I’m not trying to make this blog all Mao all the time, but as we seem to be discussing him a lot, and Johnathan just brought up the issue of popular memory again, I thought I would toss in an interesting comparison. In Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones he interviews the actor/director Jiang Wen. Jiang was just coming out of a period of partial exile, and he was talking about his desire to make an honest movie about Mao. He was fascinated with him because
He’s a tragic figure – the most tragic in Chinese history…..Mao was more tragic then Hamlet. Mao was an artistic person, not a political person. He should have been a poet and a philosopher; he should have been creating things instead of dealing with politics….I think Mao has something to do with every Chinese person….He represents many Chinese dreams and many Chinese tragedies.p.349
The thing I find interesting about this is that it is the best expression I have seen of Mao as China’s national Rorschach test, the person Chinese people use when they want to think about China’s 20th century transformations. I think this is why American reactions to Mao and Chinese ones are always so different. In American popular memory to the extent he exists at all it is as a great monster like Hitler or Stalin. For Jiang Wen at least he is someone who is good to think with, in the sense that by thinking about him you can think about pretty much any of the issues in China’s recent history you are interested in.
Americans at least don’t really invest themselves in history that way. There was a big spat about Thomas Jefferson a few years back, over the question of his fathering a child with one of his slaves. His defenders wanted to claim that he did not, so we could shove him back on the family altar with Washington and the other plaster saints. He opponents wanted to make him out as Simon Legree. Coming to a popular understanding of Jefferson as a beacon of liberty and a slaveowner was just not going to happen.
I wonder if Mao may have passed his sell-by date in Chinese popular memory, however. Intellectuals of my age and older can still debate “Mao 60 percent good 40 bad or vice versa” through many bottles, but Jiang Wen seems to fantasize about making a big movie that would make this a public conversation and make himself what Michael Moore would like to be. Would younger people really care? Does he really work to help you think about the things that bother Chinese people today? I suppose he does, in that some of his statements about egalitarianism and anti-bureaucratism would still have a lot of resonance. Plus, using Mao to think with puts the party in a bad position.
I’m going on someone’s list for this, but I keep trying to think of good analogies for Mao’s role in Chinese history and memory and I keep coming up with…. Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln did things that were very important to the survival and future of the nation, many of which now appear to have been constitutionally suspect; Lincoln is deeply revered, mostly by people who have no idea what he actually did to achieve those ends; Lincoln is deeply despised by descendants (actual or imagined) of those who his tactics hurt, even to the point of denying his actual achievements. Lincoln’s death, at the height of his political power, was followed by a repudiation of his policies by successors…. (if Mao had died in 1955, how Lincolnesque would he look now? If Lincoln had survived Ford’s Theater and carried out Reconstruction his own way, would the League of the South hate him less or more?)
Yeah, it’s strained, but it doesn’t surprise me to see people trying to use Mao as a literary device more than an historical figure at this point: Look at all the Civil War movies and literature we still produce, and how limited the historicity of it is.
Actually, I think Napoleon may work better. In part that’s because the French are more historically aware than Americans (as are groundhogs, field mice and pocket lint.) Thus at least until recently debates about him and the Revolution more generally seem to matter. (Admittedly I know very little about modern France.) On the other hand most of the issues that Lincoln works well for were pretty much settled by the end of his life. I’m not sure I agree that Lincoln’s policies were repudiated. The Union stayed whole, slaves stayed free etc. I don’t think anyone can really say what his Reconstruction policies would have been or how they would have worked.
Mao on the other hand still works. Is national power the most important thing? Then Mao is good. Hate the corrupt and unresponsive party? Then the CR is good. Convinced that Chinese intellectuals are still the same arrogant SOBs as in the Song dynasty? Then 100 Flowers is for you.
I’d rather see Mao compared with Chiang Kai-shek, with the underlying question being: Which model was more successful? Could CKS and the KMT have wrought the Taiwan economic miracle on China as a whole if they had won the civil war?
As a whole, I doubt it, simply because it would be quite impossible to lift all of China up so quickly, without the exploitation of cheap labour.
However, on the other hand, If Chiang had accepted Mao’s offer of a north-south divided China, like Korea or Germany, then that would have being more interesting to compare with.
In that case, Chiang would have probably lifted the south to be far more prosperous than the north, which is even true today in the mainland.