Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (8 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 25
the mid-1950s when the Chairman told the people that: "Swimming is a sport in which the swimmers battle against Nature; you should go into the big rivers and seas to temper yourselves."
97
Then, Mao's personal passion for swimming became the center of a minicult from 1966 when, on 16 July, at the age of 73, he undertook an "heroic" swim of 15 kilometers in the Yangtze.
98
"Fear not fierce wind and waves/I swim as though strolling leisurely in a garden," Mao had written in one of his poems, and the supposedly Olympian feat of strength and vitality displayed in his Yangtze swim was reported as an act with both political and quasi-religious significance. It also marked a new stage in the unfolding of the Cultural Revolution.
99
Thereafter, on 16 July every year for more than a decade, people throughout China took to the water with banners and red flags held high to commemorate Mao's display of revolutionary physical strength and to emulate his spirit by confronting the dangers of untamed nature.
100
The subsequent mystique of swimming was such that at various points in his reformist career Deng Xiaoping, Mao's
de facto
successor, took to the water for the media to emphasize his political longevity.
101
In death, Mao's body belonged to the nation. Even from the time of his funeral "Mao as a person, with family and friends, was displaced by Mao as a transcendent revolutionary leader without a private domain of his own"
102
(see Figure 5). The Memorial Hall built to house his preserved body was itself a formalistic "embodiment" of China built by workers from throughout the country with materials from every province,
103
the last example of what has been called Mao's "participatory democracy."
104
The Lincoln-like statue of Mao in the entrance chamber of the Memorial Hall has behind it a massive picture of the rivers and mountains of China. In much writing about the dead leader his physical being and spirit have been equated with the landscape of the nation, and in many cases Mao's personal revolutionary history drained places of their own history and made them part of his own (see Figure 6). During the new Mao Cult it was claimed that some tourist spots bore a physical likeness to the Chairman. There was, for example, the "Sun Peak" in Huizhou, Guangdong, which was said to look just like a Mao statue,
105
and at ''Mao Zedong Mountain" in Xinjiang the dead leader was regarded as having been "transubstantiated as a geographical feature of the national landscape."
106
The "geospiritual remerging" of the Leader with the land reflected traditional ideas of ancestral return
107
and helped regional travel agencies exploit local geography so they could cash in on the new Cult and China's boom in tourism.
Mao's own corpse, on the other hand, was nothing less than "the biological structure of an historical monument," to use an expression favored by Professor Yuri Denisov, director of the Institute of Biological Structures in

 

Page 26
Moscow, the organization entrusted with the preservation of Lenin's body and the embalming of other socialist potentates.
108
Although plans to dispose of Mao's body and remove the Memorial Hall were mooted during the de-Maoification process of 1979-80, the Chairman remained
in situ,
and from the late 1980s his body was often reproduced both in living tissue and in effigy for popular entertainment. The actors Gu Yue and Wang Ying, for example, played Mao in numerous big-budget historical films and multi-episode teleseries made before and during the centenary year of 1993 (see "In a Glass Darkly").
109
In 1994, a wax effigy of the Chairman was modeled for public display in the Great Chinese Wax Works in the Chinese Museum of Revolutionary History on the eastern flank of Tiananmen Square. As one commentator remarked upon seeing the lifelike icon of Mao: "He is the banner of the country, the soul of the people as well as being a Great Man. You enter and empower yourself with some of the energy of this Giant; when you leave you can be a more dignified and upstanding Chinese!"
110
It is as an incorporeal presence, however, that Mao's influence reached beyond the grave. As Hua Guofeng, the transient Chairman who succeeded Mao (and attempted for a time to both look and write like him [see Figure 7]), said in his speech at the opening ceremony of the Mao Memorial Hall in September 1977: "Chairman Mao will always be with us; he will always be in the hearts of each comrade and friend among us; he will always live in the hearts of the Chinese people and of revolutionary people the world over."
111
As a revolutionary leader Mao had encouraged people to experience hardship as well as engage in sports and naturopathyswimming, sunbaths, washing with cold water, physical labor, and so onin a pseudo-religious regimen for the tempering of both body and spirit. Physical vigor was central to his positivistic and subjective project to remake both the self and the world. While Mao's politics are now as much of a historical curiosity as his corpse, his approach to physicality has played a worthy role in the process whereby the Chinese body has been transformed into the temple of the consumer. In 1990s China, one does glory to one's familial ancestors and pays homage to the memory of Mao and other revolutionary elders not only by engaging in the revolution through productive labor, but also by advancing the reforms through shopping (see the comments of the entrepreneur in "The Sun Never Sets").
112
While Mao's physical remains were palatially accommodated in a crystalline display case, his political career and works were remodeled to suit the shifting exigencies of Party policy.
In 1979, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the People's

