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Because Mao is a symbol that is used in a much more particular way than e.g. Lenin or Stalin in the USSR, who received blanket endorsement (until Stalin didn’t). Mao today is a sacred symbol, but one that is also associated with a huge amount of condemnation, so naming a whole city after Mao himself doesn’t make sense, though smaller things like a library are named after him.
Mao, though he bears significant responsibility for his cult of personality, was also aggressively opposed to measures to tie his face into the formal existence of the state, e.g. he was presented with prototype money with his face on it and said that it should be burned. To the extent that things were named after him, it was overwhelmingly after he died or would have been much lower-profile entities, perhaps done by municipal officials.
China did a better job than most other socialist projects of centering the party rather than individuals as the center of respect and leadership. That’s (part of) why they’ve had so many peaceful, successful transitions of power between leaders since Mao died.
That’s just not true lol. The late years of Mao was plagued with factional feuds under the backdrop of Cultural Revolution (Gang of Four vs the reformers).
Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, a highly decorated military commander, was being denounced on stage as part of the struggle session and banished to work at a factory, simply because he was on a committee that approved a satirical novel (Liu removedan) that was deemed reactionary:
Label says: “Anti-party element Xi Zhongxun”
Zhou Enlai was so afraid of being on the chopping block of Mao that he spent decades deliberately relegating himself to the third in-command just to prevent the image of him “overshadowing” Mao.
Many liberal reformers that came into power after Mao had themselves experienced being banished to the countryside. Let’s just say that there are a lot of mixed feelings about Mao. On the one hand, it is undeniable that his contribution to the party and the nation was indispensable (and the legitimacy of the party itself), but he had also done many mistakes especially late in life that caused a lot of turmoil.
The transition from Deng wasn’t smooth either. After the June 4th incident (Tiananmen incident) in 1989, which many forgot started because of the privatization of state-owned enterprises causing many new graduates to lose their previously guaranteed employment, the party split into two embittered factions: the conservatives who want to roll back liberal reform and return to Mao era planning (Chen Yun faction) and the liberal reformers that wanted continue the liberalization policy (Deng Xiaoping faction).
Amidst the factional struggles, Jiang Zemin, who was Chen Yun’s protege (conservative faction), ended up being the compromise candidate to lead the party. Moving up north from his Zhejiang base, Jiang Zemin was politically isolated in Beijing and was very much in a precarious position.
Deng came out of his retirement in 1992 to do his infamous Southern Tour, during which in his Wuhan speech in August, hinted very strongly at a coup (“the reform must continue by any means necessary”) if the reforms were to be rolled back.
This culminated in the Zhuhai meeting where top ranking military commanders and senior officials secretly met with Deng, bypassing Beijing altogether, with the plan of a coup installing Qiao Shi if Jiang refuses to pursue the liberalization route. Jiang Zemin folded and the conservative faction (Chen Yun et al.) were all purged throughout the 1990s.
Xi Jinping’s ascent was also plagued by the Bo Xilai’s scandal (who was supposedly to be on the left wing side of the party). Xi himself was far more moderate during his early career and played a neutral “wait and see” stance at the Zhejiang branch during the 2007 Chen Liangyu’s rebellion (Shanghai branch) who wanted to form the Five Southeastern Provinces group to challenge the central government’s imposition of authority against the local governments. When Chen was eventually purged, perhaps as a reward, Xi was given the position of head of CPC Shanghai and ascended to the national committee from there.
The drama of the CPC history was no less intense than in any other country’s politics, to be fair.
Correct me if my history is incorrect here:
It might be worth mentioning that, while Mao bears a lot of responsibility for his cult of personality, it was often rather out of his control on a proximate level and people basically used him as a religious symbol to justify whatever they already wanted to do, which is probably seen most acutely in the warring factions of the Red Guard who each represented themselves as acting on behalf of Mao, having been given contradictory directions by Mao and by party bureaucrats trying to protect their positions, respectively (and also some people who were legitimately just gangsters in a turf war).
Correct, but at the same time the Cultural Revolution happened because Mao wanted to accelerate the process of transition towards socialism, and he saw the traditional structure deeply entrenched in the Chinese society as an impediment of progress.
It would eventually cause vast destruction and internal turmoil never seen since the founding of the PRC, where millions and millions of youth roaming the streets and destroying properties and culturally significant artifacts, before Mao realized that he had unleash a force that would soon spiral out of control if not curbed immediately.
The anti-intellectualism also caused scientific research to be halted for nearly ten years, and would take decades more after liberalization for Chinese academia to catch up with the West.
Many former Red Guards are still alive today, which is why the topic is still controversial in China today. I think we will only get to a proper denouncement of the Cultural Revolution by the party once the older generation has finally died out.
