Mao's battle with freedom.(Asia)(Mao Zedong)(Biography)

IN THE EARLY 1990S, according to a story told by many Chinese taxi drivers, an eight-car traffic accident in Guangzhou resulted in injuries to seven of the drivers involved; the eighth, unscathed, had a Mao portrait attached to his windshield as a talisman. The incident fuelled a Mao fever ("Mao re"), a neo-folk religion with superstitious overtones.

Shopkeepers offered busts of Mao that glowed in the dark and alarm clocks that featured Red Guards waving Mao's Little Red Book at each tick of the clock. Even Mao temples appeared in some villages, with a serene portrait of the Chairman on the altar. A transmuted use of Mao as folklore goes on today. In Beijing there are nightclub singers who croon songs that cite Mao's words. Youths dine in "Cultural Revolution-style" cafes off rough-hewn tables with Mao quotations on the wall, eating basic peasant fare as they answer their cell phones and chat about love or the stock market.

Such non-political solutions to the burden of Mao Zedong are an escape that fits a Chinese tradition. When floods hit the Yangtze valley and farmers clutch Mao memorabilia to ward off the rushing waters, it is reminiscent of Chinese Buddhists over the centuries clutching images or statues of Guan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, to keep them safe and make them prosperous.

Following the eclectic nature of Chinese popular beliefs, Mao is added to the panoply of faith.

But where is Mao the totalitarian? Each of the major nations that experienced an authoritarian regime in the twentieth century emerged in its own way from the trauma. Japan, Germany, Italy, even Russia departed politically from systems that brought massive war and repression. China, still ruled by a Communist Party, has been ambiguous about Mao. Although Mao's portrait and tomb dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing, Mao himself--unlike Stalin in Russia or Hitler in Germany--has floated benignly into a nether zone as if somehow he was not a political figure at all, let alone the architect of China's communist state.

The cab drivers, farmers, pop singers and shopkeepers are really only following the lead of the Chinese Communist Party, which does not quite know how to handle Mao's legacy. China has abandoned Mao's policies but has not faced the structural and philosophical issues involved in Maoism--and probably won't until the monopoly on political power by the Communist Party comes to an end. Yet unless China gets the Mao story correct it may not have a happy political future. A current example of the nervousness about Mao is that new history textbooks approved for initial use in Shanghai have largely brushed Mao out of major events in China's twentieth-century story! Chinese communist history, in its shrunken form in these texts, will be like a steak dinner without the steak. It is excellent to see technology, economics and the world beyond China getting more attention in China's high schools, but a generation of Chinese growing up ignorant of the storms of the Mao era is not an attractive prospect.

The moral compass of the Mao era has gone, unregretted. But money-making, national glory and a veil over the past in the name of "good feelings" are not enough to replace it. Can a society that lived by the ideas of Confucianism for two millennia, and later by Mao's political athleticism, be content with amnesia about the Mao era and the absence of a believed public philosophy?