Still Bowing Down Before Mao The Communist Party has officially claimed that the brutal dictator, who brought calamity upon China, was right 70% of the time. By Benjamin Shull
http://www.wsj.com/articles/still-bowing-down-before-mao-1479427514
Last year, China Central Television’s Bi Fujian was booted from the state broadcaster after a viral cellphone video caught him mocking Mao Zedong. The star anchor was promptly “condemned by critics online as a traitor and renegade,” write the authors of a new study of Mao’s legacy in modern China. Of course, the punishment for perceived slights against Mao was more draconian in the recent past—in 1989, three would-be protesters received 16 years, 20 years and life imprisonment, respectively, for throwing eggs at Mao’s portrait in Tiananmen Square. But China’s Communist leadership continues to punish any perceived “disrespect” directed toward the Chairman.
To us in the West it seems to defy logic that Mao could attract admiration at all today. The Great Helmsman was a brutal dictator who brought widespread persecution and economic calamity upon China. His nearly 30 years in power were disastrous, culminating in the mass starvation caused by the forced collectivization of the Great Leap Forward and in the deep-seated psychological trauma wrought by the Cultural Revolution, when ideological discipline was policed by the terror squads of the Red Guard.
China and the New Maoists
By Kerry Brown and Simone van Nieuwenhuizen
Zed, 190 pages, $20.95
In “China and the New Maoists,” Kerry Brown, a scholar at Chatham House in London, and Simone van Nieuwenhuizen, of the University of Sydney, don’t mince words. “As an economist, Mao was wholly ineffective,” they write, “sponsoring ludicrous programmes that chased after ideals like complete central state control of the economy and comprehensive plans that resulted in colossal inefficiency, the breakdown of the supplies of the most basic food and commodities, and entrenched poverty.” Even so, the authors observe, Mao has not lost his iconic status in China. The result is a kind of double-think in which past crimes are glossed over for the sake of national continuity. Since Mao’s death, they note, the Communist Party of China has officially claimed that Mao was right “70% of the time” and wrong “30% of the time.”
President Xi Jinping embodies the ambivalence of Mao’s legacy in China. In a 2013 speech titled “Carry on the Enduring Spirit of Mao Zedong Thought,” he exalted Mao’s political vision of a uniquely Chinese brand of socialism. But Mr. Xi’s attitude has not always seemed so forthright. His reformist father had been a fierce rival of party stalwart Deng Liqun, who forcefully pushed the notion that Mao, in the author’s words, had “created intellectual unity, a common framework and a grammar of politics, economics and geopolitics that suited the specific Chinese situation.” (It was even considered a surprise when Mr. Xi attended Deng’s funeral last year.) Mr. Xi’s father, like countless other Communist officials under Mao, was purged during the Cultural Revolution. But Mr. Xi has gradually centralized decision-making powers in his own hands in a way reminiscent of the Chairman himself.
Deng’s body of thought was formed in the wake of Mao’s own death. In the same way, the group of devotees who the authors characterize as “new Maoists” came of age after Tiananmen. They present Mao as a systematic thinker who unified the country in spite of the catastrophic mistakes he made. While “sacralization of Maoism reached its peak during the Cultural Revolution,” the authors write, supporters continue to exist in large numbers: “There were, and still are, firm believers from the highest political echelons right down to the grassroots level” doing battle with those more willing to repudiate Mao’s worst tendencies. A key for these followers is distinguishing Mao Zedong from Mao Zedong Thought—a distinction between “the man himself, at whose hands their nearest and dearest suffered,” and “the man as a source of a body of ideas, tactical wisdom and nationalist messages.” CONTINUE AT SITE
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