China still holds Mao aloft

From The Mercury News December 15, 2005, by Tim Johnson

"As China hurtles down the capitalist road, the communist ideals of the modern nation's founder, Mao Zedong, lie discarded in the gutter.

Yet Mao is still enshrined as China's greatest leader. His large portrait, solemn and slightly enigmatic, looks out over Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heart of the nation.

The Communist Party clutches Mao as a monumental figurehead, 29 years after his death. Party leaders won't let go of him as long as they retain their monopoly on political power. The preamble to China's Constitution hails "Mao Zedong Thought" for helping to guide China into the present. His likeness appears on nearly every piece of currency.

But Mao's ideas appear to have little relevance. Long gone is the cradle-to-grave system of Spartan housing, medical care and schooling that was guaranteed to everyone after the revolution in 1949. Mao reviled capitalism and oversaw industrial and rural development based on egalitarianism and central government planning. Soon after his death in 1976, China haltingly began to embrace capitalism, rely on market forces and end its isolation from most of the rest of the world.

One can only imagine the shock that the Great Helmsman would feel if he came back to life and strolled through China's cities. But that misses the broader point: Whatever the Chinese Communist Party's orientation, it retains Mao's propensity for authoritarian rule and uses him as a vital buttress to its own legitimacy.

The result is one of the world's great dramas: The party wants to maintain its iron grip on political power, but it also must permit China's economy to grow within a global system in order to meet the sky-high hopes of the Chinese people for better lives

Debate about Mao is largely off limits in China. In many ways, his public image is as frozen and static as his waxen body in a mausoleum on Tiananmen Square.

"Mao is a man of significant merits as well as weaknesses," said Xu Mingyang, a 27-year-old white-collar worker who was waiting to enter the mausoleum, repeating a common view espoused by the government that Mao was an epic figure with shortcomings near the end of his life.

Opinion polls routinely show schoolchildren listing Mao as their greatest hero, even above their parents, while young adults view him as a distant, even irrelevant, figure. Older Chinese are split. Some voice exhaustion at the social turmoil during his rule, while others, mainly rural peasants, admire him and long for the economic stability of his era rather than the vulnerability they feel today.

Outside China, new allegations are arising of some of the terrible costs of Mao's rule from 1949 until his death.

A new book, "Mao: The Unknown Story," by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, portrays him as a monster in Hitler's league, guilty of some 70 million deaths during the Great Leap Forward, Mao's drive beginning in 1958 to push all workers to meet unrealistic industrial and agricultural goals, and the Cultural Revolution, the 1966-76 period, in which he sanctioned national turmoil."

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Mick's comment: I have read "Mao: The Unknown story", and found it a fascinating if somewhat horrifying account. The book is extremely well researched and documented, and reads like a page turning novel.

I've spent quite some time doing business in China - so I guess I'm biased as to why this is a book to read, as it has some very interesting clues about the future of China .

But I'd also classify it as a "must read" for anyone interested in leadership in general.

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