Page 189 - Communism in Ambush

"Mao lives!"
With these
words, the
January 10, 1994
edition of Time
magazine char-
acterized the po-
litical culture in
China.

t to guarantee a good crop. In 1993, several workers at a Sichuan factory
committed suicide on the one-hundredth anniversary of Mao's birth--they
were convinced they would join him in an afterlife. Taxicab drivers in
Beijing and Shanghai dangle Mao's portrait from their rearview mirrors.
Artists are incorporating Mao's image into their works, and a gigantic por-
trait of Mao still looms over Tiananmen Square. And, most importantly, in
the party and in the universities, the fashionable political philosophy isn't
democracy; it's the new Maoism.
Mao hasn't made a comeback. He never left. Unlike Germany or Russia,
China has never made an attempt to confront its past; it never tried to en-
gage in de-Maoification. The Communist Party has resisted any attempts
to confront either the horrors of the late 1950s Great Leap Forward, when a
Mao-made famine took tens of millions of Chinese lives, or those of the
Cultural Revolution, in which state-sanctioned barbarity reached the nadir
of encouraging cannibalism among school children. Efforts to speak the
truth about these matters are squelched: when, for example, the Shanghai
University journal Society stated in 1993 that 40 million had perished in
Mao's famine, that issue of the magazine was instantly recalled.
What informs China's politics is what has informed it for the last fifty
years: a philosophy that mixes nationalism and communism and that is
built upon the legend of Mao as founding father. 134
So, what does this post-Mao capitalism mean? Is it a departure