The Useless Tree

…Doomed to Repeat It.

    I just have to comment on this (link via ESWN).
   
    It seems that some students in New Zealand satirized Mao Zedong by making him a "cover girl:"

Mao_in_a_dress

    

     Fairly tame, and funny, I thought.  But Chinese students in New Zealand (I think this includes students visiting from the PRC and Chinese-New Zealand citizens) took offense.  I was shocked by this statement:

UCOL student Xing Tang said Chaff [the magazine] staff are ignorant of Chinese culture. “Chairman Mao is like Jesus to us,” he said on the verge of tears.

     To think that someone would still be willing to deify Mao like this is remarkable.  Obviously, this student has not studied PRC history and politics.  Would he still have the same opinion of Mao if he dug deep into the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward?  Chinese students in New Zealand may well face discrimination of various sorts, as they contend (and as demonstrated in some of the comments in the "cover girl" post), but it is hard to see how any of that can possibly justify continuing veneration of a man who did so much to destroy "Chinese culture." 

    Nationalism can do strange things to people.

UPDATE: This is a bigger thing than I realized: Chinese netizens oppose auction of Mao Zedong’s portrait:

"I strongly oppose the auction of Chairman Mao’s portrait because it is
neither a mere piece of artistic work nor a commercial activity. Mao
Zedong is the spirit of our great nation, " an anonymous person said on
the Internet.

 Please ask this person: how many Chinese died during the Great Leap Forward?

UP-UPDATE: Just so we can all agree that no "national father" is above satire, let’s remember this image, which stands up quite well next to the Cosmo-Mao:

George


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3 responses to “…Doomed to Repeat It.”

  1. Bro. Bartleby Avatar
    Bro. Bartleby

    The January 2006 issue of National Geographic has a piece on genocide and a “Chart of Death” for the 20th Century and Mao and the “Great Leap Forward” tops the charts with 30-million deaths. I guess this goes to show that modern PRC students don’t read NG.

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  2. Bewildered Academic Avatar
    Bewildered Academic

    Christian Science Monitor is running an interesting story on the demythification of the Luding Bridge.
    Link to article

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  3. Bro. Bartleby Avatar
    Bro. Bartleby

    Yes, that is an interesting article. And something more:
    In a speech given at Stanford University, former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski related the following conversation with Deng:
    “I even told them we went to Luding Bridge, which was the site of a special, important heroic battle in which the Red Forces were able to cross the river under very difficult and treacherous conditions. If they hadn’t they would have been wiped out. It was a great feat of arms to have crossed that bridge. At that point, Chairman Deng smiled and said, “Well, that’s the way it’s presented in our propaganda. We needed that to express the fighting spirit of our forces. In fact, it was a very easy military operation. There wasn’t really much to it. The other side were just some troops of the warlord who were armed with old muskets and it really wasn’t that much of a feat, but we felt we had to dramatize it.”

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