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Yun Shi M.A. ’99, a 31-year-old graduate of Berkeley’s Asian Studies program, is one of the restaurant’s patrons. She grew up in the Shandong province singing songs about Mao and studying his teachings. Like her mother, Shi feels strongly about Mao’s contribution to modern China, particularly his programs to redistribute land. While acknowledging Mao’s crimes, she still stands by his goals and recites his famous declaration in 1949, when communists prevailed in China’s civil war, that “the Chinese have stood up.” On Shi’s trip to China last year, her 80-year-old great-aunt gathered several family members and revealed a secret she’d carried for more than 50 years. She and her husband had once owned land in the province. “People just showed up at their door one day and demanded that they leave immediately,” Shi says. “My aunt stood under a tree and watched villagers carry their stuff away. They found a woodshed and lived there for a year eating whatever they found, at times resorting to begging.” During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and '70s, Red Guards sent millions to reeducation camps in the countryside to spend their days doing hard labor and learning the teachings of Mao. Others were jailed and executed. In a new biography, Mao: The Unknown Story, authors Jung Chang and Jon Halliday use previously unreleased material to show in detail how Mao concocted his reputation as a peasant hero in a tyrannical quest for absolute power. Mao sacrificed armies to foil Communist rivals and sold food for arms during one of China’s most devastating famines. According to the authors, Mao said he was willing for half of China to die for the country to become a global military and nuclear power. They estimate that Mao is responsible for more than 70 million deaths. But among some Chinese here and in China, Mao’s status as a hero and liberator, and as a symbol of the country’s rising international power, remains potent. The new biography has provoked defensive reactions on Chinese-language Internet message boards. A typical post read, “Mao did what he set out to do and freed China from foreign humiliation once and for all.” Although Shi was moved by her great-aunt’s story, she says, “It never crossed my mind to feel guilty about how I feel about Mao. While I don’t like the way it was done, I still support an idea of a fair society.”
Journalism dean Orville Schell M.A. ’67, author of several books on China, says that nostalgia for Mao is long-standing. “China has a history of respecting power and fame, even when leaders were bad actors,” he says. “Mao was a leader of titanic, imperial proportions. To peasants, he became like one of the tutelary gods, a folk cult hero.” But Schell adds that this does not reflect a political desire for a strong ideological leader in China. “Many who grew up during the Cultural Revolution still sing the songs they learned then, but with a tongue-in-cheek quality.” Mao has long held a similar fascination in the West. After Andy Warhol painted him red, blue, and green, Mao became a kitsch favorite with designers. Mao’s plain, high-collared jacket—once the de facto uniform for millions of Chinese—is a regular on Paris runways. Canton-born New York designer Vivienne Tam sells t-shirts with pigtails and nesting bees drawn on Mao’s face, and says she admires the leader who can dictate the fashion of a billion people. David Tang, owner of the hip Sino-emporium Shanghai Tang in Hong Kong, New York, and London, has resurrected Mao’s Red Guard uniforms and made them en vogue. Tina Cheng, owner of the Mao Zedong Village, got the idea for her restaurant after seeing diners pack restaurants in China that specialize in Mao nostalgia, and now plans to open more Mao restaurants in the Bay Area. At karaoke houses across the United States, Chinese immigrants can select modern versions of communist folk songs that salute Mao as the “red sun at the center of our hearts.” Once required singing by all school-age children in China, today’s versions have a modern spin with pop and techno arrangements. And when basketball superstar Yao Ming was picked by the Houston Rockets in the first round of the 2002 NBA draft, TV stations televised him from his home in Shanghai where he stood with his excited parents in front of a portrait of Chairman Mao.  China’s central government has long recognized Mao’s lasting fame and harnessed it for its own purposes. Ironically, while the original cult of Mao spread socialist thought through the ubiquitous “Quotations from Mao,” popularly known as the Little Red Book, this new cult serves capitalist goals. Chaohua Wang, editor of One China, Many Paths, says that during the late 1990’s, the Chinese government rolled out Mao to motivate the masses after more than a decade of relative silence about the leader. “When the economy was firmly rooted in the modern capitalist style and on the way to full marketization, the government felt safer to talk about Mao,” she says. Until then, the government had downplayed Mao’s thoughts while his successor, Deng Xiaopeng, instituted open-market reforms. Even as Mao’s abuses became known, Deng and other leaders never condemned him publicly, saying he was “seven parts good and three parts bad.” But during the late 1990s, says Chaohua, there was discontent in the countryside over the growing disparity between rich and poor. “China had gone from being one of the most equal societies to one of the most unequal societies. The government began to talk about Mao to comfort those who were complaining, and emphasized Mao’s achievements in making China strong,” says Chaohua. These leaders mimicked Mao, traveling to villages in the countryside to enlist the populace in their way of thinking. But their speeches adopted the idea of a “harmonious society” that, Chaohua says, is the exact opposite of the “class struggle” that Mao used to launch the Cultural Revolution. That irony isn’t lost on Michael Xin, a venture capitalist who invests in companies all over the world. Xin was about 6 when his father, manager of a Shanghai shoe and hat store, was subjected to public humiliation and sent to a reeducation camp during the Cultural Revolution. Despite his family’s suffering, Xin says he’s in awe of what his country has become, and credits Mao for laying the foundation. “It has gone from being one of the weakest countries to one of the strongest in a very short period of time.” And when a Taiwanese vice-president in an American high-tech company told Xin that he owed his success to Mao’s teachings, Xin rushed out to find books explaining Mao’s “Sword” and “Practice” theories on how to deal with conflict and motivate people. “Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to regain his power,” Xin says. “He thought he was losing control. Instead, he consolidated his power and he did it brilliantly.” Mao artifacts courtesy of Juliana Sun |
 WEBCAST: Jung Chang & Jon Halliday Mao: The Unknown Story
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