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.
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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.