Last Saturday a man from Xinjiang, with a Chinese name, threw some sort of flammable material at the giant portrait of Mao that hangs over Tiananmen Gate, scorching its lower left hand corner:

         A new portrait has already been installed.   Authorities apprehended the man and they say he is mentally ill.

    But sometimes crazy people (if he really is crazy) speak truths that the rest of us shy away from. 

    Here is a passage from the Analects (18.5):

A madman of Ch’u named Convergence Crazy-Cart passed by Confucius singing:

"Phoenix! Hey, sage phoenix,
how’s Integrity withered away so?

What’s happened can’t be changed,
but the future’s there to be made.

Give it up!  Give it all up!
High office – these days, that’s the gravest of dangers."

Confucius stepped down from his carriage, wanting to speak with this man.  But crazy cart ignored him and hurried away, so Confucius never spoke with him.

     It is an odd passage, perhaps a later addition to the text, written by someone with Taoist leanings looking to push Confucius in a Taoist direction.   From a Taoist point of view, the crazy man speaks the truth.  Integrity has withered away; holding high office is "dangerous," insofar as it takes you away from Tao.  The crazy man is impervious to Confucius – so, we might conclude that the truth that he speaks is also beyond the grasp of Confucianism. That, at least, is what a Taoist would hold.

     This encounter re-appears in chapter 4 of Chuang Tzu.  The same madman, Convergence Crazy-Cart, accosts Confucius, and says close to the same thing.   In this case the message is clearer: the notion of a virtuous leader, lording it above others, is, ultimately, empty.

    And that brings us to the Mao portrait in Tiananmen Square.  Why is it still there?  Because the Party needs to maintain some link to its revolutionary past, however brutal and unjust that past is, in order to legitimize its authoritarian rule.  If people in China were allowed to freely study the Mao period, to shift through the documents of the Great Leap Forward, to count the deaths, and if they were allowed to make their own decisions on whether they, collectively, should venerate Mao in this singular and unique manner, then I imagine many more of them would want to take that portrait down. 

     The crazy man (again, if he really is crazy), acting perhaps on personal impulse, has done something that many others might rationally chose do if they had greater freedom of thought and action.