Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader by Geremie Barme Read Free Book Online

tattoos) to adorn their bodies; 92 his words (quotations and verbal mannerisms, including his coarseness) acted as a currency with a universal rate of exchange, and his style (in clothes, smoking, posturing) was emulated widely in what was a national expression of an "aestheticization of politics" 93 (see "Mock-Mao and the Heritage Industry" below). As the present-day hagiographers Su Ya and Jia Lusheng wrote in their 1992 book The Sun Never Sets : "Unity of thought, unity of will, unity of action: in clenching His fist He smelted the loose sands of China into a lead ingot, melding hundreds of millions of Chinese into one body" (see Figure 4). While Mao was rarely represented in film or theatrical productions before the late 1970s, his symbolic presence was indicated by images of the sun, dawn, mountains, and the sea. The manipulation of such symbols was in many ways similar to filmic conventions developed by Fascist and Stalinist filmmakers who were concerned, to use Susan Sontag's formulation, with "the rebirth of the body and of community, mediated through the worship of an irresistible leader." 94
Loyalty to Mao, or the wedding of the individual to the totalizing state as represented in the body of Mao, created a relationship that bypassed government and Party structures created to regulate the nation. 95 When people despaired in their own lives they thought of Mao and believed that if only he knew what was happening to them the situation would be set straight (this was also a common refrain in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia). He was the godlike figure who had redeemed the nation in 1949, and unquestioning loyalty to him was seen as the path to self-redemption in the Cultural Revolution. In the 1990s, Mao reincarnated as a figure who was outside temporal and spatial realities, an abiding presence that was beyond the atomized confusion of Reformist China. He represented permanence, value, a historical point of reference and significance.
The body had been a central element of debates regarding national prowess in China for more than a century. Physical discipline and self-strengthening were constantly linked to the issue of China's rejuvenation and progress, and Mao Zedong was an early advocate and practitioner of physical education for revolutionary ends. 96 His penchant for swimmingin particular, ablution as political ritualassumed national importance from
     

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the mid-1950s when the Chairman told the people that: "Swimming is a sport in which the swimmers battle against Nature; you should go into the big rivers and seas to temper yourselves." 97 Then, Mao's personal passion for swimming became the center of a minicult from 1966 when, on 16 July, at the age of 73, he undertook an "heroic" swim of 15 kilometers in the Yangtze. 98 "Fear not fierce wind and waves/I swim as though strolling leisurely in a garden," Mao had written in one of his poems, and the supposedly Olympian feat of strength and vitality displayed in his Yangtze swim was reported as an act with both political and quasi-religious significance. It also marked a new stage in the unfolding of the Cultural Revolution. 99 Thereafter, on 16 July every year for more than a decade, people throughout China took to the water with banners and red flags held high to commemorate Mao's display of revolutionary physical strength and to emulate his spirit by confronting the dangers of untamed nature. 100 The subsequent mystique of swimming was such that at various points in his reformist career Deng Xiaoping, Mao's de facto successor, took to the water for the media to emphasize his political longevity. 101
In death, Mao's body belonged to the nation. Even from the time of his funeral "Mao as a person, with family and friends, was displaced by Mao as a transcendent revolutionary leader without a private domain of his own" 102 (see Figure 5). The Memorial Hall built to house his preserved body was itself a formalistic "embodiment" of China built by workers