Mao’s Last Collector

It was an informal send-off for Dr Stephen FitzGerald, Australia’s first ambassador to China, and appropriately enough the venue was a Chinese restaurant in Sydney, what British left-wing historian Eric Hobsbawm describes as one of the world’s great export products. A number of academics and writers, some wearing Mao jackets and clutching the Little Red Book, were present along with representatives from Canberra and a few reporters including me representing the Sydney Morning Herald. When “God Save the Queen”, still the national anthem, was played, the intellectuals stayed resolutely in their seats, but they leapt to their feet at the sound of “March of the Volunteers”.

It was 1972 and the Cultural Revolution was at its height. The cult of Mao was in full swing. Gough Whitlam had just come to power and several of his ministers were enthusiastic about what was happening in China, or what they thought was happening. There wasn’t much doubt though that it was good diplomacy to move towards a rapprochement with this vast emerging nation by establishing formal relations.

Although some had their misgivings about him, Chairman Mao was considered to be a giant political figure—a colossus in physique and achievement, a reformer who had almost single-handedly dragged his nation into the twentieth century.

The cult of Mao Zedong had spread into the world community. Posters of the Great Helmsman, rays of the sun lighting up a smiling and avuncular face, adorned the walls of restaurants, homes and many a student apartment. Andy Warhol famously painted several images of Mao to go with his portraits of baked beans. Chairman Mao had displaced Che Guevara, you might say, as the poster boy of the Western world’s leftist movement.

As we now know from recent research and the admissions of later leaders of the People’s Republic of China, it was all propaganda. The Cultural Revolution was actually a pogrom, Mao’s despairing attempt to win an internal power struggle by using the army to return to revolutionary principles. It was a systematic internecine assault on the people that set back China’s economic progress for many years and sent many “intellectuals” and “bourgeois counter-revolutionaries” to their deaths in concentration camps. As it happens, the benign colossus was indeed well above average height at just under six feet, but he was hardly benign, the enemy of the people rather than the Great Redeemer, and at least as ruthless as Stalin.

As for the posters, the Little Red Book and practically every other aspect of the cult of Mao, they were the result of a highly methodical and contrived process of mass production designed almost to deify the Great Teacher and create a figurehead around whom the propaganda was packaged. He was the rallying point for the official line.

Recently, while writing a history of the Great Depression, I was struck by the willingness of certain intellectuals to be duped by the propaganda of totalitarian regimes. In the mid-thirties, Britain’s Left Book Club under Victor Gollancz produced a stream of titles expressing admiration and even adoration for Stalin, at least until the publisher saw the light and put a stop to it. The gullible Sidney and Beatrice Webb, for example, penned Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? And the supposedly hard-headed Leon Feuchtwanger wrote the approving Moscow 1937: My Visit Described for My Friends.

Officially, there never was a cult of Mao. After his death in 1976, millions of artefacts of Mao-worship—posters, ceramics, cartoons, woodcuts, engravings, sculptures, movies—were rounded up and destroyed in what might be called the great nihilism. Although they were works of propaganda, many of these historic objets d’art were of high quality, but they were still binned in the general correction.

However, not everything was destroyed. An auction of Mao memorabilia in November last year—the first in many years and probably the last—inconveniently brought it all back to light on the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Organised by the international house of Bloomsbury and Dreweatts, it provided a timely object lesson in how efficiently the state can subvert art to pull the wool over the people’s eyes.

Probably Mao’s last collector, Peter Wain amassed the Mao memorabilia while serving as a captain in the British army in Hong Kong in the late sixties and early seventies. As he wrote to me:

Maoist slogans, architectural monuments, films, plays, mass parades—they’ve all gone from everyday life in China. But they represented the heaviest deluge of propaganda through arts that has ever been experienced in any civilisation at any time. When artistic freedom rather than political freedom began to return in 1976 after Mao’s death and the arrest of Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four, Little Red Books were shredded and objects regarded as being from a period best forgotten were destroyed or hidden.

