Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (4 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

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Page 7
be made. These decisions were made by a number of bureaucratic instrumentalities such as the Party's Department of Propaganda, the National Bureau for Publishing Administration, and Xinhua Books, the major retailer for books in China, in accordance with Party directives.
Lin Biao, the cult of Mao he sponsored, as well as
Quotations from Chairman Mao,
which Lin had exploited and even written a preface for, may have all been defunct from the time of Lin's disappearance in 1971,
10
but the Little Red Book itself continued to enjoy a shelf life until 1979, as did many other products of the official Mao Cult. In February of that year the Department of Propaganda issued instructions to remove from sale all copies of
Quotations
in Chinese and other languages, along with poster-size single quotes from Mao and out-of-date Mao portraits emblazoned with the words "Long live" (
wansui
) or "Eternal life" (
wanshou wujiang
).
11
As of the day this document, "A Circular Concerning the Withdrawal from Circulation of
Quotations from Chairman Mao
(12 February 1979)," was issued by Party Central's Department of Propaganda, all copies and editions of
Quotations,
in Chinese, minority, and foreign languages, were banned from sale through the official Xinhua Bookstores and the International Bookstore (
Guoji shudian
). Apart from limited numbers to be held by province-level Xinhua Bookstores for possible future official use, all other copies were ordered pulped (
huajiang chuli
) forthwith.
Similarly, all Chinese diplomatic missions, official Chinese residents overseas, delegations sent abroad, and organizations within China that had contact with foreigners were to cease immediately distributing or supplying in any way copies of
Quotations.
In its place,
Selected Works
or individual tracts by Mao could be provided when necessary. "Foreign friends" who imported the book for sale in their home countries could wait until they ran out of stock. This stipulation was probably made because an international ban on the book would not only have been unenforceable, but also may have sparked a rush on the now-illicit booklet. No future supplies of the quotes, however, were to be exported.
This document was circulated on 20 February 1979, to Xinhua Bookstores at the provincial, municipal, and autonomous region levels by the National Bureau for Publishing Administration.
12
It was followed some two months later by another circular on how the fiscal losses incurred as a result of the pulping of this material were to be dealt with. A further notice was issued by Xinhua Books in June, ordering the pulping to be completed by September 1979.
13
Posters of the official portrait that showed Mao in his avuncular or, as the propagandists would have it, "beatific" old age, however, seem to have fallen out of favor fairly rapidly. In 1979, internal estimates claimed that

 

Page 8
during the Cultural Revolution 2.2 billion portraits of the Chairman had been produced, three for every person in the nation.
14
By the early 1980s, however, there was a critical lack of Mao's votary imageso much so, in fact, that in mid 1981, a member of the county Party committee of Huize in Yunnan Province wrote to the head office of Xinhua Books remarking that a local peasant had bought up ten copies of the official portrait just before Spring Festival, fearful that images of Mao would soon be unavailable. Following the Party's critique of Mao's errors in 1981, the fear among the faithful that there would be a sudden dearth of Mao images must have been so widespread that the head office of Xinhua responded to this letter by instructing bookstores throughout the nation to stock Mao portraits so as always to be ready "to satisfy the needs of Party members and the People."
15
At about the same time that the comrade from Huize was complaining to Beijing, the Publishing Administration circulated a document from Party Central's Department of Propaganda regarding the proprieties of displaying pictures of Party leaders at meeting places and in public. In the punctilious blather beloved of bureaucrats worldwide, the Department of Propaganda remarked that after many inquiries as to whether it was still appropriate to hang images of leaders in publicespecially given the antipersonality cult line that the Party was now pursuinga number of decisions were made "on the basis of guidelines proposed by various comrades in the central government" that put strict limits on the public hanging of portraits of Party leaders (see "Documenting the Demise").
16
In January 1983 a new formulation was devised for dealing with the problem of official portraits. By this stage, Hua Guofeng, the interim Party leader handpicked by Mao, had fallen from power and all evidence of his stewardship, including his portrait, as well as all works related to him, songs in praise of his wisdom, and so on, was being obliterated. In the future, the Department of Propaganda instructed, plentiful supplies of official portraits featuring either the Four Dead Great Revolutionaries (Mao, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, and Zhu De), or the Six Revolutionaries representing two generations of leaders (Mao, Zhou, Liu, Zhu, as well as Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun), were to be made available over the Spring Festival period, and Party cells were directed to encourage the masses to buy and hang these pictures in place of Hua Guofeng's portrait.
17
In 1989, further image consultation resulted in a new move. From April that year Party Central deemed it unnecessary for the portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin to be displayed in Tiananmen Square on Labor Day (1 May) or National Day (1 October), as previously had been the case. Henceforth, only Mao and Sun Yat-sen were to be seen in public. This decision, the Department of Propaganda pointed out in an internal

 

