MCLC: Confucius, Mao, and the Little Red Book

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Haiyan Lee <haiyan at stanford.edu>
Subject: Confucius, Mao, and the Little Red Book
***********************************************************

Source: LA Review of Books (3/26/14):
http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/chinablog/confucius-mao-little-red-book/

Confucius, Mao, and the Little Red Book
By Jeffrey Wasserstrom
All Photos by Jeffrey Wasserstrom

I’ve just returned from a trip to China that began with a week in
Shanghai, where I participated in one literary festival, and ended with a
few days in Beijing, where I had a small role in another bookish event of
the same kind.  It was good to go back to those cities, which I’ve visited
regularly since the mid-1980s, especially since temperatures were higher
and smog levels lower than I’d feared they might be, and the panels at
Shanghai’s M on the Bund and Beijing’s Capital M went as well as I’d hoped
they would.  But as satisfying as returning to each metropolis was, I was
particularly glad to be able to slip in a side trip to Qufu, a small city
in Shandong Province, best known for its ties to Confucius, that I’d never
been to before.  This visit has changed forever the way I think about the
historical treatment of the ancient sage and how I think about a canonical
modern Chinese text, Mao’s Little Red Book.

I decided to go to Qufu, which is still home to many members of the Kong
lineage of which Confucius was part, as soon as I realized how simple it
would be to fold this place I’d long been curious to see into a rushed
itinerary.  Thanks to the opening of a new bullet train route, I could set
off from Shanghai in the morning, get to Confucius’s hometown after being
whisked along the rails for three hours, spend the afternoon seeing the
main local sights (the Confucius Temple, the Confucius Mansion, and the
massive Kong family cemetery that includes the philosopher’s tomb), and
then continue on by rail to Beijing the same evening, getting to the
capital two hours later.

Qufu had been high on my “to see” list for years due to my interest in the
dramatic about-face the Chinese Communist Party has made regarding
Confucius.  He is now treated as a kind of national saint but, to borrow
from sports writing parlance, his posthumous career has had the ups and
downs of a classic comeback kid. Most significantly, as Maura Cunningham
and I note near the beginning of our China in the 21st Century: What
Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, second edition, 2013), as
recently as the 1970s he was “excoriated in a mass campaign that presented
him as a man whose hide-bound, anti-egalitarian ideas had done great harm
to many generations of Chinese men and even more damage to generations of
Chinese women.”  How, I wondered on the train to Qufu, would sites
associated with Confucius deal with the various reversals of fortune that
have been experienced by the sage, who was out of favor among
intellectuals in the 1910s, only to be exalted by Chiang Kai-shek in the
1930s, before being reviled throughout the Mao years (1949-1976) and then
surging back into official favor under the Chairman’s successors?  In
symbolic terms, might Qufu be that most unusual sort of contemporary
Chinese locale — a completely Mao-free zone?

My first fifteen minutes in Qufu were frustrating ones.  They were spent
circling the train station with a friend, who was also shuttling between
the Shanghai and Beijing literary festivals and had agreed to join me in
some Confucius-themed sightseeing, trying to figure out a way to leave our
bags in a safe place while venturing into the city.  My initial
impression, captured in a couple of photographs I took during breaks from
our quest to find lockers or a secure luggage room (the closest we got was
a waitress pointing to a closet in her restaurant that she thought might
be a good place to stow our bags), was of a city that was all about
Confucius and had no room for Mao, and was unconcerned with the ups and
downs of the former’s career.  Bigger than life in the station’s main hall
was a statue of Confucius that gazed down on all visitors and was
described simply as a revered figure from ancient times.  And when I
stepped outside, I saw the same visage gazing down at me benevolently from
a giant poster that placed Confucius between a needle-nosed bullet train
(suggesting that Qufu is a place that honors venerable traditions but is
part of a modern country) and a hillside (nodding to the city’s only claim
to fame unrelated to the Kong family, which is its proximity to Mount Tai,
a leading attraction for Chinese lovers of nature).

Mao came into the picture, though, as soon as we gave up on leaving our
bags at the station and decided to hire a taxi with a decent-sized locked
trunk for the whole afternoon.  Hanging from the cab driver’s rearview
mirror was the same good luck medallion emblazoned with the late
Chairman’s face that one sees in taxis across China.  As he drove us to
our first stop, the Confucius Temple, he pointed to rows of buildings
going up along the highway and cranes in the distance that were part of
still grander development plans.  Qufu, the voluble man insisted, was
destined to become a major tourist site and a bigger city, since travelers
from Korea, Japan and Taiwan as well as from all parts of China would want
to come and pay homage to Confucius.  Was he sure, I asked, that the
population and local tourist trade would grow enough to justify all the
building underway?  Definitely, he said, nodding his head vigorously, and
then offered two pieces of evidence to back up his confidence.  First, the
Shangri-La luxury chain had recently opened a hotel in Qufu.  Second,
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s wife, Peng Liyuan, had close ties to the
area, so money was bound to flow into the region.