But not before other totalitarian regimes learned how to do it. After the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran in 1979, he oversaw the launch of a wave of propaganda that was similar in concept but not nearly as thorough as the cult of Mao. North Korea’s Kim Jong-il, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, numerous African dictators, Fidel Castro among others: for all of them, China was the model to follow.

The architect of the cult of Mao was his wife Jiang Qing, an actress by training who had once performed Ibsen and had an instinctive sense of how to entertain the masses. As Wain explains: “She controlled all the arts and demanded standardised performance and imagery. Art had to toe Mao’s political line, not the personal creative vision of the artist.” Clearly, the starting point of the strategy was the illiteracy of the masses. Because they didn’t have access to conflicting information, they were highly susceptible to persuasive imagery.

With the masses ready and willing, all that remained was to bring the artists into line. Adds Wain: “Under Jiang Qing artists had to take the greatest care in reproducing Mao’s likeness, as the slightest flaw labelled the creator as counter revolutionary, with dire consequences.” The senior masters were ordered to forthwith scrap their “counter revolutionary” art—until then, many depictions of peasants showed lives of exhaustion and misery—and get to work on boosting the people’s revolution.

This was dangerous work. It was all too easy to cause offence at the highest level because of the technical challenges, especially when working with traditional materials like porcelain. If the cobalt blue misfired, for example, it could damage Mao’s image—and the senior master’s career. Simultaneously Jiang Qing ordered the destruction of countless examples of China’s pre-revolutionary art in a demonstration of philistinism similar in principle but far greater than the Nazis’ book-burning bonfires of May 1933, the German students’ “action against the un-German spirit”.

Although the cult of Mao reached its apotheosis during the ten disastrous years of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, he’d been on the billboards since 1940. What is fascinating is how the senior masters went about their work in the intervening years, steadily converting Mao Zedong from a normal-looking, if hard-eyed general in a khaki uniform into a jolly, smiling giant in civvies. An early woodblock print from around 1940, one of thousands churned out by the People’s Pictorial Publishing House, shows him as he probably was—strong appraising gaze, a bit chubby, a natural leader.

Gradually, every kind of artist was rounded up in the great cause and over the next decade the Chinese people (and Westerners and Russians, because the propaganda was exported) were subject to an avalanche of vases, posters, statues, silk printings and woodcuts that came to associate Mao with the sun, a near divinity bathed in golden light.

His Little Red Book became embedded in this visual fealty as heroic workers marched along, clenching the publication in their hands, against a backdrop of smoking steelworks. “Grasp Revolution, Promote Production, Deeply Continuously Develop Great Revolutionary Criticism” was the message. The vehicle for the propagation of the cult was the People’s Liberation Army and their song sheet was the Little Red Book. The PLA attributed increasingly fantastic results from the perusal of Mao’s thoughts. As the army dutifully reported, just one study session:

supplied the breath of life to soldiers gasping in the thin air of the Tibetan plateau; enabled workers to raise the sinking city of Shanghai three-quarters of an inch; inspired a million people to subdue a tidal wave in 1969, inaccurate meteorologists to forecast weather correctly, a group of housewives to re-invent shoe polish, surgeons to sew back severed fingers and remove a ninety-nine-pound tumour as big as a football.

By 1956, General Mao had been replaced by Uncle Mao. Not only did he tower over everybody around him, he had rosy cheeks and a big smile, wore a loose-fitting shirt and khaki pants, and carried a peasant’s broad-brimmed straw hat.

By 1970, he’s verging on immortality at allegedly 10,000 years old. And by 1974, with the Cultural Revolution beginning to peter out, he’s turned into a veritable giant—peasants and factory workers hardly reach his shoulder. And he’s an object of worship—surrounding figures can’t take their eyes off him. Reality has long since been abandoned. Ever-smiling peasants and factory workers have perfect teeth, immaculate clothes and are so brimful of health and well-muscled they wouldn’t look out of place in a body-building contest. They are ecstatic at the delivery of a supply of scythes, thrilled by the arrival of a new turbine. Heroes of production are gloried, like Iron Man Wang from the Taching oilfields. Now we have a revolutionary Utopia.

