MCLC: happy b-day Chairman Mao

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: happy b-day Chairman Mao
***********************************************************

Source: Sinosphere Blog, NYT (12/23/13):
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/happy-birthday-chairman-mao/

Happy Birthday, Chairman Mao
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

To mark the birth of Mao Zedong 120 years ago on Thursday, Dec. 26,
statues of the revolutionary leader will be washed throughout the country,
Chinese media reported.

Stamps will be issued, books published, documentaries broadcast,
photographic exhibitions staged, “red songs” sung, Mao-themed calligraphy
displayed, seminars and speeches held, and a businessman and
philanthropist, Chen Guangbiao, and other businessmen will distribute
corn, flour and oil to children and elderly people
<http://news.sohu.com/20131218/n391975173.shtml> in Yan’an, the Communist
forces’ revolutionary base in the northwestern province of Shaanxi,
according to the state news agency Xinhua.

Yet Chairman Mao’s legacy is controversial, even if many ordinary Chinese
are deeply proud of the 1949 revolution and revere him.

So despite the celebrations, which will also include concerts in the Great
Hall of the People and the Beijing Exhibition Center on Thursday, and at
the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing on Wednesday
evening, not everyone is enthusiastic.

Asked if tickets were available for “Red Sun Songs, Remembering the 120th
Anniversary of Mao Zedong’s Birth,” a woman answering the telephone at the
Beijing Exhibition Center theater asked, “Why do you want to watch that?
Isn’t the folk song concert way better?”

She was referring to “Temperament – China’s 2013 Ethnic Minorities
Concert” set for Dec. 30 at the same venue.

At the heart of the ambiguity is Mao’s legacy as a leader who is seen by
ordinary Chinese as freeing China from foreign influence and class
oppression, but who also made “mistakes
<http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/833595.shtml#.UreZcPYWF91>,” as the
state-run Global Times wrote on Monday. Those included the persecution and
deaths of millions of people in political campaigns that began in the
1950s and lasted into the early 1970s. After Mao’s death in 1976, the
government declared him “70 percent right and 30 percent wrong,” an
oft-used Chinese formulation.

In two editorials – one in its Chinese-language edition and one in its
English one, headlined, respectively, “Repudiating Mao is a Childish
Fantasy Entertained by a Small Number of People” and “Mao Denigration
Driven by Political Motives,” the newspaper wrote, in its Chinese version,
that assessing Mao’s legacy is not easy, because “we are still living in
the Mao era, linked in countless ways.”

In the English version, the tone was perhaps more conciliatory: “Even when
he has already passed away for 37 years, it is difficult to disregard the
history of Mao’s era to make a judgment about him, because we are still
more or less influenced by his era.” The newspaper often produces
different versions of editorials for Chinese- and English-language
consumption, seeking to address different audiences.

In a sign of unease over the extravagance of some commemorations –
witness, for example, a gold-and-jewel statue of Mao said to be worth
about 100 million renminbi, or $16.5 million, in the southern city of
Shenzhen — the concert at the Great Hall of the People has been abruptly
scaled back.

President Xi Jinping is attempting a balancing act between supporters and
detractors. He has directed that neither the Maoist period nor the
post-Maoist period of China’s post-1949 history be “repudiated,” in a
theory known as the “Two Do Not Repudiates.”

Mr. Xi has said the celebrations should be “solemn, austere and practical.”

Reflecting that, earlier this month, the Southern Weekend newspaper
reported that the concert, previously titled “The Sun is the Reddest, Mao
is the Dearest,” would be renamed “Singing for our Homeland
<http://news.ifeng.com/mainland/special/maozedong120/content-3/detail_2013_
12/11/32037530_0.shtml>.”

And the concert at the National Center for the Performing Arts is private,
said a person answering the telephone there. “It’s chartered, tickets are
not for sale,” she said.

The critical voices are growing. The historian Zhou Xun recalls in her new
book, “Forgotten Voices of Mao’s Great Famine, 1958-1962,” an oral history
of the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s disastrous attempt to collectivize
agriculture and industrialize at breakneck speed, that as a child she ate
“stale corn imported from Cuba,” because of the shortage of food even in
normally fertile Sichuan Province.

Growing up with stories of a great-aunt who died of hunger during the
famine caused by the Great Leap Forward, which Ms. Zhou estimates killed
45 million people, she began researching in the Sichuan provincial
archives.

“I was shocked by what I read there,” wrote Ms. Zhou, now at the
University of Essex, as “nearly 12 million people in Sichuan – the land of
abundance – died of starvation” during those years.

After reading a report of mass starvation in Luliang in Yunnan Province,
where 90 percent of the farmers were ordered to turn their energies to
water conservation projects and thousands died of hunger, Mao wrote: “This
is a good report. The Yunnan provincial government made a mistake, but
they have realized that there was a problem, and they have dealt with the
problem correctly. They have learned their lesson, and they will not make
the same mistake again. This is a good thing: turning disaster into
blessing.”

The Communist Party Central Committee then ordered that each person in
China should consume 2,500 calories a day. “Both Mao and the Party
leadership ignored the crucial fact that there was a major outbreak of
famine in the country and that a large number of people were dying. The
food for 2,500 calories a day was simply non-existent,” she wrote.

Meanwhile, in Shaoshan, Hunan Province, Mao’s birthplace, 10,000 people
plan to mark his birthday by eating “long life noodles” and singing “red”
songs for him. And a new play, “China Put Forth a Mao Zedong,” will be
staged and later tour the country, at a reported cost of 500 million
renminbi ($82 million) out of a total local government budget of 1.95
billion renminbi, according to media reports.

Patrick Zuo contributed research.