May Day Mao Memorializing

Since it's May Day and all, let me tell you about seeing Chairman Mao in Tian'anmen Square. Mike and I went down to the Mao Mausoleum (or "Mao"-soleum, if you will) last Saturday morning, on one of the last tourist stops on my trip. It's a bizarre experience. The socialist cult-of-personality thing is pretty foreign, and it's pretty jarring, too, in contrast to the commercialized westernizing boomtown front that Beijing presents.



Mao is embalmed in a glass room in the center of this modern pagoda-looking building. He looks just like he's sleeping and made out of wax, which he very well might be.

Mao Mausoleum, as seen from the south (exit side)

It is a free attraction. What you do, preferably as a member of a large Chinese tourist group all wearing the same color hat, is this:

1. Get in line. There is a long, long line that winds around the building, marked with two dotted lines painted on the pavement about a meter apart. The line moves very fast. This is about the only place in Beijing you'll find people actually waiting in line without pressing to the front, incidentally. You will see a couple pieces of heavily socialist realist sculpture around front (pictured above).

2. In front of the Mausoleum is a security checkpoint. You cannot take your camera into the Mausoleum. If you have brought your camera, your younger brother will be nice enough to abandon the line and wait for you around back of the Mausoleum.

3. There are flower stands between the security checkpoint and the Mausoleum. The flowers are plastic. They may be perfect for that special embalmed someone in your life. I did not buy any.

4. The Mausoleum itself contains three rooms. You enter into the first room and find a large marble sculpture of Mao on a throne, with a large oil painting of a socialist realist mountain landscape spread behind him. If you have purchased plastic flowers, leave them at the foot of the statue. Meanwhile, signs direct you to remove your hat (guards will further direct you to do so if you do not) and to remain respectfully quiet.

5. You enter into the second room (still moving briskly, by the way) in one of two streams of people on either side of the glass enclosure within. Two posted guards stand still and silent beyond Chairman Mao, who lies on his back with a red sickle-and-hammer flag draped over him. People do remain quiet, although someone's cell phone went off while I was in there.

6. The third room is the gift shop, where you can purchase memorabilia such as collectors' plates and copies of the Little Red Book. I did not buy anything.

All in all, the experience feels rather like a bizarre amusement park attraction. I have no idea what the Chinese visitors make of the experience. To me it has a way of highlighting how relatively un-weird the Lincoln Memorial, for example, really is.

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In terms of actual Mao memorializing, here's a passage by John Lewis Gaddis in his eminently readable (and highly recommended) The Cold War: A New History:

Mao added to his industrialization and collectivization campaigns his own purge of political dissidents. "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend," he proclaimed; but then he arrested as "rightists" those critics unwise enough to take him at his word. It was a strategy designed to "coax the snakes out of their holes, . . . to let the poisonous weeds grow first and then destroy them one by one. Let them become fertilizer." Then he decided on something even more dramatic: he would merge the industrialization and collectivization campaigns by transforming peasants into proletarians after all, but by means that went beyond anything Stalin had ever considered. He ordered farmers throughout China to abandon their crops, build furnaces in their backyards, throw in their own furniture as fuel, melt down their agricultural implements — and produce steel.

The result of Mao's "Great Leap Forward" was the greatest single human calamity of the 20th century. Stalin's campaign to collectivize agriculture had caused between 5 and 7 million people to starve to death during the early 1930s. Mao now sextupled that record, producing a famine that between 1958 and 1961 took the lives of over 30 million people, by far the worst on record anywhere ever.

So there you have it. Happy May Day, everyone!