\n
I\u2019m 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\u2019s Oracle Bones<\/a> he interviews the actor\/director Jiang Wen<\/a>. 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<\/p>\n \n He\u2019s a tragic figure \u2013 the most tragic in Chinese history\u2026..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\u2026.I think Mao has something to do with every Chinese person\u2026.He represents many Chinese dreams and many Chinese tragedies.p.349<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The thing I find interesting about this is that it is the best expression I have seen of Mao as China\u2019s national Rorschach test, the person Chinese people use when they want to think about China\u2019s 20th<\/sup> 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\u2019s recent history you are interested in.<\/p>\n Americans at least don\u2019t 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<\/em> a slaveowner was just not going to happen.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cMao 60 percent good 40 bad or vice versa\u201d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019m 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\u2019s Oracle Bones he interviews the actor\/director Jiang Wen. Jiang was…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[165,126],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-2c","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5047,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions\/5047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}