Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 19, 1993 TAG: 9312190052
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: E-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KATHY WILHELM ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: BEIJING LENGTH: Medium
"China shouldn't commemorate Mao!" sputtered Xu Liangying, 73. "No one in the [former] Soviet Union commemorates Stalin!"
But 22-year-old Liang Jiangang, who was an infant during Mao's last purges, gave up three hours one recent evening to listen to leaders of his Communist Youth League branch read sermonettes on Mao and patriotism. The gathering sang Maoist songs.
"We love Mao Tse-tung, because his ideas can encourage us to do new work" in building a better nation, Liang, a junior economist at a large state corporation, said in halting English.
Xu and Liang exemplify ends of the wide spectrum of emotions about the Dec. 26 centenary of the man who unified China under a strong central government in 1949, then tore it apart with endless campaigns to create a pure Communist society.
Some Chinese, like Xu, look unblinkingly at Mao's failings - his economic policies that led to famine, his betrayal of old comrades and persecution of loyal intellectuals, his encouragement of factional bloodshed during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution - and condemn him.
But most Chinese seem unready or unwilling to tear aside the veil the Communist Party has drawn over Mao, blurring his responsibility for the nation's backwardness and suffering.
With many of his features erased, Mao can be turned into almost anything: an inspirational nation-builder, as Liang sees him; a benevolent father figure, as in recent memoirs by his bodyguard and other aides; a symbol of clean government, as used by student protesters in 1989; a protector of worker rights, as seen by a labor activist who recently began wearing a Mao pin.
All in all, Mao has aged much better than might have been expected in the first years after his death. His wife, Jiang Qing, was in jail for helping lead the Cultural Revolution. A man he purged twice, Deng Xiaoping, took charge and began dismantling Mao's programs.
Chinese intellectuals were returning to cities from rural exile, shattering the image of a socialist paradise under Mao with stories of hunger, venality and injustice. Mao, like Stalin, seemed headed for the trash heap.
But Deng, lacking other sources of legitimacy, found it in claiming to be Mao's heir. De-Maoification stopped with a public statement that Mao made mistakes but was a great man.
by CNB