Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (7 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 21
nisexual figure. Mao's official portrait shows the enigmatic face of a man-woman (or grandfather-grandmother). In poetry, song, and prose he had often been eulogized as a mother/father, and his personality in all of its majesty and pettiness fits in with complex attitudes regarding sexual personae. In his dotage Mao, a bloated colossus supported by young female assistants,
79
often looked like a grand matriarch, time having blurred his features into a fleshy, unisex mask. Li Zhisui's memoirs,
The Private Life of Chairman Mao,
provides numerous fascinating insights into the Chairman's various peccadilloes, not least of which was his irrepressible and, in some cases, bisexual appetite. Not only did he disport himself with a bevy of comely ingenues, it would appear that he was not above lunging at the handsome young men in his guard who put him to bed, or to expect a "massage" from one of their number before retiring.
80
In this context it is instructive to recall the reaction of the American journalist Agnes Smedley to her first meeting with Mao in Yan'an:
His hands were as long and sensitive as a woman's. . . . Whatever else he might be he was an aesthete. I was in fact repelled by the feminine in him. An instinctive hostility sprang up inside me, and I became so occupied with trying to master it, that I heard hardly a word of what followed. . . .
81
The Mao suit only added to the sexual egalitarianism of the Mao image. While in his later years Mao was a wrinkled, green-toothed, slack-jawed old man, the official description of the Chairman was of a vibrant and healthy individual whose features remained unravaged by that mighty sculptor, time. His pictures were airbrushed to perfection and his appearance in documentary footage carefully doctored to present the best possible image so that even in terminal decline official propaganda could claim that he "glowed with health and vigor, and he enjoyed a ruddy complexion" (see "The Sun Never Sets").
In the popular imagination, however, Mao remained above all a martial hero and patriot possessed of the genius of Zhuge Liang, the strategist
par excellence,
and the "style of a great knight-errant" (
daxia qidu
).
82
A number of the selections in the present volume give obvious and undeniable reasons for Mao's rebirth; other, more deep-seated cultural and psychological causes for his rehabilitation are only hinted at. Li Jie goes as far as any in speculating on the "force field" surrounding Mao, and Liu Xiaobo makes important contrasts between Mao and Deng Xiaoping, as does Wang Shan, the author of
China Through the Third Eye.
In selections from a sensationalistic popular magazine such as
True Tales of the Adventures of Mao Zedong
(see "Martial Mao") we also can discern elements of Mao's roughness, callousness, and heroic charisma that make him an attractive martial

 

Page 22
hero for a population succored on traditional tales of chivalry, violence, and acts of courage (see Figure 2).
83
In the popular imagination Mao is EveryMao: he is the peasant lad made good; warrior/literatus as well as the philosopher/king. He is an ideal, and his heartlessness in the face of massive suffering is not something his constituents would necessarily find abhorrent. Interestingly, the 1993 survey by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, published in
Beijing Youth News
(see "Galluping Mao"), reveals an abiding admiration for Mao even among his victims.
84
Whether this is the view we would get if there was press freedom and an end of one-party rule in China is a matter for speculation. Indeed, the most fearful thing about the Mao Cult may be that it has become a permanent part of China's cultural landscape, and nothing, be it economic development or political upheaval, can alter this.
The exact origins of the new Mao Cult of the early 1990s are uncertain. In the following pages there are those who argue that the fascination with Mao began among university students in Beijing who were disillusioned with imported intellectual fads from the West (see "From Sartre to Mao Zedong" and "A Typology of the MaoCraze"). Others claim that Mao never really disappeared but was merely resting throughout the 1980s while the people of China got on with the pressing business of economic Reform (see "The Sun Never Sets"). But for many, the post-June 4 popular Mao Cult really began when talismans (commonly called
guawu,
they can be interpreted in traditional terms as
hushenfu
), laminated images of the Chairman hung from the rear-view mirrors of taxis, buses, and trucks, first appeared in South China and gradually spread throughout the country from 1991.
According to a story that was to become one of China's most widely told urban myths, the driver of a vehicle involved in a serious traffic accident in Shenzhen that left a number of people dead survived unscathed because he had a picture of Mao on the dashboard. Another version of the story claims that the accident occurred in Guangzhou and a whole busload of people were protected by Mao's image. Shortly after the tale began spreading, laminated images of Mao appeared in vehicles in cities, towns and villages throughout China. These images were not unlike the St. Christopher medallions popular with European drivers or the Virgin Mary of the Highway images found, for example, in Brazil. Many of them showed Mao in the guise of a temple god or guardian spirit and were said to be capable of deflecting evil (
pixie
).
85
Some people preferred pictures of Mao as a young man, or in a PLA uniform; others favored the official portrait of Mao in his later years. Many of the pictures were placed in gold-colored plastic templelike frames or had red tassels or gold ingots dangling from them, thereby combining aspects of the Mao persona with elements of folk culture and religion (see Figure 3).