Page 9
communiqué, was not to be construed as evincing a change in attitude toward Marxism as such. "Mao Zedong and Mao Thought," the Department reminded its cadres, were, after all, "the concrete manifestation of Marxism in China."
18
Following the appearance of the new Mao Cult the statistics regarding official portraits show that while officialdom had relegated Mao to history, the masses were creating a new history for the Chairman. In 1989 a mere 370,000 copies of the official portrait of Mao had been printed. In 1990 the number rose dramatically to 22.95 million, of which 19.93 million were sold. In 1991 the number hit 50 million. For the same year the portraits of other leaders (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Zhou, Liu Shaoqi, and Zhu De) combined totaled only 2.25 million.
19
In one report published in late 1991, it was claimed that 99.5 percent of households in Changsha County, Hunan, had "invited portraits of Chairman Mao into their homes" (
qing Mao zhuxi xiangjinwu
).
20
The fate of Mao's published writings was a more complicated matter. According to secret statistics compiled by the head office of Xinhua Books in June 1979, there were 450 million unsold or remaindered copies of the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong in storage, constituting some 24 percent of all remaindered books in China (which ran to a total of 170 million volumes, valued at 1.3 billion
yuan
). This figure included 8 million sets of Mao's selected works and 2.82 billion copies of speeches and writings in single volumes.
Xinhua Books noted that during the 10 years of the Cultural Revolution more than 40 billion volumes of Mao's works were printed and distributed, constituting, in mid 1979, 8 percent of all unsold books in China. That meant 15 copies of Mao's books for every man, woman, and child in China.
21
Approximately 85 million
yuan
in interest-free loans had been made available by state banks to produce this revolutionary tide of paper. But due to the new economic strategy that the government launched in 1979, publishers now had to pay interest on the loans, and massive debts were accruing at an alarming rate.
Official Xinhua Bookstore documents conceded that it was unlikely there would be any mass demand for these books in the future and, given the rate at which political books were selling in 1979 (a mere 560,000 volumes in the first half of 1979), remaindered stock would remain stockpiled for decades.
22
This daunting "mountain of books," as it was called, now took up valuable and much-needed storage space. Its existence hampered the production and distribution of new books, in particular school texts. Furthermore, fluc-

 

Page 10
tuating temperatures throughout the year, as well as mold caused by the rainy season, were causing serious deterioration of the laminated covers of the books; volumes were sticking together, binding glue was drying out and cracking, staples were rusting, and pages were yellowing. Such natural attrition had already claimed some 15 to 20 percent of all books.
Emergency measures to deal with the problem were formulated. Complete sets of the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, as well as certain editions and Mao's selected works (including single-volume editions, hard- and soft-cover as well as traditional clothbound editions), were to be preserved in toto. Henceforth, 10 to 20 percent of all other editions of Mao's works and single-volume publications were to be kept in storage by local publishing houses. The remainder were to be given away to readers in need (village cultural centers, middle school students, and recently rusticated youths), in accordance with local guidelines. Books that could not even be given away had to be pulped "after a reasonable period had elapsed." All damaged books could be pulped immediately. These regulations also covered editions in minority languages.
The expected losses resulting from this were estimated to be 30 percent of all remaindered books. The loss of possible revenue through gifts would be 24 percent and 32 percent due to pulping respectively. With the agreement of the Ministry of Finance, these losses were to be met by Xinhua Books over a two- to three-year period.
Not surprisingly, many publishers failed to follow these detailed and burdensome directives. In the atmosphere of de-Maoification described above, many localities acted unilaterally in dealing with the Mao opus. In July 1980, for example, it was reported that some bookstores in Shaanxi Province had been pulping more than 90 percent of their political book stock, claiming that they were damaged; others were selling spoiled books to individuals.
23
By early 1982 the decision to pulp Mao had been pursued with such rigor in certain localities that a new crisis in the supply of Mao's works unfolded.
At the time, a number of disgruntled People's Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers stationed in Henan Province complained to the head office of Xinhua Books that local stocks of
Selected Works of Mao Zedong
and famous speeches and writings by Mao, such as "Serve the People" and "In Memory of Norman Bethune," had run out. In response, a document was sent to the provincial office of Xinhua Books in Henan, and a more detailed document was distributed to publishers throughout China stipulating that all of the 43 canonical writings by Mao listed in the Party's 1981 "Decision on Historical Questions" were to be kept in stock for the use of readers and for obligatory political study sessions. It noted that due to the recent unavailability of Mao's works, some

 

Page 11
comrades had actually been reduced to copying out articles by hand.
24
While the Mao classics remained inviolable, Volume 5 of
Selected Works,
a tome hastily produced after the Cultural Revolution as part of the power struggle that followed Mao's death, was now found to be seriously flawed. The problem was the book's footnotes. They reflected the politics of the 1970s, and they were completely out of step with the propaganda requirements of the Reform era. In early 1982, a circular issued by the National Publishing Bureau ordered the book withdrawn from sale and pulped.
25
Mao's works were updated after that, but only following what appeared to be a considerable hiatus. Various articles, speeches, and volumes were produced to provide canonical support for the twists and turns of new Party policies in the 1980s. Then, as the authorities were reaffirming their ideological pedigree in the face of internal dissension and international disorder (in particular the collapse of communism in the West), a second edition of
Selected Works
containing new annotations that expunged "leftist" influences and errors, was published coinciding with the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party, on 1 July 1991.
26
On 4 July Party Central issued a circular admonishing Party members and cadres to lead the nation in studying Mao Thought. The official media promotion of the book, not to mention obligatory sales, added to the popular interest already piqued by the new Mao Cult, and by January 1992 10 million sets of the second edition had been sold.
27
As part of the commemoration of Mao's centenary in 1993, it was announced that a five-volume set of
The Works of Mao Zedong
would be published containing documents not previously included in
Selected Works,
including essays, speeches, telegrams, letters, reports, speeches, directives and so on from 1921 to 1976, arranged by topic.
28
Similar official Mao-related publishing projects, including the production of deluxe edition coffee-table books,
29
memoirs, collections of essays, and so on, were produced as part of the centenary frenzy of 1993.
Mao Remains:
Cold and Hot
In one of the most direct critiques of Mao ever published on the Mainland, the writer Li Jie stated in 1989 that the secret of Mao's political success came from the understanding of the Chinese plight that he shared with the writer Lu Xun (d. 1936). Whereas, Li argued, Lu Xun had used his insight into the weaknesses of the Chinese character to struggle with the burden of tradition and warn his compatriots of its dangers, Mao had manipulated his

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