at the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall in Tiananmen Square.
35
The post-Cultural Revolution Mao Cult was markedly different from the personality cult of the 1960s. First and foremost, the new Cult was not initiated by the authorities, nor was it ever entirely harnessed by Party propagandists, despite various efforts to "channel" (
yindao
) it in the Party's favor. Although the Cult certainly bore many traits of a popular folk cult (see "A Place in the Pantheon"), the dimensions of moral revival, sanctity, and the general religiosity and fervor that characterized the earlier Cult were noteworthy for their absence.
36
Moreover, the new Cult was one of a succession of fads that had swept China from the early 1980s (although there were also crazes in the 1970s, such as the popularity of chicken blood remedies during the last years of the decade). The 1980s' fads, symptomatic of the accelerated pace of history, included, as Hua Ming points out in the essay "From Sartre to Mao Zedong," intellectual fashions among university students and cultural figures for Freud, Nietzsche, and Sartre. In the late 1980s one of the most significant mass cults, however, had been that for
qigong,
China's home grown ''naturopathic religion," which dovetailed neatly with the reappearance of Mao Zedong-as-adept, the guru-master of the Chinese nation. There is no doubt that many aspects of the new Mao Cult, in particular the packaging of Mao in the early 1990s, reflected the mercantile fervor of the Reform age that had been initiated in 1978. On this level, the selling of Mao was blatantly mercenary and exploitative. But it is too easy to dismiss, as some writers have, the new Cult as either a cunning political strategy authored by Party leaders facing a legitimacy crisis in the post-4 June period or as yet another example of how Deng Xiaoping's "market socialism" consumed everything, including the Party's revolutionary traditions, as it careened toward some unstated capitalist goal.
Even in the early post-Cultural Revolution period Mao's reincarnation had been deeply problematic. The Party under Deng Xiaoping's guidance,
37
along with the sage intervention of Chen Yun
38
and ideologues such as Hu Qiaomu (one of Mao's leading ideological scribes), Deng Liqun, and many other Party leaders and theoreticians,
39
formulated a means for turning Mao into a malleable icon and thinker whose services could be enlisted for the cause of economic reform and the Open Door.
40
Unlike the Soviet Union's de-Stalinization, China could not jettison Mao without endangering the ideological foundations of both the Party and the nation. Mao was both the Lenin and the Stalin of China,
41
a man whose career was linked inextricably with the history and mythology of the Party, the army, and the People's Republic. Deng and his coevals were aware that to abandon Mao could, in

 

Page 14
the long run, presage the collapse of the Party itself. As early as 1962 Edgar Snow had remarked: "Mao has . . . become an Institution of such prestige and authority that no one in the Party could raze it without sacrificing a collective vested interest of first importance."
42
Despite the acknowledged disasters of Mao's rule, this remained true even long after his death.
Dismantling the Mao Cult, or what was now dubbed "modern superstition" (
xiandai mixin
), and dealing with Mao's mixed political legacy was a process fraught with danger.
43
The internal debates concerning the Chairman's fate were protracted and cautious for, apart from the need to put Mao in his place, they also involved byzantine power struggles and the ousting of Mao's anointed successor, "the wise leader" Hua Guofeng.
44
But Mao the man was eventually tamed, and Mao Zedong Thought, having been safely reinterpreted as ''the crystallization of collective wisdom," was retained as the amorphous ideological basis for Party rule
45
(see Figure 1).
Activists in the Democracy Wall Movement of 1978-79 made the first unofficial assaults on Mao's reputation, and the manner in which the Party was manipulating it to bolster the new orthodoxy.
46
They were soon silenced by the authorities,
47
and in March 1979 a commentator in the
People's Daily
remarked pointedly that China was experiencing a desanctification of Mao, not de-Maoification at all.
48
But the limited cultural flowering that developed in the wake of the political changes emboldened writers and artists to make Mao a target of their work. From the late 1970s, a number of tentative cultural reprisions of Mao appeared, including the sculptures of Wang Keping (e.g., his 1979 "Blind and Silent" and 1980 work "Idol"),
49
the screenplay for
Unrequited Love
by PLA novelist Bai Hua,
50
and an elegiac poem by Sun Jingxuan (see "A Specter Prowls Our Land").
While lip service was paid to the memory of Mao on and around the tenth anniversary of his death in 1986 with the obligatory publication of editorials and memorial essays in the press,
51
as well as with the production of a sanitized
Mao Zedong Reader,
52
the high tide of economic reform and mooting of political reform ensured that the occasion passed with relatively little fanfare. Interestingly, Mao as a consumer item made his first fleeting appearance at about this time. First, arias from Beijing Model Revolutionary Operas, the cultural staple diet of the Cultural Revolution, were reworked to the garish beat of Mainland-style disco music. Tunes from "The Red Lantern," "Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy," and "The Red Detachment of Women,"
53
along with a curious selection of songs from popular old Mainland, Japanese, Hong Kong, and Taiwanese films, were produced on cassette and played by radio stations throughout the country. Their release created a nationwide minisensation in 1985-86; it also sparked a

 