 

Page 23
It was probably no coincidence that the fad for the talismans originated in the South, where traditional beliefs are generally stronger than in the North; and even more interesting is the fact that Mao supposedly first revealed his supernatural powers in Shenzhen, the laboratory of post-Maoist capitalist reforms (see "Hanging Mao"). Indeed, the vitality of the Cult that spread from the South calls into question just how successful the official de-Maoification of the early 1980s had been. As Maurice Meisner commented at the time: "As Mao's successors in Beijing pursue `de-Maoification' in the cities, as they seek to replace the personal authority of Mao with the impersonal bureaucratic authority of an authoritarian state, they must ponder the political implications of the persistence of the cult of Mao among the great majority of the people over whom they rule."
86
An indication of Mao's permanent position in the popular Chinese pantheon came in mid 1995 when it was widely reported that a traditional-style temple devoted to the Chairman had been built in his home province. Mao had literally been enshrined in a temple (the
Sanyuansi
) in Leiyang, Hunan Province. Funded by farmers and pilgrims over a number of years the large temple had halls dedicated to China's revolutionary triumvirate of Mao, Zhou and Zhu De. The images, reminiscent of icons found in traditional temples, were the work of a sculptor from the Buddhist complex at Wutaishan. The standing Mao image was said to be some six meters tall and those of the seated Zhou and Zhu were each approximately 4.5m. At the height of its popularity from late 1994 some 40-50 thousand worshippers visited the temple daily. Party authorities closed it in May 1995 on the grounds that it encouraged superstition.
87
Mao:
The Body Corporate
The first Mao Cult reached its apogee during the early years of the Cultural Revolution, when Mao was hailed as "the Great Teacher, Great Leader, Great Commander, and Great Helmsman"
88
and Red Guards swore to sacrifice themselves and, indeed, murder each other to "protect the Chairman." As in the application of the "leader principle" (
Führerprinzip
) in Hitlerian Germany, Mao was cast as "the sole representative of the people on all levels of political and social life. He claimed to embody the total unity of that people, leaving no room for opposition or criticism. All expressions of the national will were to be his. No representation of different groups, interests, and ideas was allowed to exist alongside him. . . ."
89
In the new Mao Cult, the leader again became a vehicle for the will of the people, a symbolic entity who attracted every shade of dissatisfaction and nostalgia that the people experienced as the effects of the economic Reforms swept over the nation.
90

 

Page 24
In life, Mao's body had been the incarnation of mass will. His appearancecarefully presented in photographs and on film so as to maintain an idealized imagewas described in hallowed terms. In the Cultural Revolution, Mao was nothing less than the physical representation of Revolution, History, the Fate of China, and the People's Aspirations;
91
he was the culmination of thousands of years of Chinese civilization, the embodiment of China itself.
In the past, people used Mao's image (the Mao badge and even tattoos) to adorn their bodies;
92
his words (quotations and verbal mannerisms, including his coarseness) acted as a currency with a universal rate of exchange, and his style (in clothes, smoking, posturing) was emulated widely in what was a national expression of an "aestheticization of politics"
93
(see "Mock-Mao and the Heritage Industry" below). As the present-day hagiographers Su Ya and Jia Lusheng wrote in their 1992 book
The Sun Never Sets
: "Unity of thought, unity of will, unity of action: in clenching His fist He smelted the loose sands of China into a lead ingot, melding hundreds of millions of Chinese into one body" (see Figure 4). While Mao was rarely represented in film or theatrical productions before the late 1970s, his symbolic presence was indicated by images of the sun, dawn, mountains, and the sea. The manipulation of such symbols was in many ways similar to filmic conventions developed by Fascist and Stalinist filmmakers who were concerned, to use Susan Sontag's formulation, with "the rebirth of the body and of community, mediated through the worship of an irresistible leader."
94
Loyalty to Mao, or the wedding of the individual to the totalizing state as represented in the body of Mao, created a relationship that bypassed government and Party structures created to regulate the nation.
95
When people despaired in their own lives they thought of Mao and believed that if only he knew what was happening to them the situation would be set straight (this was also a common refrain in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia). He was the godlike figure who had redeemed the nation in 1949, and unquestioning loyalty to him was seen as the path to self-redemption in the Cultural Revolution. In the 1990s, Mao reincarnated as a figure who was outside temporal and spatial realities, an abiding presence that was beyond the atomized confusion of Reformist China. He represented permanence, value, a historical point of reference and significance.
The body had been a central element of debates regarding national prowess in China for more than a century. Physical discipline and self-strengthening were constantly linked to the issue of China's rejuvenation and progress, and Mao Zedong was an early advocate and practitioner of physical education for revolutionary ends.
96
His penchant for swimmingin particular, ablution as political ritualassumed national importance from

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