Let me preface this by saying that I recognize that the primary element of the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guard movement, was massively misbegotten from a methodological standpoint, and in that respect maybe the most catastrophic mistake in the history of the PRC, one which was at the same time very consistent with Mao’s past mistakes like the Hundred Flowers campaign, the research element of the Four Pests campaign, and some other aspects of the GLF, where he just sort of trusted people on a scale of tens of millions or greater to spontaneously and independently (even of each other) act in a constructive and informed manner. It was a left-deviationist tendency bordering on anarchism and I struggle to understand how he didn’t correct it after decades of it backfiring on him, except that there were also cases where a superficially similar approach worked out astoundingly well, like the land reform. The critical difference imo is that the peasants had a lot more grounding their response because they had their obvious oppressor right in front of them and the tools to handle it themselves, whereas more nebulous tasks of construction resulted in a scatter-shot response at best.
This all having been said:
Many Red Guards are still alive today, which is why the topic is still controversial in China today. I think we will only get to a proper denouncement of the Cultural Revolution by the party once the older generation has finally died out.
I’m really confused by this response, because my impression has very consistently been that the modern PRC errs on the side of over-denouncement of the CR, ignoring the respects in which it was actually successful (like the barefoot doctors campaign, which was internationally revered in its time), and respects in which it had good goals (like fighting bureaucracy) and just took catastrophic measures to ultimately fail to achieve those goals. Is it really under-denounced?
I’m also not sure if people mention that Mao siccing the PLA on the Red Guards resulted in five times the number of deaths of the entire CR (by then functionally a civil war) up to that point, which I think is probably indicative of a miscarriage of justice even if a number of people definitely needed to die, practically speaking.
I know a Chinese woman whose parents were killed during the CR. She herself was tortured by red guard, she was 8-10 years old I believe and the guards were 13-15 boys. You can imagine the cruel acts they perpetrated on her.
She ended up escaping to Hong Kong and immigrated to America, where she worked at my elementary school.
She recently got in touch with one of the same red guard that is alive in China. He was beside himself with grief and apology at the terrible acts he committed. She forgave him, saying they were both young and in a terrible political time people are led astray and can make those choices.
She is also a well known homeless advocate, really her life became dedicated to feeding and housing the homeless after she was in America. She has visited the white house as well as meeting officials in China in her capacity as an advocate and volunteer.
Not adding much to your point but just an interesting anecdote from the CR that I know of as someone living in America
I would like to read more about this
I strongly recommend Ezra Vogel’s biography on Deng Xiaoping as an authoritative source on the subject matter.
The biography is officially endorsed by the CPC, although certain controversial parts (such as the Zhuhai coup) had to be censored in the PRC edition. If you read the Hong Kong edition or the original English edition, those parts were not censored.
It does not escape the irony that the best biography on Deng happened to be written by a foreigner, an American no less. I’ll leave you to decide why the CPC would endorse such a work (which included first hand interviews with Deng’s family members and close associates), even though they had to censor parts of it to maintain continuity with the party line. I consider the work to be authoritative in this regard.
It does not escape the irony that the best biography on Deng happened to be written by a foreigner, an American no less.
This is not too different from how the reason why Deng went for a progressive reform according to Isabel webber’s how China escape shock therapy. Deng initially wanted to initiate reform resembling USSR’s shock therapy, in opposition to the more Conservative (read left wing) of the part of the party and specialists who traveled to Eastern Europe countries to see the ravages of shock therapy. Ironically, it was George Soros who convinced the Party higher ups that it might not be a good idea
Comrade Soros defending communism yet again!
his argument is probably that the world needs a party that can crack the whip on the populace in earth’s sweatshop and as China integrates into global capital, the socialistic states will witter away for liberal democratic value to fill in
Well at least the first part is true - party leadership over individual leadership.
Absolutely not, the cult of Mao was significant, even if Mao took several measures to oppose aspects of it (with mixed success), and continued to be politically expedient even after his death. There was a period where things were somewhat more about “the Party,” though I’d argue that some of it was just a different mask for Deng since he continued to be an influential figure after leaving office and has been upheld much more emphatically than Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao, but now Xi is again very emphasized. Nothing post-Mao is as ridiculous as the late Stalin period, but that’s not saying much.
I’m not really sure about how Mao compares to Stalin, because Mao definitely did more to fight the cult than late Stalin did, but China still wound up with masses of people treating portraits of Mao like shrines to saints and using Quotations as a religious symbol (not just the content, but the physical book itself)
the same reason why after his death, there are incentives program from the party to retake and recycle the Mao pins, which is basically a status object at the peak of Cultural Revolution.
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