Chairman Mao Hyped as a Hero for the Tourist Masses

David Eimer, UK Independent

The Chairman's image is dangling from the mirror of the taxi that takes me
to Mao's childhood home in Shaoshan in southern China. "He's my good luck
charm," grins the driver. However surprising this may seem, it certainly
appears to be working.

Since China's State Council designated this year as the year of Red Tourism,
an initiative designed to re-kindle faith in the present-day Communist Party
(CCP), a booming Shaoshan has become an unlikely must-see on the tourist
trail.
Legions of holiday-makers are flocking to the town, eager to learn more
about the roots of the man who in his homeland is still regarded as having
done more than any other to unify and form contemporary China.

The CCP knows that, now more than ever, faced with a population more
interested in the latest mobile phone than political ideology, it needs a
hero. And the Chairman fits the bill better than anyone.

China's State Council, therefore, has been trying to persuade domestic
tourists, who made 111 million trips during the recent week-long October
national holiday, to turn their backs on destinations such as Hong Kong's
new Disneyland, Macau's casinos and the beaches of Hainan island. Instead,
the council is promoting the dusty and remote city of Yan'an in Shaanxi
province, where Mao and the CCP were based for a decade from 1937, as well
as old Red Army battlefields and key sites along the route of the Long
March.

For the first time in decades, Yan'an, Shaoshan, in Hunan province, and the
Jinggangshan region in Jiangxi province, the first part of China that Mao
and the CCP took control of in 1927, have been put on the map. And the
government, hoping to gain some reflected glory from a man who remains more
popular, 29 years after his death, than any of those who succeeded him, is
delighted.

So far, its co-opting of Mao, who had a whole host of villas built around
China for his holidays, is working brilliantly. Helped by nostalgia for the
certainties of the Mao era and an increasingly nationalistic mood, the Red
Tourism initiative has resulted in four million people visiting Yan'an this
year.

One hundred and fifty locations in 13 provinces have been earmarked as Red
Tourism sites. They range from Zunyi in Guizhou province, where Mao took
over the CCP leadership and restaurants offer "Red Army banquets", with each
dish named after a famous battle, to Xibaipo, a village in Hebei province
that was Mao's last stop before he arrived in Beijing in 1949 and took
power.

But nowhere is more sacred and popular than Mao's home village of Shaoshan
in the southern province of Hunan. There, farm machinery remains in the
field next to the yellow house where Mao was born in 1893. Men on bikes,
with pigs in cages strapped to the back, cycle past. Mao's family home is
guarded by an unsmiling PLA honour guard and the coaches that are backed up
all the way along the road disgorge an almost continuous stream of red
tourists.

Such is Mao's status in China that no one dares challenge the myths
surrounding the man who may have united the country but also initiated such
disastrous events as the Great Leap Forward, in which 30 million people died
of famine, and the Cultural Revolution, which saw millions more Chinese
denounced by their friends and neighbours and sent to labour camps or worse.

"In the eyes of Chinese historians, Mao is a controversial figure," says
Yang Kui Song, a history professor at Peking University. "Some historians
are very positive about him, but many criticise Mao in private. They'd never
express their opinion openly. They'd get into trouble."

Mao's reputation has taken a battering in the West this year, following the
publication of Jung Chang's long-awaited biography, Mao: The Unknown Story.

But Jung's book is banned in mainland China and her portrait of a master
manipulator who regarded ordinary people as expendable and was interested
only in maintaining his iron grip on power, would be greeted with shock and
disbelief by most Chinese.

Never mind the fact that it was the leaders who followed Mao — Deng
Xiaoping, Jiang Zhemin and now Hu Jintao — who initiated the policies that
have made China the fastest-growing economy in the world, it's Mao who is on
every bank note and whose statue is in every town and city. And while Jung's
book is not available, there is a vast array of kitsch Mao memorabilia, from
key rings to alarm clocks and lighters.

The crowds thronging around Mao's childhood home in Shaoshan are a mixed
bunch. Some of the older visitors are dressed in Mao caps and jackets, but
there are plenty of couples clutching babies and camcorders, as well as
students and schoolchildren.

People seem puzzled when I ask if they like Mao. "Of course we do," says one
woman. "All Chinese people like Mao Tse-Tung. He is the Chairman and the new
China was built by him."