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

marked Stalin's rule, just as in China the nation had enthusiastically responded to the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the ceaseless political purges that Mao had directed from the early 1950s. To "rediscover" Mao in a period of rapid change and social dislocation was for many also a grounding act of self-affirmation.
In China, the events of 1988 and 1989natural disasters and economic uncertainty followed by a fear of national collapse, mass protests against corruption and the lack of freedoms followed by the ill-managed government suppression of the 1989 protests, the equivocal response of the Western democracies, and the fall of communism in Eastern Europeall served to encourage the nascent Mao Cult. As is so often the case when people face economic uncertainty and social anomie, old cultural symbols, cults, practices, and beliefs are spontaneously revived to provide a framework of cohesion and meaning to a threatening world. To many, Mao was represen-
     

Page 19
tative of an age of certainty and confidence, of cultural and political unity, and, above all, of economic equality and probity.
The Maoist past reflected badly on Deng's present. Yet perhaps it was only with the relative economic freedoms allowed by the reforms that people could afford to indulge in an anodyne wave of pro-Mao nostalgia. Certainly, the new Cult suggested alternatives to the Reformist economic and social order, but it did not offer new or viable political solutions to China's problems. If anything, the Mao Cult looked fondly on strong government, coherent national goals, authority, and power. Mao was, first and foremost, an unwavering patriot who led the nation against foreign imperialism and expelled foreign capital. 72 The formulas of the Mao era also offered simple answers to complex questions: direct collective action over painful individual decisions, reliance on the State rather than a grinding struggle for the self, national pride as opposed to self-doubt. Many could indulge in Mao nostalgia because due to bans on remembering the past they had forgotten its horrors. Unlike Europeans, for example, who are exposed to a continuous media barrage related to World War II, Chinese government censorship of most information on the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution meant that the populace had not had to deal with unadulterated memory and horror through film, television, newspaper articles, memoirs, and so on. Emotionally, therefore, many people, and in particular the young, could partake in the luxury of a positive nostalgia for the past.
As folk religion flourished outside urban centers from the 1980s, the eclectic nature of Chinese popular beliefs meant that the Chairman could be subsumed within a larger system of faith. Many commentators have noted that Mao has finally found a niche in the traditional Chinese pantheon alongside such martial heroes as Guan Gong, Zhuge Liang, and Liu Bei. The real Cult of Chairman Mao was no longer determined by Party fiat, and the authorities knew it. The old propaganda line "Chairman Mao will forever live in our hearts" ( Mao zhuxi yongyuan huo zai women xinzhong ) had literally come true. But Mao no longer ruled as he once did through Party organizations, overt propaganda, and ceaseless political campaigns. His spirit was more ineffable, perhaps even more omnipresent.
EveryMao
There was something for everyone in the Mao persona. As Edgar Snow wrote in the early 1960s: "What makes him [Mao] formidable is that he is not just a party boss but by many millions of Chinese is quite genuinely regarded as a teacher, statesman, strategist, philosopher, poet laureate, national hero, head of the family, and greatest liberator in history. He is to
     

Page 20
them Confucius plus Lao-tzu plus Rousseau plus Marx plus Buddha. . . ." 73 In the 1990s, Mao remains a patriotic leader, martial hero, philosopherking, poet, calligrapher (surrounded as he so often was with the bric-a-brac of the