Page 15
heated debate on the merits of reviving what, for many, was nothing less than the Muzak of the Chinese holocaust.
54
Also at about this time, some fashionable young artists in the nonofficial cultural scene in Beijing began turning up at foreigners' soirées and exhibition openings wearing tailored Mao suits (
Zhongshan zhuang
or
Maoshi fuzhuang
)
55
adorned with discreet Mao badges. By resorting to the
démodé
jackets they proclaimed themselves to be sartorially "revolutionary" in an environment increasingly dominated by
de rigueur
long hair, blue jeans, grimy jackets, and T-shirts.
At the time it was already evident that Mao-period memorabilia had more of a commercial than an ideological significance. From the mid 1980s, the economic reforms had an increasing impact on the publishing industry that made it imperative for publishers to show a profit. Despite the Party's attempts to avoid them, controversial subjects such as the Cultural Revolution became a new source for best-selling books.
56
The relatively open atmosphere of the time also encouraged authors to deal with political topics in a way that had not been permitted since the first wave of anti-Cultural Revolution (and by implication anti-Mao) literature of the late 1970s. Works by writers such as Suo Guoxin, Hu Yuewei, Ye Yonglie, Feng Jicai, Gao Gao and Yan Jiaqi appeared in 1986, and although little of this writing strayed far from Party guidelines, it popularized sensitive issues and helped turn some areas of Party history into a realm ripe for media exploitation.
57
This period of taboo-breaking experimentation was interrupted by the purge of Hu Yaobang in January 1987, but picked up again as the ideological rectification campaign that was launched after Hu's fall faltered. Although the literature that was published on Mao and the Cultural Revolution was deeply flawed and often trite, its appearance presaged the opening up of the way for more serious writing that was beginning to mature in early 1989, on the eve of the disastrous Protest Movement.
58
In 1988, at the height of cultural license, both writers and publishers discovered the untapped potential of Mao Zedong himself and a boom was born that continued well into the 1990s (see "Mao, a Best-Seller" and "All That's Fit to Print").
For many the late 1980s was a time when the reforms had reached an impasse; corruption, nepotism, and economic ineptitude led to widespread disgruntlement, and the Party leadership, its attempts at substantial political reform stymied by infighting, appeared to be increasingly out of touch with everyday realities. Mao, a strong leader who in the popular imagination was above corruption and a romantic unfettered by pettifogging bureaucratic constraints, was for many the symbol of an age of economic stability, egalitarianism, and national pride. Gradually, the image of Mao, long since freed from his stifling holy aura and the odium of his destructive policies,

 

Page 16
became a "floating sign," a vehicle for nostalgic reinterpretation, unstated opposition to the status quo, and even satire. In one early 1990s' Mainland study of the popularity of Mao among university students, the responses reflected a wide spectrum of opinion. Among other things, the survey found: Mao was popular among people who felt frustrated politically, but also among people with a desire to learn why Mao had been such a political success; there was a nostalgia for a simpler past; there was also a curiosity about previously forbidden information concerning Party leaders and their private lives; and there was a popular longing for a new sage-king, not to mention outright hero worship.
59
It was also in the late 1980s that artists such as Wang Guangyi, who was then based in Wuhan, began manipulating Mao's image in their works. Wang's clinical framing of a Mao portrait in a grid of red lines was one of the first works of its kind and a "rehearsal" of the Chairman that built on the surreal reprisals of Cultural Revolution culture first undertaken by Wu Shanzhuan in the mid 1980s when he created a work called "Red Humor," an installation of nonsense big character posters.
60
In the literary world, meanwhile, there were moves to reevaluate and even overthrow Mao's cultural canon.
61
As the Reforms further transformed Chinese society from the mid 1980s, cultural and economic dislocation began to have an increasing impact on the populace. Widespread resentment against the effects of Reform, in particular inflation, corruption, and egregious nepotism within the Party, began mounting to crisis level in 1988. It was also the year in which Mao Zedong initially showed signs of making a popular comeback. The six-part teleseries "River Elegy" featured documentary footage of mass Red Guard adulation for Mao and study sessions from the Cultural Revolution, the first of their kind to be seen on Chinese television for years.
62
Such scenes enthralled younger viewers who had grown up after the Red Guard movement in an age when the religious ecstasy of mass political action was virtually unknown.
63
In 1988 Mao's name also was featured in at least one popular rhymed witticism (
shunkouliu'r
) aimed against the Party leadership and their progeny. It ran: "Chairman Mao's son went to the front line [of the Korean War and died in service]; Zhao Ziyang's kid smuggles color TVs; Deng Xiaoping's son calls for donations [to his foundation for the handicapped]; while the children of the People deal in state bonds." (
Mao zhuxide erzi shang qianxian; Zhao Ziyangde erzi dao caidian; Deng Xiaopingde erzi gao mujuan; Renminde erzi dao dian'r guokuquan
).
64
And it was in a mood partially of playful exasperation and partially sincere protest that some workers and other residents of Beijing decided to carry portraits of Mao into Tiananmen Square during the heady week of the 1989 hunger strike in

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