Mao `Craze' Complicates Life For Deng Xiaoping

A DECADE ago, statues of Mao Zedong were being pulled down all over China. But recently in Shaoshan, Mao's birthplace in Hunan Province, a six-meter bronze statue of Mao began to go up. The image will be completed in time for the 100th anniversary of his birth next month.

When Mao died and Deng Xiaoping came to the helm in 1978, much of the "class struggle" and "self-reliance" that Mao had stood for was set aside. Ideology was downgraded. Economic activity was regarded as its own justification. Chinese youth began to emulate the world beyond China, when permitted to. And to buy foreign products - when they could afford them.

Yet, today, in Mao's 100th year, he fascinates the Chinese people, and his shadow complicates life for Deng.

Although money-making (under repressive rule) is the order of the day in the last years of Deng, who is 89 and very ill, a "craze for Mao" has gathered steam. Photos and badges of Mao are hung on the walls of noodle shops or homes as good-luck symbols. Mao's image and words figure again in the popular arts.

A habit among taxi drivers of hanging a Mao portrait as a talisman on the steering wheel, to ward off accidents, policemen and criminals, began after an eight-car traffic accident in the southern city of Canton.

Of the eight drivers, seven were injured, and the eighth had a Mao portrait attached to his windshield.

In the first years of the Deng era, during the 1980s, pop music kept clear of political themes. But in the 1990s, karaoke clubs have been filled with young people enjoying songs in praise of Mao. A pop music cassette called "The Red Sun" (a Cultural Revolution appellation for Mao), whose lyrics make use of Mao's slogans and ideas, has sold nearly 10 million copies.

This new Maoism in few respects can be likened to the Maoism of the Cultural Revolution - of which Deng was a victim. It is too good-humored, too commercial, too bemused to remind anyone of the zealous days of the 1960s.

But some of the new Maoism recalls Chinese tradition - including that of honoring the (mythical) Yellow Emperor as an untouchable hero.

When devastating floods hit the Yangzi valley in 1991, farmers clutched Mao badges and photos, just as Chinese Buddhists for centuries have clutched images of Guan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, to keep them safe and make them prosperous.

It is natural that, in an era of economic boom and dislocation, superstition returns. Mao may seem an unlikely "god" - but 100s of millions of people brought up in the Communist era are not familiar with the traditional deities. Mao, the only "giant' within their mental experience, fills in by default.

Deng, whose legitimacy as leader stems from his courage in dismantling Maoism, is anxious about the new interest in Mao. He faces enemies on both flanks.

Senior leftist figures make use of the Mao craze to caution against some of Deng's free-market policies. But among ordinary citizens, "pop Mao" is a subtle mockery of the whole box and dice of Communist politics.

For Mao to "sell well" is not only good for the private businessmen who market the portraits and cassettes (many of these traders are former inmates of Mao's prisons and labor camps). It is also a symbol of commerce dethroning politics. That Mao is one of the ingredients tossed into the casserole of the market is in itself a joke at the expense of socialism.

Pop Mao is a bit like the current craze for religious symbols in American fashion. Deng, casting a nervous eye on the Mao songs and pictures, is like a Catholic bishop confronting the nun's robes, monk's garments, and crucifixes that are prominent in the current Nieman Marcus apparel catalog. Both Deng and the bishop must wonder: Does any sincerity lurk amidst the chic?

Last year Deng, in an attempt to damp down the Mao craze, and cow those leftists riding on the back of it, traveled to the commercial south and flashed a green light for a new spurt of reform.

Deng reminded the nation of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, and pointed out that his reforms were a relief from those horrors - and a negation of the late Mao. His aides brazenly asserted that Deng's ideas were the "true development of Mao's thought . . . Any attempt to make use of the `Mao craze' for other schemes would be a serious disruption of Deng's path."

It must amuse Chinese who are busy making money to recall that Mao repeatedly expressed the fear that capitalism would come back in China. It was less that capitalism "came back" in a triumphant struggle against a socialism caught off-guard, than that socialism didn't work well, and capitalism as the preference of a majority of the Chinese people was welcomed to the door of a household desperate for a fresh approach.

So China roars ahead economically, dynamic in many areas - but pathological in politics.

Despite Deng's nervousness about the "craze for Mao," he himself has become a new "Mao" - an "emperor" with a cult enveloping him. No one dares to say a word against him. No process exists to replace him when he dies.

"Our beloved fellow countrymen will be able to live like human beings," a Chinese dissident once said, "and to choose the government they wish."

The Chinese dissident was Mao Zedong. But after he came to power in Beijing in 1949, events in China didn't always happen as he hoped.

Today, the Chinese people can "live like human beings" - thanks in part to Deng's reforms. But still they are not able to "choose the government they wish." Mystification takes the place of participation.

Ross Terrill's books on China include "China in Our Time," just out in paperback, and "Madame Mao." His biography, "Mao," appears this month.