How Mao won history

Why was I, a toddler in the early 1990s, still singing "The East is Red"? Why was the only art project at pre-school to copy a sketch of Tiananmen Square? Why did every nursery rhyme have to end with (to the amusement of my grandparents) the befuddling phrase "down with Chiang Kai-shek"? Wasn't he already dead? Who was he anyway?

The answer to all these questions, in a super-fast, slightly disingenuous, and very un-nuanced way, is "because Mao Zedong won history". Out of all the single-party dictators who emerged out of the 20th century crazy, all ruling with censorship, personality cults, and violence, the Chairman emerged relatively unscathed, even though, let's face it, he did not have a light hand with doling out punishment. While "Hitler" is now synonymous with "evil" even to German people, Mao's granddaughter peacefully calls grandpa "a symbol of revolutionary culture". Nikita Khrushchev spent a considerable amount of energy candidly removing Stalin's cult of personalty, but my 1990s experience suggest that the same wasn't done for Mao in China. Japan's Hideki Tojo was sentenced to death at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, but Mao's face is still on a T-shirt. Even Mao's own wife could not retire gracefully from her political life.

To speak about someone like Mao without nuance in today's academic society is to flirt with danger. To paraphrase a real historian (not a wannabe one like myself), China is bigger, older, and more powerful than just about anyone else right now, Orientalism dictates that we shall treat this "other" society and its people with some type of exceptionalism. In other words (to paraphrase myself), it is currently trendy not to hate Mao. Gone are the days of "reds under the beds" or the speak bitterness campaigns about the excesses of the Cultural Revolution.

On another level, the appropriation of Mao's image has something to do with the now socially-acceptable attitude to socially-accept Mao with only a little reservation. It is not completely fair to compare Mao's legacy to that of Hitler or even Stalin, because Mao's image after his death became a carefully curated, useful tool to maintain social stability in the face of heavy economic and political reforms. In my view, this more closely resembles the exemption of the Japanese emperor Hirohito from the Military Tribunal in the aftermath of the Pacific War -- with the Japanese society in flux, the consistency of the imperial family's sanctity was maintained.

Mao's pervasiveness in Chinese culture (and indeed, that of the world) has become obscured with the impossibility for Chinese people to remember the 1950s and 60s without the official line, its sound-bites and its new canon. When Mao left behind his writings, a formidable collection of his likeness in propaganda art, and a country that needed to reform, and fast, he won history by leaving his successors no choice but to write it like he was writing it himself.

Taipei channeling 1950

I recently spent a week in Taipei, constantly wondering why we seemed to be stuck in 1951. Taipei is one of my favourite cities where constancy seems to be one of the biggest virtues, but the anachronistic political attitudes of many who I had encountered puzzled me.

Of course, I was there to do "research", which meant spending all my daylight hours in an archive, trying to digest pages and pages of handwritten meeting minutes and press coverage of the KMT. These actions may well have informed the way I thought about Taiwanese society during the trip -- but they did not prepare me for some of the comments I had heard at the Occupy Central solidarity protest.

The most meaningful (and frankly what had caused me to leave) was on student organiser's speech: "Our ultimate goal is to take down the Chinese Communist Party." This was followed up "Taiwan and Hong Kong should unite and take down China." I was a bit concerned -- were we still stuck in 1950? Was the spirit of Chiang Kai-Shek channeled through the Liberty Square venue?

Another taxi driver voiced a slightly concerning sentiment: "I hate the DPP but the KMT is too weak to do anything about it. I wish the CCP will come and just defeat them all."Also present at the protest venue was the Pan-Green alliance ("Taiwan and Hong Kong should unify and defeat China because we are not them and we don't need them") and some kind of libertarian (ok, perhaps downright anarchist) student group selling T-Shirts that said "Fuck the Government".

Yet if you look outside of this cross-section of Taipei society, people seem happy, kind, and content with their way of life. My only unpleasant run-in was with a mainland Chinese tourist who demanded change from a 100 RMB note, in RMB, for a 50 NTD purchase at a fruit counter. Hong Kong's style of politically correct, polite dissent and mainland China's way of self-censorship seem to be foreign concepts in Taipei.

Perhaps this is positive, that the Taiwanese seem to be so comfortable with speaking their thoughts, even if such thoughts may be half-formed or inappropriate for a certain situation. None of this has put me off going back to the pleasant island for more work or leisure, of course, but the mentality does strike me as interesting.

The etiquette of protest

I am currently trying to use my acute social observation skills to determine just how many students are skipping classes at the University of Hong Kong to occupy Tamar Park. The photos of the protest look almost idyllic -- sunny skies, green grass and a supportive culture of learning. It definitely looks like we are heading in the right direction if this is the form that protest chooses to take on.

The terms "civil disobedience" and "non-violent resistance" hold a special meaning that goes far off and beyond the broader terms of "protest" and "movement". To me, there is a certain type of conduct for participants in the art of protest that can make a movement more poignant.

If there is one key element of Hong Kong's protest culture that we should focus on, it is the grace with which the student protestors are behaving. Barring inappropriate usage of historically loaded terms, the peacefulness of Hong Kong student protests puts the so-called "activism" at my elite, Ivy League alma mater to shame. From throwing pies to booing off guest speakers to "rallying the troops" in anti-protest, the style in which Brown University students choose to show their discontent more closely resembles the shock value unprofessionalism of the Falun Gong than the palpable show of solidarity of Tiananmen.

Hong Kong students have demonstrated maturity, eloquence and elegance in their approach to issues within their own society. They have shown that they are capable, willing and ready to talk (and for enfranchisement, as such follows). I am impressed, and I am supportive of their methodology (the aims and key messages are the subject of a different conversation).

By refusing to hear questions and critiques, governments all over the world have alienated their peoples to shut the door on any semblance of democracy. China is one of the most visible examples of this mistake, but it is by no means unique. Yet when riots break out and force is employed, the legitimacy of both sides, including that of well-meaning activists, are undermined.

My hope is that Hong Kong students keep their calm, maintain their cool and keep carrying on their protest with this exemplary model of poise. For the students' opponents, there is no reason not to give such a huge number of well-behaved young people a conversation. Democracy is not about giving into demands; it starts, instead, with respectful behaviour.

By complete coincidence...

"Despite pitched battles and ferocious skirmishing, it was a legume, not a legion, that claimed the life of the Taiping leader."

- Liel Leibovitz and Matthew Miller, Fortunate Sons: The 120 Chinese boys who came to America, went to school, and revolutionized an ancient civilization, p 81.

The above quote on the food poisoning and subsequent death of Hong Xiuquan perfectly represents the sense of absolute chance that I feel during the study of Chinese history. Hong, Hakka man, failed scholar, leader and instigator of the Taiping Rebellion and self-professed younger brother of Jesus Christ, is probably one of my favourite historical figures. My obsession with this fanatical man does not come with admiration or any shared values, but rather at the awe of how his inconsequentiality morphed, by complete coincidence, into his becoming the leader of the biggest civil war, like, ever.

History, in my opinion, is one of the very few academic fields where a scholar can write "by complete coincidence" in a piece of published writing and get away with it. Studying the history of China demands an open mind for just this type of odd discovery. I'll remember to do that when pouring over archival material and desperately digging for that one statistic, conducting an exercise in historiography to search for an article that contains just the right tone or abusing thesaurus.com for the perfect synonym of some distant cousin of "melancholy" with a hint of "schadenfraude".

Watch this space -- I'll have many more musings on chance's charming role in my finally-happening new career as a wannabe historian.