Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (54 page)

My Mao badge didn’t set off the metal detector. A female soldier inspected my backpack and waved me through. As I waited in my balcony seat, four military choirs filed in and began belting out competing revolutionary songs, as if they were at a college football rally Below me, the stage was draped with enormous red silk flags and banked with pots of kumquats and miniature tangerines. Mao hated bourgeois trappings like potted plants, and he would have despised these. Kumquats and tangerines symbolized golden ingots. The more fruit there was, so the superstition went, the richer and luckier you’d be in the new year.

At 9 a.m. I watched a parade of Mao’s old enemies totter on stage. They had come not to praise Mao but to bury him in the dust heap of history. There was General Yang Shangkun, a surprisingly hearty eighty-six-year-old, who was caught bugging Mao’s office and private railway car in the 1960s. There was Rong Yiren, now seventy-seven, a dapper Shanghai capitalist who lost his immense textile-mill fortune under Mao and remade it under Deng. And there was Bo Yibo, now eighty-five, whom Mao purged as a vice-premier during the Cultural Revolution. Bo Yibo spent the first half hour of the memorial meeting ignoring the ceremonies, and instead chatted animatedly to Ding Guangen, Deng’s bridge partner. General Yang Shangkun was passed a note as the meeting began. He glanced at the note, walked out and never returned. Had he arranged this in advance?

Deng himself was conspicuous by his absence. He had been well enough to vote in a municipal election just a few days earlier, but no one really expected him to show up. Mao, after all, had purged him twice. And no doubt Deng held Mao responsible for the crippling of his eldest son.

As Communist Party Chief Jiang Zemin droned on and on, I suddenly realized he was no longer talking about Mao. He was praising Deng. Our Great Architect, he said, had the wisdom to recognize that class struggle was outdated by 1978 and to open China to foreign investment. He hailed Deng as the true successor of Mao
Zedong Thought. The final indignity came when he called on people to study Deng’s
Selected Works
.

Party Chief Jiang reminded me of a grinning panda, with his rounded, black-rimmed glasses, his broad smile and his snugly tailored Mao suit. Under a gigantic portrait of Mao, he read his twenty-eight-page speech smoothly, his voice rising in a crescendo like a carnival barker’s to indicate appropriate moments to applaud. The audience dutifully clapped nine times. Only once was Jiang disappointed – when he attacked corruption among high officials. Then there was silence.

As he droned on, I scanned the choice first rows of the vast auditorium with my binoculars. I couldn’t spot Jade Phoenix. I knew that to mark the centenary, she had gone to Beijing University a few weeks earlier to speak to an invitation-only audience about Mao. It was nothing titillating, just about how hard he had worked in his later years, but everyone had been curious to see what Mao’s mistress was like.

As I peered through my binoculars, I noted without surprise that Mao’s descendants had not been allowed to sit on the stage. Seventeen years after the Great Helmsman’s death, Deng still kept a tight rein on them. I spotted them in the first three rows. Mao’s three surviving children were all there, his mentally ill son, Mao Anqing, in his wheelchair in the aisle, his two matronly daughters, Li Na and Li Min, in the first row. The four grandchildren, including the hotel clerk, sat in the second two rows. New World Mao was slumped over in the third row He looked like he was trying not to fall asleep.

A military band closed the meeting with a rousing rendition of the “Internationale,” still one of my favorite songs. “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, Arise, ye wretched of the earth,” I sang softly in Chinese, as some of the foreign correspondents around me gave me strange looks. I suddenly realized I was the only one actually singing in the Great Hall of the People. Even the four choirs were silent. I took off my Mao badge, and went home.

An award-winning journalist, Jan Wong was the Beijing correspondent for
The Globe and Mail
from 1988 to 1994. She is a graduate of McGill University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and is the recipient of the George Polk Award, and other honours for her reporting. Wong has written for the Montreal
Gazette, The New York Times, The Boston Globe
and
The Wall Street Journal
. She is the author of three other books:
Lunch with Jan Wong, Jan Wong’s China
and
Beijing Confidential
. She lives with her family in Toronto, where she is a reporter for
The Globe and Mail
.