Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader Read Online Free PDF

hoary political associations. Many of the slogans and much of the speechifying and posturing were also familiar from the Maoist past. Even the language of a key document of the protests, the students' Hunger Strike Declaration, reflected the style of the Chairman. Indeed, some of the lines were an unconscious paraphrase of one of Mao's earliest articles. 65 He also made his presence felt in a more ethereal manner. On the afternoon of 23 May, the massive picture of Mao hanging on Tiananmen Gate was splattered with paint by an errant group of protesters from Hunan. 66 Immediately after this incident a dramatic storm struck the city. Many were convinced that Mao, infuriated with the protests and the desecration of his image, had "manifested his supernatural power" ( xianling ) and struck out at the demonstrators. 67 Among the student leaders, Mao's pervasive influence also made itself felt after this. There were constant purges at the top and endless covert meetings. The general lack of democratic principles, in particular from the time of the hunger strike (mid May) onward, as well as the shrill rhetoric of demagogues such as Chai Ling 68 and the demonizing of opponents in the ranks of the students, teachers, and intellectuals as "traitors," ''collaborators," and "capitulationists" who were supposedly engaged in plots and conspiracies to sell the movement out to the government, clearly reflected the political heritage of the long-dead Chairman.
There were other reasons for the reappearance of Mao among workers from the late 1980s (and not only in 1989), as we have indicated in the story referred to in the opening paragraph of this essay. The revival of the Stalin cult in the Brezhnev era may also be instructive in our investigation of the renewed popularity of Mao in the Chinese Reform era. Victor Zaslavsky says of the late 1960s' nostalgia for the days of Stalin:
The terror increased social mobility, eliminated re-emergent class barriers, and functioned as a socio-psychological mechanism by creating the sensation
     

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of a "negative" equality, or even of protection for individuals against the arbitrariness of local authority. At the end of the 1960s, when various enterprises began massive layoffs of superfluous workers in order to carry out economic reforms, workers often had fond recollections of Stalin's "justice," when factory administrators "lived in fear''in contrast to this new period, when they could "do as they pleased." . . . With the atomization of the working class and in the absence of any workers' democracy, of the right to association and strike, a strong central power comes to be seen as a guarantee of workers' economic rights against the arbitrariness of local administration. 69
As for the young, the general mood of helplessness in the 1960s only added to the nostalgia for the past. As Zaslavsky notes in words that adumbrate some of the attitudes that appeared among various strata of China's urban youth in the 1990s: "The young neither fight against communism, argue against it, nor curse it; something much worse has happened to communism: they laugh at it." In the Soviet Union the youngworkers, students, and otherswere witnessing their society turning into a realm of consumers and found their own lives increasingly meaningless and without goals. Their creativity frustrated and deprived of a positive direction, "the young look[ed] back nostalgically to the period of social revolution inseparably linked with Stalin's name." 70
There was, however, another level of the abiding reputation of Stalin in the Soviet Union. As the Soviet dissident philosopher Alexander Zinoviev observed, Stalin's rule was the ultimate expression of popular will and the mass personality. 71 He was the embodiment not only of history but of the national spirit as well. To deny him was to negate not only one's own history but also vital facets of the national character. Large numbers of people had participated in the terror that