 

Page 27
Republic, Marshal Ye Jianying declared: "What we call Mao Zedong Thought . . . is not the product of Mao Zedong's personal wisdom alone; it is the product of the wisdom of Mao and his comrades-in-arms. . . . It is the crystallization of the collective wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party"
113
(see Figure 8). The conversion of Mao into a corporate body had been completed by the ninetieth anniversary of his birth, in 1983.
114
At that time, not only was his Thought decreed to be the product of collective wisdom, Mao himself was recast as
primus inter pares
within the "older generation of proletarian revolutionaries" (
laoyidai wuchanjieji gemingjia
) who had founded the Party, the PLA, and the People's Republic.
115
It was not until the early 1990s, however, that reports filtered out that Mao Thought was literally the result of a collective effort. In December 1993, the Hong Kong press reported on two documents coauthored by the Central Party School, the Party Document Research Center, and the Party History Research Center that had been presented to the Party's Secretariat in August that year. Both documents, if the Hong Kong claims are correct, confirm what has been suspected and discussed for many years, in particular by Sinologists, that famous works published under the name ''Mao Zedong" were the product of other and, in some cases, many hands.
116
The first of the documents, "Problems Involved in the Collation and Publication of the Works of Mao Zedong," revealed that after five years of intensive work analyzing and collating material in Party archives it was found that of the 470-odd speeches, reports, committee decisions, articles, telegrams, editorials, editorial notes, and directives previously attributed to Mao, more than 250, or nearly half, were neither drafted nor revised by Mao himself. Produced by "comrades in the Center, the Central Secretariat, or workers in the Center" in many cases Mao had merely read sections of the final work and written "I agree" (
tongyi
), "good" (
hao
), or simply signed "Mao Zedong" on them. Of the 120 or so military essays, telegrams, orders, and messages ascribed to Mao from the years prior to 1949, only 12 were actually authored by him. The rest were produced by various Party or army instrumentalities or individuals including Zhu De, Zhou Enlai, Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, and Ren Bishi.
117
As for the post-1949 Maoist works, it was revealed that many crucial documents and speeches were drafted by Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, Ai Siqi, Yang Xianzhen, Lu Dingyi, Hu Qiaomu, Deng Liqun, and Zhou Rongxin, revised by Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping, and merely approved by Mao. Indeed, from 1962, Mao instructed Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, Ai Siqi, Hu Qiaomu, and Deng Liqun to act as the collective authors of Mao Thought. It was even revealed (or at least claimed) that Mao's most famous three essays, the "Three Standard Articles" (
lao sanpian
)"In

 

