On the Meanings of Propaganda (original) (raw)
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On the 120th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s birth in December 2013, the whole of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo Standing Committee, led by new installed leader Xi Jinping, attended commemorations held in Beijing. Commentators inside and outside China were calling Xi a new kind of Mao, noting his eagerness to use some of Mao’s political techniques to mobilise people, and often referring to the supreme leader of the People’s Republic from 1949 to 1976 in highly complementary ways. As I try to show in this paper, Mao Zedong’s legacy today remains profound, but complex. That so many were critical of Xi’s willingness to refer to the former leader is one indication of this. Mao was perhaps the modern leader of China who forged the deepest emotional link with people in the country. But he was also someone associated with campaigns from the 1950s onwards that carried huge social costs. The most epic of these, the Cultural Revolution, was one that Xi himself suffered in, becoming a send down youth in 1969 and moving from Beijing down to the Shaanxi countryside. Many, many others have similar experiences. Those that appeal to the Chairman these days tend to do so not because, like Xi, they want to make a clear link between pre and post-1978 history, when the reform and opening up process is meant to have started, but because the feel that modern China has lost its path. It has forsaken the Utopian, idealistic goals that Mao set it, allowing elites to re-emerge, and the Party to end up as the sort of self-serving, bureaucratic entity that he strove so much to avoid it turning into. The language contained in documents like the statement put out after the Third Plenum in Beijing in October 2013 of `perfecting the market’ in China and saying that a free market is necessary for implementation of socialism with Chinese characteristics alienates and antagonises them. They want public ownership of assets restored, and a welfare system that covers everyone and drives for equality imposed again. They feel that while some have gained form the post 1978 deal, there are many more Chinese who have suffered, been pushed into poverty and injustice, and betrayed. Some of these voices find their way onto the internet, and have social influence. I look at these in this paper, and try to answer just how influential and representative they are. For the question of Mao and his continuing impact, the answer is partly that he continues to escape the boundaries that people claiming his name try to put on him. For this reason, understanding him and those that try to speak in his name even to this day, is important. I hope this study helps a little in understand just why the red sun of Mao Zedong is still very much alive in some Chinese people’s hearts, and why people as senior as Xi chose to appeal to Mao when they conduct politics in the era when China has become the sort of economic and political powerhouse that Mao could only ever dream about.