China still struggles to stuff
the Great Helmsman underground
A MERE 18 years after the death of Mao
Zedong, it was possible for a notable Sinologist to give his book on Chinese
reforms the title of “Burying Mao”. And who was to quibble? The point of all
the market-led economic change that Deng Xiaoping had promoted seemed to be to
put as much distance as possible between his China and the era of Mao’s rule,
so full of violence, trauma and human suffering. And yet. With the 40th
anniversary of Mao’s death this month, a Sinologist now would think twice
before choosing a similar title. “Mao Unburied” is more like it.
For China still struggles to stuff the
monster underground. Mao himself said he wanted to be cremated, and liberal
intellectuals occasionally petition for his incineration and the return of his
ashes to his hometown of Shaoshan. But his corpse still lies at the heart of
the Chinese polity, in a glass sarcophagus on Tiananmen Square, attended by
streams of visitors. Though most images of Mao have been removed from public
places, his picture still hangs on the Gate of Heavenly Peace. It is 14 months
in jail for you if you throw a bottle of ink at it. Mao would have been
appalled at China’s present materialism. Yet his portrait is also on every
banknote. It is as if he is having the last laugh.
Taxi-drivers hang icons of Mao on their
rear-view mirrors. When recently asked why, one replied that it was because Mao
was a “kick-arse leader” who had had the guts to go to war with the Americans
(during the Korean conflict of 1950-53). For younger Chinese, Mao has retired
to the position of avuncular founder of the country. And in Shaoshan, Banyan
has been to a restaurant that serves Mao’s favourite dishes to hordes of
tourists. It even has a shrine to the Great Helmsman. Plastic flowers are
around his neck, incense and oranges at his feet—along with Mao’s multiplying
banknotes. The revolutionary atheist has become another god in the Chinese folk
pantheon.
To be clear about his rule: he emerged
as the Chinese Communist Party’s leader from ruthless
party purges in the early 1940s. From China’s “liberation”, ie, communist
victory against the Kuomintang Nationalists in 1949, violence was, as Frank
Dikötter, a historian at the University of Hong Kong, puts it, not a by-product
but the essence of Mao’s rule: a reign of broken promises, systematic violence
and calculated terror. The genius of Mao’s violence was to implicate ever more
people in it. Between 1950 and 1952 perhaps 2m “landlords” and “rich
peasants”—wholly artificial definitions, imported from the Soviet Union, for a
country without big landholders—were singled out and killed. A parallel
campaign was waged against “counter-revolutionaries”. Mao and his accomplices
laid down execution quotas for each province: up to four people per thousand.
Perhaps 5m were killed between 1949 and 1957—a golden era, relatively speaking,
before the horrors of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and subsequent famine (up to 30m
dead) and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s (over 1m killed). How
can a man with as much blood on his hands as Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin be
deemed acceptable?
The question is not confined to China.
This month, concerts glorifying Mao were to be held by a China-linked group
hiring public venues in Sydney and Melbourne. Until they were cancelled because
of threats by protesters to disrupt them, city officials defended the concerts
as expressions of free speech.
They would surely not have done the same for
events in honour of Hitler or Stalin. Elsewhere, a restaurant in London plays
on the theme of the Cultural Revolution. A high-end Western but Chinese-themed
department store long sold playful watches featuring Mao’s arm waving to the
crowds.
One answer is that a personal side to
Mao shines through in his early years that inoculates against the memory of the
monstrous later ones. The early Mao had a gift for empathy and friendship
absent in Hitler or Stalin. He was, moreover, hugely well read, and though it
is not hard to be a better poet than Hitler was a watercolourist, Mao was in
fact one of the finest Chinese poets of his day. Last, as Kerry Brown of King’s
College, London, points out, Mao’s rise to power was accompanied in the
turbulent China of the first half of the 20th century by a moving personal
trauma: not only the deaths of so many of his chief colleagues, but also
members of his family. In 1930 his second wife was executed by the Nationalists
for refusing to renounce Mao. His son, Mao Anying, was killed in 1950 by an
American air strike during the Korean war. The trauma engenders sympathy among
those who know the story. Some suggest that the suffering Mao experienced early
in his life may have numbed his senses to the destruction he later unleashed.
Mao-tied
Yet the more forceful answer must be
that, whereas Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes have long crumbled, China’s
Communists continue in power. And, says Mr Brown, the national story that Mao
crafted, of bringing together a nation after a century of turmoil and
humiliation at Japanese and other foreign hands, remains emotionally reassuring
and satisfying for many Chinese—despite a great many holes.
It means that China’s Communist rulers
have to put up with Mao. His craze for permanent revolution and popular attacks
on the party are anathema to President Xi Jinping. Confucius, whom Mao reviled,
is much more Mr Xi’s fellow, with his precepts of order, hierarchy, loyalty and
uprightness. But Mr Xi has a problem. As Mr Brown puts it, a party with its
roots in terror, illegality and revolution has today to present itself as the
bastion of stability and justice.
Mr Xi knows that Mao remains the bedrock of
his power. It is why the regime allows no chipping away—recently closing the
only Chinese museum dedicated to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, and
shutting down a journal that questioned Maoism. Mao positively oozed power,
thrilling even Henry Kissinger. Mr Xi knows his power is merely borrowed.
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