Mao and "Obamao"

Abstract

They had been the effects of Mao's policies. With a keen eye, I began to fit the details of my family's experience within a historical logic. Suddenly, Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, totalitarian ruler, charismatic "man of the people," poet, philosopher, and the person who led China into one of its most chaotic periods, began to pop up everywhere. The presence that had been so ordinary suddenly stood out, strange and slightly eerie. In an oil painting, he looms over Tiananmen Square; he dangles on the red lanyards that hang from taxi drivers' mirrors, he even stares down at me from the walls of the security office of my apartment complex. Since the Communist Party is still in power in China, people feel inclined to legitimate and uphold their founder, but, given the radical turn toward a market economy, it seemed perplexing how visible he remained in everyday life. I also began to realize how much he had been present in past summers in China. It became apparent that the Chinese have a complex relationship with Mao today and that, while ubiquitous, much of the narrative about Mao is controlled by the state. A movie that Lingzhi and I reluctantly went to see one day because our preferred movie was sold out, turned out to be "The Founding of a Party," a state production to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party, with a youthful Mao in the leading role. We were two of only a handful of viewers in the audience despite the heavily star-studded cast of Chinese celebrities in the film. With Lingzhi, I also visited Mao Zedong's high school (coincidentally, his hometown is where my mother is from) that now serves as a museum memorializing his early life. In the beautiful, well-preserved school, I was able to sit at his former desk, peer into the well vi Somehow Mao's image fit in the rapid, consumer-driven transformation in China. While not many people were talking openly about the Cultural Revolution, a sort of dialogue had begun with the visuals about the past, prominently the official Mao portrait. Images carry a particularly strong power in China due to their elusive meanings, which can slip from government censors that otherwise track and delete certain words in blog posts and social media. To protest the detention of Liu Xiaobo in 2008 and his inability to attend his own Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Norway, a picture of an empty chair started trending on the microblogging site Weibo. Similarly, I started thinking about the proliferation of reinvented Cultural Revolution and Maoist images as creating a sort of dialogue with the past, without words. What did it mean for these images, some silly, some ironic, to exist alongside the legitimated, state-sponsored representation of Mao? What do these images illuminate about the complex relationship people have with traumatic history, through the surprising ways the propaganda visuals are engaged with and manipulated? This thesis is my attempt to theorize and understand the aesthetic and political entanglements around me.

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