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Text File | 1994-05-02 | 17KB | 336 lines

<text> <title> China's Problem Exorcising Mao </title> <article> <hdr> Foreign Service Journal, June 1991 China's Problem Exorcising Mao </hdr> <body> By A. Dane Bowen, Jr. Mr. Bowen, professor of history and economics at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania, is a retired Foreign Service officer. He was national security adviser to Secretaries of the Treasury John Connolly, George Shultz, and William Simon. Some time ago China's octogenarian leader, Deng Xiaoping, told an Italian journalist, "We're not going to do to Mao what Chairman Khrushchev did to Stalin." In other words, Deng--who was purged not once but twice under Mao Zedong and whose family suffered terribly during the Mao era--intends to embark upon no de-Maoization program resembling the de-Stalinization program of the Soviets. It was during Mao's last and most egregious of a long line of blunders and offenses, the movement with the Orwellian name the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution," that Deng's grown son was thrown out of an upper-story window and abandoned with a broken neck. He is now spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Why no casting out of Mao Zedong from the Chinese Communist hagiography? China seems unable to resolve its ambivalence about Mao. On one hand, his image is neglected and his "little red book" impossible to find in China. Leaders speak of him only with some embarrassment. On the other hand, there is no official repudiation of his rule. Some students even seem to admire him. Resting in heavenly peace Mao's tomb has not suffered the fate of Stalin's. When I visited Red Square in Moscow in 1968, Stalin's body had recently been removed from where it had rested on public display beside Lenin's. It was re-interred between Lenin's tomb--something of a forum for the nation--and the great medieval Kremlin wall, which affords a backdrop to the tomb. Stalin's grave was at the end of a long row of graves of old Bolsheviks, going back to the Russian Revolution of 1917. But unlike the other graves, which had a bust of each on top of a fair-sized headstone, and had the grave framed by red granite, Stalin's grave was unmarked. In contrast, Mao's cadaver remains ensconced in the heart of Beijing, in an enormous mausoleum in the middle of his creation, the enlarged Tiananmen Square, the largest in the world. The mausoleum is the southern terminus of a central, north-south axis of the imperial Forbidden City, which begins at the base of a hill in the north and runs through building after building, pavilion after pavilion, courtyard after courtyard, and gate after gate, exiting through Tiananmen Gate onto the Square, and ending with Mao's remains. Mao's mausoleum thus blocks the imperial symbolism of opening out to all of China to the south. Of this scene, a Chinese poet wrote this bitter verse: <qt> <l>Chairman's tomb and Emperor's</l> <l>palace face each other across the</l> <l>square,</l> <l>One great leader in his wisdom made</l> <l>our countless futures bare.</l> <l>Each and every marble staircase</l> <l>covers heaps of bones beneath,</l> <l>From the eaves of such fine buildings,</l> <l>fresh red blood drops everywhere.</l> </qt> (Quoted in Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China) Just as Mao's mausoleum dominates the south end of Tiananmen Square, so his portrait commands a central position over Tiananmen Gate, from the top of which Mao in 1949 proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic. As the leaders of the Soviet Union stand on Lenin's tomb to review the parades in Red Square, China's leaders gather on Tiananmen Gate to review functions in the square. The Chinese even once sang a popular song called "I Love Tiananmen!" During the height of the demonstrations in the square in May and June of 1989, some demonstrators splashed paint on Mao's portrait. Leaders of the student demonstrators helped workers replace it! Moreover, demonstrators shortly before the massacre carried posters with huge portraits of Mao and Zhou Enlai. This puzzled me at first, since I tended to assume that the students were very much against the system Mao had created. But I recalled the reactions of some of my brightest students when I was teaching, during the pro-democracy movement, at a state university in Changsa, capital of Mao's native province of Hunan. Some of these students thought very highly of Mao, although close questioning revealed that they knew practically nothing about him other than the official line. When I told a group of male students that Mao kept a considerable stable of young women, they shook their heads in disbelief. They insisted he had three wives, but all in seriatim and legally. Had not Mao ended multiple wives, foot-binding and concubinage? When I explained that beautiful young women had been sent to Mao from all over China, that they were even sometimes seen marching together in a unit of the People's Liberation Army, they still did not believe me. "Mr. Democracy" One of only three statues of Mao which I came across in teaching and traveling in all the major regions of China stands at Hunan University across the river from Changsa. During the pro-democracy movement students hung a huge sign on this imposing statue, reading, "Mr. Democracy, we welcome you." While Mao may have been a reformer of sorts and called for "mass participation" (meaning continuing revolution), he was certainly never a proponent of democracy. One of the very few things the students really knew of the real Mao was that he twice purged Deng Xiaoping, the current Chinese leader. And since the students were against Deng, they figured that Mao must have been alright, based on the old principle that the enemy of my enemy must be my friend. An idealistic school teacher turned tourist guide told a New York Times reporter that she preferred Mao to the current "grandfathers" in the Chinese government. On the evening of May 4, 1989, I sat around bonfires with my Chinese students on the campus in Hunan Province, the occasion being the celebration of "the May 4th Movement," a student-led movement of 1919. Among the songs the students sang was "Socialism is Good." Yet, many of these same students immediately before and after this officially sponsored celebration participated in the pro-democracy demonstrations. Hometown "shrine" When I first arrived in Changsha, I was puzzled as to why this out-of-the-way provincial capital would have such an imposing railroad station. I discovered that it was much bigger and more impressive than the railroad station in the former capital, Nanjing, or in Canton, or even in Shanghai. With its central tower, symmetrical wings, and position blocking the view at the end of the city's main drag, Wuyi Road, it reminded me of the state capitol in Austin, Texas. Yet not only is Changsha no rail center, it is not even at the intersection of main rail lines. Only later did I read that some 20 trains a day used to depart from this station on a spur to go to Mao's birthplace and boyhood home in the farming village of Shaoshan, 75 miles to the west. The American novelist, Paul Theroux, wrote in his travelogue of China, Riding the Red Rooster, that no one went anymore to this village, virtually a shrine to Mao. That is a little bit of an exaggeration, but certainly before Mao's recent revival, not many did, and I daresay no Chinese official or bigwig goes there now. Close by, 20 miles farther into the boondocks, I saw hordes of people and black, chauffeur-driven limousines with Chinese officials visiting the birthplace and huge museum--20 times larger than Mao's--of Liu Shaoqui. Liu was Mao's vice chairman, until he began to question some of Mao's policies, such as the break with the Soviet Union and the disastrous Great Leap Forward. Mao framed him, arrested him, and let