Page 28
Memory of Norman Bethune," "The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains," and "Serve the People''
118
were the work of Hu Qiaomu, Mao's political secretary. Mao himself is supposed only to have made a handful of corrections to Hu's original drafts.
119
Similarly, there are doubts about the authorship of Mao's two major theoretical worksthe "
lianglun,
" "On Practice" (
Shijian lun
), and "On Contradiction" (
Maodun lun
). It is claimed that these two pillars of Mao's philosophical contribution to Marxism-Leninism were the result of a collaborative effort between Zhang Wentian, Wang Jiaxiang, and Chen Boda, although Ai Siqi's family had argued for some time that Ai was the real author.
120
Even if the scribes were inspired by the wave of privatization in China there was little chance they would revolt. The Chinese Copyright Law of 1990 dealt with possible claims by former official ghostwriters by clearly stipulating that the copyright of any work drafted collectively for Party and state leaders, or speeches, articles, and so on written by state employees for the leadership, belonged to the person in whose name that work was produced or published.
121
Despite these internal revelations, Mao's official status as one of the great twentieth-century masters of Chinese prose remained intact. But just as he was only one sage political leader within the Party collective, so, too, as a writer he was but one of many outstanding talents. In 1994 Mao was "literarily" put in his place by the editors of
A Treasury of Literary Masters of Twentieth-Century China.
Announced in late 1994 by the Hainan Publishing House, this "Treasury" aimed, as a report in
Beijing Book News
put it, to "blow away the nonliterary mists that have clouded literary history in China."
122
A quarter of the multivolume series was devoted to prose writing, and examples of Mao's essays were included. Although, according to the editors of the
Treasury,
the quality of his work justified him being ranked about above Lin Yutang, San Mao, and Feng Zikai, as a literary figure he was obliged to take his place in a line behind Lu Xun, Liang Shiqiu, Zhou Zuoren, Zhu Ziqing, Yu Dafu, and even the contemporary Shaanxi writer Jia Pingwa.
123
It is Mao's life, however, and the charisma of his personality rather than his writings that continued to appeal to the popular imagination. One of the most prolific popularizers of information on Mao's personal life was the PLA author Quan Yanchi. By producing from the late 1980s a series of best-selling titles such as
Mao on the Way to the Altar, Inside and Outside the Vermilion Walls,
and
The Head of the Bodyguards Talks about Mao Zedong,
Quan played a crucial role in revealing the Chairman as a human

 

Page 29
being, thereby making him more sympathetic, commercializing the Mao industry, and, in the course of doing so, profited handsomely from it. His books, which were written in a cloying and affected prose style that carefully avoided controversial issues, appeared just as the 1988-89 crisis of faith in the future of the Reforms was fueling protests against the status quo and a wave of nostalgia for the past. This was also a period that saw a secularization of dead Party leaders' lives, information about which had previously been treated as a state secret. Only in death, in eternal repose, could the true mien of leaders like them be revealed.
Much of Quan's early work was based on lengthy interviews with members of Mao's inner circle of security guards, in particular Li Yinqiao, a man who also features in Li Zhisui's account of life on the inside. The impressive sales figures of Quan's books encouraged numerous imitators and, according to State Publishing Bureau statistics, by June 1991 the seven best-selling works of reportage related to Mao, of which Quan was the leading author, had sold some 3.67 million copies.
124
As his informants realized the type of money that could be made out of the memoir industry, however, Quan became the object not only of envy but also of litigation, and he found himself embroiled in a bitter public dispute with Li Yinqiao, who accused him of taking unfair commercial advantage of material he had provided.
125
While the masses were eager to read the easily digested but essentially anodyne writings of authors such as Quan and the much-published Shanghai reportage writer Ye Yonglie, who first came to prominence in the 1980s writing about the victims of Mao's rule, at least one survey claims that it was Chinese translations of Western studies of Mao, in particular Ross Terrill's
Mao: A Biography,
that had a major impact on the young (see "Galluping Mao"). More revealing accounts of the past by Mainland authors such as Li Rui, a onetime secretary of Mao's, or lugubrious but interesting works by Party stalwarts such as Wang Dongxing, the head of Mao's security office, and Bo Yibo, a leading economic planner, however, attracted far less attention.
126
And although there were a number of journals devoted to studies of Mao Thought, they were not widely read.
127
For more than a decade there had been a steady trickle of fascinating and highly controversial material in both restricted circulation and openly available publications that gradually revealedand continues to reveala great deal about the inner history of the Party, Mao, and other leaders. Not surprisingly, much of this work was either too arcane or too limited in scope to attract the attention of the general reader
128
(see Figures 9a, 9b, 9c). That is not to say that some of the more popular essays and books on Mao did not contain new, and in some cases startling information about the Mao period, including such things

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