Along the way the propaganda hijacked Chinese myth and legend, identifying with peasant uprisings of 150 years earlier. Particularly around the period of the Vietnam War, anti-US propaganda became much more aggressive, while sturdy, masculinised woman soldiers join the men in the front lines. China has “three defences”, promises one poster, chillingly citing “Atomic, Chemical and Biological Warfare”.

No respecter of tradition, Jiang Qing also co-opted the performing arts, writing and directing plays, ballets and operas whose plots elevated farmers, workers and revolutionary soldiers above landlords and similar anti-revolutionaries. Fairly typically, her 1960 ballet Red Detachment of Women reflected the official vision. In it, a wealthy young woman leading a privileged life sees the Maoist light, abandons comfort and wealth, joins an all-female unit of the Red Army, and becomes its heroic leader.

The subject of all this did not complain at his virtual beatification. Although personality cults are contrary to the tenets of Marxism—“Engels and I first joined the secret society of Communists on the condition that everything making for superstitious worship of authority would be deleted from its statute,” Marx once wrote in a letter—Mao came to believe in “healthy worship”, as he told a party congress in 1958. Worship of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, he said, was healthy “because they hold the truth in their hands”, while everything else was “blind worship”.

As well as resting on the population’s general gullibility because of its illiteracy, the veneration of Mao over such a vast population rested on the harnessing of all the available technologies: mass production, radio, newspapers and other publications. As Jacques Ellul, the late French theorist on the subject, wrote at the onset of the Cultural Revolution: “The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment.”

But perhaps the most original theorist on propaganda is its arch-exponent, Josef Goebbels. Speaking in early 1933 after his appointment as Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, he summarised his role with astonishing acuity. As he put it, “I cannot convince a single person of the necessity of something unless I get to know the soul of that person, unless I understand how to pluck the strings in the harp of his soul …” So he wasn’t so much a pedlar of information as a burglar of the hearts and minds of the German people. Leni Riefenstahl’s Aryan-boosting movies became his masterpieces.

Mao’s wife thought she was copying from Stalin but she was inadvertently reproducing techniques developed by Britain in the First World War. Press baron Lord Beaverbrook had established a Ministry of Information in 1917 while his rival Lord Northcliffe set up the more blatantly-named Enemy Propaganda Department. Between them, they did a highly effective job of producing posters, leaflets and films that painted the German forces as monsters. Hitler was highly impressed by the “great skill and ingenious deliberation” of the British. “Germany had failed to recognise propaganda as a weapon of the first order,” he wrote in Mein Kampf.

The Ayatollah Khomeini’s propaganda campaign probably learned from Britain too. As British historian Valerie Holman points out, in the 1940s Churchill’s government set out to win the hearts and minds of Persia (as Iran then was), then swinging between support for Germany and the Allies, by hiring the talented illustrator Kimon Marengo, who signed himself Kem. Egyptian-born, he led the “Kem Unit” at the Political Warfare Executive inside the Foreign Office where he operated rather like one of Mao’s senior masters. Much talent was housed in the PWE, including the European sections of the BBC and the Foreign Publicity Department of Ministry of Information. The purpose was simple: Undermine the enemy. And the industrious Kem, working with instantly recognisable images derived from the 2500- year-old Shahmaneh legend, turned out illustrations with inscriptions in Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi as well as European languages. His cartoons ridiculed the dictators, especially Hitler. Even Goebbels got the Kem treatment, being portrayed as a cloven-hoofed devil.

Persia was flooded with these illustrations, helping turn the tide. (After the war, Marengo graduated PhD with a thesis titled “The Cartoon as a Political Weapon in England: 1783–1832”, a subject about which he was surely an authority.)

After the war, the Reza Shah Pahlavi picked up plenty of tips from Britain. Just like China, Persia, with a literacy rate as low as 10 to 15 per cent, was ripe for propaganda. As Holman explains: “No one could afford to under-estimate the importance of visual culture or of oral tradition [in Persia].” Using stories and posters based on myth and legend as well as genuinely informative (and very popular) lectures, the Shah’s propaganda instrument was the Bureau for the Education and Guidance of Public Opinion. And in propaganda, the wheel generally turns full circle. One poster from the subsequent Iranian revolution shows the deposed Shah sitting at the mouth of a cave that resembles hell, with snakes on both sides.

