During a recent visit to Beijing, I was looking at the sky on a clear night when I was startled to see the ghost of Mao Zedong staring down at me. The legendary tyrant’s mellow, moon-like visage sparkled above a spanking-new shopping centre while a hidden PA system amplified his high-pitched Hunan accent: “The Chinese people have stood up!”

One of the urban wonders that tourists and journalists alike are sure to descend on during the run-up to the Olympic Games is The Place. This is an open-air concourse that runs like a slash through a modern shopping centre not far from Tiananmen Square, covered by a LED screen the length of two football fields and suspended 80 feet above the ground.

Mao’s space at The Place is both ironic and dead serious. Mao, who branded China with a sharp and cutting anti-capitalist philosophy, now is a brand name in his own right, bestowed with the pride of place in an opulent urban mall, occupying centrestage in a slick piece of visual propaganda drawn from archival footage. Deng Xiaoping, the late strongman who overturned Mao’s legacy and put the workers’ paradise on the road to being a shoppers’ paradise, is conspicuous by his absence.

Mao is back, not with a vengeance but in an uncanny and pervasive way. Try to knock Mao down here, and he pops up there. By and large, the Mao statues that once were so ubiquitous in Beijing are gone, but Mao never really went away. In fact, one can hardly make a purchase in China without seeing his dreamy visage, especially on the 100-yuan bill, the bill of all bills at a time when making money is truly the lifeblood of China.

The August song-and-dance extravaganza that began the one-year countdown to the 2008 Olympics was staged in the heart of Tiananmen Square, visually anchored by the brightly lighted portrait of the controversial chairman. There have been periodic bouts of nostalgia for Mao before, none more potent than the spontaneous popular uprising at Tiananmen in 1989. The demonstrators, despite their media-pleasing democratic rhetoric, had a decidedly Maoist cast. No one understood this better than Deng, the man who ordered the crackdown in fear of being deposed in a second cultural revolution.

Both Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, although anointed by Deng for succession, have done much to stabilise and secure Mao’s reputation, in no small part to bolster their own Communistic legitimacy while freeing themselves from the Dengist straitjacket. Mao may have been a tyrant, as aloof as an emperor, but he won the civil war and united China, not unlike a ruthless predecessor he was said to admire. China’s founding emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, was not a nice man by any reckoning, but he is remembered for uniting China and setting it on a course for prosperity. Every time we utter the word China — “land of Qin” — we inadvertently invoke the tyrant’s legacy.

And so, too, will Mao’s legacy be invoked again and again, rough edges gradually smoothed out over time, reduced to a rounded pebble in a turbulent, ever-changing stream.
Los Angeles Times