Mao Zedong (Illustration: Mayank Chhaya)
From all indications China is remixing Mao Zedong as the Chinese Communist Party celebrates the 90th anniversary of its founding on July 1. Mao is being revived using a less threatening strategy of propaganda music as immortalized by the “red songs.” Both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have run specific stories about this form of valorous music which was widely used during Mao’s time to fire up the Chinese people.
If the media reports are any indications the post-post-Mao generation seems to have no problem with him and the founding of the Communist Party that he came to embody so overwhelmingly. They all seem to want to discover a bit of Mao in them. If you were unaware of the horrors of that era and came to know of the time only through the current, more cuddly remix of it, you could not be faulted for feeling warm and fuzzy about it. After all, what’s not to like in cute children singing songs in unison or pretty girls locking hands, wearing their best smiles,dressed in designer retro Mao outfits and singing?
There is probably nothing intrinsically wrong with the red songs, many of which were born out of folk wisdom and inspired ordinary people to a higher ideal than just their individual selves. What may be worrisome though is that they are being selectively chosen to soften the much harder and damaging aspects of the time they came to symbolize.
I have no scholarship of any significance to hold forth on China and its political culture but signs seem to point at attempts to slide in Maoist ideology while ordinary people are too busy thanking the party for all it has done for the country. The more discriminating and discerning among the Chinese people are justifiably worried that the current generation may not be able to appreciate the full measure of what that ideology represents and may get taken in by its more visual, celebratory, song and dance version which hides its sinister underpinnings.
At this stage it is futile to argue against the Communist Party’s manifest success in turning China into an economic powerhouse that the world looks at with a mixture of awe and befuddlement. What people seem to be responding to is some fantasy interpretation of the Mao-Party combine that exists mainly in their minds. I would not be surprised if from the vantage point of July 1, 2011, July 1, 1921 looks rather charming.