Saddam Hussein also knew how to subvert art to his own ends. Portraits of him in noble pose were plastered all over Iraq, some depicting him as Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon or even as Saladin, the champion of Jerusalem.

There’s still a lot of propaganda about. In Cuba, Raul may be in power, but Fidel’s still the father of the nation, with billboards, posters and statues of him all over Havana. In North Korea, representations abound of Kim Jong-il, son of Kim Il-sung who “created the world”. Anybody who does not believe that the current Kim can play sub-par golf, as a local professional once told an Australian journalist, risks being condemned as a “fractionalist”, North Korea’s version of China’s “counter-revolutionary”.

Ominously, students of propaganda cite a resurgence of Stalinism in Russia. As Global Post reports, a textbook issued to schools last year and approved by Vladimir Putin lauds Stalin as a “competent manager”. While the book does not deny the dictator committed atrocities, he is said to have done so out of necessity.

It may also be that deeply embedded propaganda acts like a kind of Stockholm syndrome. In deteriorating times, as in Russia now, people hark back to a strong leader who had been eulogised by poets and generally put on a pedestal by the creatives. It must be hard for a generation to shrug off such paeans as that of A.O. Avdienko:

O great Stalin, O leader of the peoples,

Thou who broughtest man to birth.

Thou who fructifies the earth …

The generation that lived under Stalin was thoroughly brainwashed. Writers were ordered to deliver novels and short stories with happy endings. Painters got the message and produced massive canvases of state banquets, weddings, public meetings and other official gatherings. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who somehow walked the tightrope, would recall: “The apotheosis of this trend was a movie which in its grand finale showed thousands of collective farmers having a gargantuan feast against the backdrop of a new power station.” Stalin was such a conscientious propagandist that he would rewrite books in his favour and had photographs doctored to show him at the bedside of the revered Lenin—in short, as the anointed inheritor of the revolution.

Ominously, a metro station in Moscow was recently refurbished and reopened with a legend in giant letters reading: “Stalin raised us to be loyal to the nation, inspired us to labour and to great deeds.” After the dictator died in 1953, the inscription had been removed in the general repudiation of personality cults. At a party congress Khrushchev had denounced Stalin, something he would never have done in Stalin’s lifetime. The dictator had used all conceivable methods, thundered Khrushchev, to “support the glorification of his own person” such as “dissolute flattery” that had turned “man into a godhead” and an “infallible sage, the greatest leader, sublime strategist of all times and nations”.

Summarised Khrushchev: “Finally no other words could be found with which to lift Stalin up to the heavens.” But now, it seems, Uncle Joe was the man who inspired the Soviet Union to great deeds.

At least half a dozen countries still fit Khrushchev’s definition of the cult of Stalin but these days fewer and fewer nations are as malleable as Mao’s illiterate peasants. Once we no longer “feel a need for propaganda”, argued Ellul, it becomes less successful. Most researchers agree that propaganda confirms rather than converts, and is most effective when its message is in line with the existing opinions and beliefs of those it is aimed at. When those preconditions no longer apply, we develop an immunity. Goebbels understood this: “Propaganda becomes ineffective the moment we are aware of it.”

And there’s only so long that intelligent people can be forced to toe the official creative line, as Iran’s current ayatollahs are learning. In mid-November Iran’s film world staged a rebellion of sorts. Top directors, actors and scriptwriters mounted a protest at years of censorship and bans of films that don’t reflect official religious views or paint Iran in a less than favourable light. Henceforth, the protesters say, they will boycott state-sponsored ceremonies. Barring violent intervention by the authorities, it could mean Iran’s propaganda has reached that fatal deflection point where it has become ineffective.

Selwyn Parker is a New Zealand author and journalist now based primarily in Europe. He specialises in history, business and travel writing, and his several books include Wealthmakers and The Great Crash.