Responding to my other questions, he said that he wasn’t part of the Kong
lineage, to which an estimated 20% of the just over half-a-million people
living in the greater Qufu are said to belong, but he was a local.  And as
such, he was very proud to be from the same place as a great sage and hero
of Chinese history.

I asked if he saw anything strange about saying that while having an image
of Mao in his car, since the Chairman, an iconoclast from an early age,
had despised Confucius throughout his adult life. The driver just bellowed
with laughter.  I asked if he even knew about the anti-Confucius stance of
Mao’s day, and he nodded and, still laughing, shouted out “Pi Lin, Pi
Kong!”  This is the shorthand for the most famous anti-Confucius campaign
of all, which took place in the early 1970s.  Making use of the term “pi”
for criticize, it targeted both the ancient philosopher (“Pi Kong”) and
Mao’s erstwhile heir apparent, Lin Biao (“Pi Lin”).  Lin, a People’s
Liberation Army leader, had been seen as a devoted follower of Mao and
staunch defender of Mao’s interpretation of Marxism and iconoclastic
critical stance toward Confucian ideas.  When the tide turned against Lin,
though, he was accused of having been a secret supporter of all things
reactionary, including Confucianism, which provided the tortured logic for
a double-barreled “Anti-Confucius, Anti-Lin Biao Campaign,” which threw
alleged ancient and contemporary enemies of the revolutionary cause into
the same vile category.

When we made our way through the city’s three major sites, the main focus
of the texts aimed at tourists, from booklets to plaques, was simply the
glories of Confucius and the rich legacy of the lineage to which he
belonged and the imperial era he is often used to represent.  There was
not any mention, at least in any text I saw, of the fact that Confucius
had only been revered during part of the People’s Republic’s history.

Every now and then, though, the recent past would come into view, since
both some official gift shops and many of the unofficial booths selling
trinkets near to the key sites contained objects associated with Mao and
his era in powers.  Inside the Confucius Mansion, for example, there was a
shop selling various decks of cards: some featuring Confucius, others
celebrating emperors, and still others honoring Mao. Meanwhile, between
the Temple and the Mansion, there were different but equally promiscuous
displays of statues, with Confucius, the Buddha, and Mao all jumbled
together.

Of all the curious juxtapositions of objects, though, there’s one that
stands out most to me as I look back on my Qufu afternoon, which I spotted
at a souvenir stall displaying, among other things, a lot of small books
with red covers.  A set of four red booklets in particular caught my eye.
Two were differently packaged versions of the classic Little Red Books
containing Mao’s selected sayings; but the other two were similarly
designed and titled copy-cat texts, made up, in this case, of quotations
by Confucius.

The side-by-side placement of Little Red Books associated with Mao and
Confucius seemed curious for so many reasons that it is hard to know where
to begin in attempting to unravel or even describe them.  To try to sort
them out, I spent some time on the plane ride home perusing an advance
copy of Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History, a wonderful anthology
edited by Alexander Cook that Cambridge University Press is publishing
next month.  The chapters in the volume, by talented scholars based in
different countries and different disciplines, explore everything from the
way the eponymous text was created and distributed within China to the
meanings it took on when it made its way to foreign countries such as
India, Italy, Albania and Peru.

Here are two things the chapters by Cook and his collaborators suggest
might be worth considering while pondering the apparent contradiction of
different sorts of little red books placed beside one another on that
table in Qufu.  Lin Biao, before being castigated as a closet Confucian,
took a special role in promoting Mao’s Little Red Book and wrote a preface
to the best-known edition of it.  And while the titles and even design
features of the newly created Little Red Books of Confucian sayings
imitate features of Mao-era creations (note the round images of the
authors on some books), the original Little Red Books of quotes by Mao
were themselves inspired in part by pamphlets and booklets from earlier
times that brought together aphorisms from the Analects and other
classical Chinese philosophical texts.

I thought that Qufu would be the sort of place I’d only want to visit
once, but the more I ponder what I’ve come to think of as my Little Red
Books photo, the more certain I am that I’ll need to go back there again.
I will want to see if the cab driver’s prediction of great things for the
city comes true.  I may even see what it’s like to stay in a Shangri-La in
Confucius’s hometown.  And I will definitely do something I foolishly
forgot to do on my first visit: buy one of the copy-cat Little Red Books
that has a picture on its cover of, and words inside by, a philosopher Mao
thought of as having ideas that were the polar opposite of his own.