Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAIRMAN MAO
A revolution is not a dinner party.
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong ( 毛泽东 , Máo Zédōng), the son of a well-off Hunnanese farmer, believed
that social reform lay in the hands of the peasants. Having helped found the Chinese Com-
munist Party, on the Soviet model, in Shanghai in 1921, he quickly organized a peasant
workers' militia - the Red Army - to take on the Nationalist government. A cunning guer-
rilla leader, Mao was said to have learnt his tactics from studying the first tyrant Emperor
Qin Shihuang, Sun Tzu's Art of War , and from playing the East Asian game of Go. In 1934
Mao's army was pushed from its Jiangxi base by the Kuomintang; the epic retreat that fol-
lowed, the Long March - 80,000 men walking 10,000km over a year - solidified Mao's
reputation and spread the message of the rebels through the countryside. They joined an-
other rebel force at Yan'an, in northern China, and set up the first soviets, implementing
land reform and educating the peasantry.
In 1949, now at the head of a huge army, Mao finally vanquished the Nationalists and
became the “Great Helmsman” of the new Chinese nation - and here the trouble started.
The chain-smoking poet rebel indulged what appeared to be a personal need for permanent
revolution in catastrophes such as the GreatLeapForward of the 1950s and the Cultural
Revolution of the 1960s. His policies caused enormous suffering; some estimate Mao was
responsible for the deaths of over 38 million people - mostly from famine as a result of in-
competent agricultural policies. Towards the end of his life Mao became increasingly para-
noid and out of touch, surrounded by sycophants and nubile dancers - a situation vividly
described by his physician, Zhisui Li, in his book The Private Life of Chairman Mao .
Today the official Chinese position on Mao is that he was “70 percent right, 30 percent
wrong”. Although public images of him have largely been expunged, the personality cult
he fostered lives on, particularly in taxis where his image is hung like a lucky charm from
the rear-view mirror, and he's often included among the deities in peasant shrines. Today
his LittleRedBook , source of political slogans such as “Power grows from the barrel of a
gun”, is no longer required reading but English translations are widely available in Beijing
- though from souvenir vendors rather than bookshops.
Viewing the Chairman
After depositing your bag and camera at the bag check across the road to the east, join the
orderly queue of Chinese - almost exclusively working-class out-of-towners - on the north-
ern side. The queue advances surprisingly quickly, and takes just a couple of minutes to file
through the chambers. Mao's pickled corpse , draped with a red flag within a crystal coffin,
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