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| Inequities in new China | | Rulers have yet to make peace with Mao | |
by S. Nihal Singh
AS I stood in a queue outside Mao Zedong’s mausoleum in the Tiananmen Square, I was struck by the torn and frayed jacket of the man standing in front of me. He had obviously been untouched by the Chinese economic boom. On leaving the hall containing the mummified body of Mao, I noticed another phenomenon. Most of the Chinese who had gathered at the shop selling Mao memorabilia were less affluent than the Chinese I had met.
My Chinese guide — a Foreign Office official — gave me another glimpse into Chinese reality. When he went to school, he said, some of his schoolmates did not own a single pair of shoes. As China officially observed the 30th anniversary of Mao’s death in a low key last Saturday, I was reminded of my encounter with the other China, and how Mao — unfashionable as he has become — is now the icon of the poor and the less affluent.
I had returned to China after a gap of some 20 years. The days of the wall posters were long over, and Deng Xiaoping ruled with his famous dictum of “it is glorious to be rich”. The wall posters were a fading memory, Pudong, Shanghai’s twin, shone like a brash new beacon beckoning China to the brave new world. During a visit to the offices of the People’s Daily in Beijing I was presented with a beautiful silk scarf.
After Mao’s death, China had officially pronounced that he was 70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong. China has moved on — spectacularly in many respects. Mao has been replaced by a president and prime minister who could grace the boardrooms of any large corporation. The Mao era is over. Yet he was too overwhelming a presence, and too recent to ignore and the new inequities of China’s breakneck economic development have served to highlight Mao’s relevance to those outside the ambit of new affluence.
We live in a non-ideological age in which ideology has been hijacked by the likes of American neoconservatives. For China, the Deng dictum is what counts, and by any criterion, its progress and development have been spectacular. Mao’s anniversary, however, is a reminder that in its efforts to get rich quickly, China has lost something of the old élan and the compassion of the past, despite the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and the built-in tyrannies of the communist system.
Is China in danger of losing its moral compass, having embraced capitalism with fervour? The official creed of communism is a mere shell and the loss of a comforting ideology, however cruel its actual practice, has given rise to such cults as the Falun Gong spiritual movement, officially detested, because getting rich by itself cannot provide an ideology, as the West has been discovering. Nationalism does service for ideology up to a point, but, as the Chinese have found out, useful as it is as in the new era, it poses dangers; excessive doses of it can hamper China’s diplomacy, particularly in relation to Japan.
The problem is that the new China has yet to make peace with Mao. The present Chinese leadership is shying away from the task because it is so arduous. Despite lone voices seeking to revisit the Tiananmen massacre, the official veil over the tragedy remains in place. There are simply too many taboos to demolish for official comfort and the nature of the new Chinese state is still wrapped up in the old clothes of communism — socialism with Chinese characteristics, to give it its official name - and former President Jiang Zemin’s efforts before departure have not been particularly helpful.
On the ideological plane, the problem is that the fantastic growth in Chinese economy and infrastructure has been undertaken within the ambit of the communist state. The American hope is that liberal economic policies and foreign direct investment, apart from the rising tourist graph, will lead to changes in the political system. Although the atmosphere in China is freer than it was in the days of Mao, the red lines are forcefully drawn and implemented. Perhaps the Chinese rulers’ model is Singapore, the nanny state, as it has been aptly described. Whether the vast land of China can replicate Singapore’s mix of economic liberalism with strict political controls is another matter. Singapore, of course, has the trappings of democracy.
Inconvenient as he might be for the present Chinese leaders, Mao encompasses an era that led to the formation of the People’s Republic and played a stellar role in stabilising the new communist state and carving out its distinct role out of the shadows of the Soviet Union. The ideological conflict between the two countries, which culminated in border skirmishes, was masterminded by Mao on the Chinese side.
In retrospect, the Chinese state was simply too large and different to remain a mirror image of the Soviet Union, convulsed for a time by Nitika Khrushchev’s denigration of Stalin. Chinese leaders waited till Mao’s death to begin a timid denigration of Mao, which has yielded place to a policy of benign neglect. Clearly, Mao does not fit into China’s present scheme of things.
The Cultural Revolution was certainly the most destructive of Mao’s policies, destroying the cream of the country’s intellectuals and depriving the young of many years of education, apart from causing numerous deaths. Other disruptive policies included the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Great Leap Forward. In a sense, they were ego trips. Historically, those who exercise absolute power are often prey to visions of their own infallibility and a man bred in the cult of revolution was captivated by the concept of a permanent revolution.
But today’s Chinese leaders cannot forget that the source of their power — the Communist Party — is the same party that brought about the victory of the Chinese revolution. Although Mao might have succumbed to megalomania towards the end of his long rule, the problem for Chinese leaders in the 21st century is to enthuse people with a party that remains a shell of its former self. For the present, Deng’s philosophy propagating the glories of being rich holds sway. Mao might still provide an answer to President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiaobao if they are prepared honestly to discuss the Great Helsman’s legacy.
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