Mao Zedong a difficult topic in China
BEIJING—Forty years after his death, Mao Zedong’s presence remains impossible to escape in China, yet difficult to discuss.
His corpse still lies in state at the center of Beijing, watched over by a giant portrait hanging on the Forbidden City in Tiananmen Square.
His face peers out of every wallet, emblazoned on the bank notes that have powered his country’s rise to the world’s second largest economy.
Yet his legacy remains problematic for China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and current party chair Xi Jinping, according to Frank Dikotter, a Mao expert at Hong Kong University, describing him as “both the Lenin and the Stalin” of the ruling party.
“He’s both the one who like Lenin brought the Communist Party to power and he’s the one who like Stalin committed horrendous crimes against humanity,” he said.
The son of a wealthy farmer, Mao dreamed of transforming the nation into a communist paradise and stopped at nothing to achieve his vision.
He was among the CCP founders in 1921, and fought for 28 years against his own countrymen and the Japanese.
Finally on Oct. 1, 1949, he declared the People’s Republic of China in Tiananmen Square, but his dream quickly turned into a nightmare.
He ordered multiple purges to fight “counterrevolutionary” influence in the party, which are believed to have killed hun- dreds of thousands of people.
Tens of millions starved to death in the late 1950s during his Great Leap Forward, an illconceived attempt to force the country into communes.
Cultural Revolution
And in the decade leading up to his death, he unleashed the Cultural Revolution, an orgy of spiritual and physical violence that deeply scarred the national psyche.
Looking back on that history, the ruling party issued a 23,000-word resolution describing Mao as “a great Marxist and a great proletarian revolutionary, strategist and theorist” who made “gross mistakes.”
The verdict is often summarized as “70 percent right and 30 percent wrong,” a stance that hasn’t really shifted even as the reforms instituted by Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, transformed the country, Dikotter said.
“You can’t really touch upon the whole credibility, reputation, image of Mao, without undermining the foundation of the CCP,” he added.
‘Sanctioned amnesia’
Under President Xi, the government has gone to even greater lengths to make sure everyone says the same thing about when they talk about Mao.
The most powerful leader since the Great Helmsman himself, Xi has cautioned against both “historical nihilism” and “neo-liberalism,” an implicit warning to bury both praise and criticism of Mao’s era.