Mao is back. The 130th birth anniversary of China’s first Chairman was celebrated on December 26 in his hometown, Shaoshan, with a fervour unseen even before the pandemic. It wasn’t just the unprecedented number of people (111,570) who descended on the small city that surprised many regulars but the large presence of young visitors. A 21-year-old described his feelings towards Mao as one of “sublime faith” and spoke of his generation’s “responsibility to inherit the Chairman’s revolutionary spirit.” Many youths shouted slogans from the Cultural Revolution, such as “To rebel is justified”, “Revolution is glorious”, “Revolution is no crime”. Did this reflect their own feelings towards the government or was it just an instinctive response to the charged atmosphere?

Mao is rarely a topic of conversation when Chinese people meet foreigners, unless they are specifically asked about him. “I’m lucky I was born in 1976, the year Chairman Mao died,” said Zhang, a self-made man, who now lives a fairly comfortable life working in a Macau casino, after having worked for years at various jobs including delivery boy, handyman, restaurateur and driver. Zhang remembers a childhood before Deng Xiaoping’s ‘opening up’ of the economy in the 1980s, when “everybody was poor.”

For Ai Han, a shop assistant born a decade after Mao’s death, the Chairman is no more than a textbook hero. Both Zhang and Ai Han could only study up to middle school. Others from better-off families, who were students during the Cultural Revolution and went to university later, have mixed feelings. Some find Mao’s ideas of equality ridiculous; others feel his ideals were overshadowed by his personality cult. But his status as the man who liberated China from feudal warlords and foreign powers is unquestioned.

However, the thousands who came to Shaoshan had no reservations about the “Great Helmsman”. A batch of 70-year-old Communist Party members came from far-off Beijing, a 60-year-old from Shenzhen. Then there was the 40-year-old villager on her first visit, who had travelled two days, changing a number of buses. Hotels were sold out, so people like 33-year-old Cheuk from Hong Kong slept at the village square.

Songs of resistance

Reports described how the atmosphere turned electric as soon as the clock struck 12 on the night of December 25. At dawn, everyone sat down to eat a bowl of ‘birthday noodles’ cooked by local volunteers in accordance with a legend that Mao didn’t celebrate his birthday in style; all he had was a bowl of hot noodles. Breakfast over, everyone assembled in front of his statue, bowing thrice and singing revolutionary songs, including “The East is Red”, the anthem of the Cultural Revolution. Some even prostrated themselves on the ground, saying that they could never forget the debt they owed him.

For 70-year-old Huang, these songs are his life’s mission. Head of a ‘Red songs’ group, the former teenage Red Guard whose poor parents were staunch Mao followers travels all over with his troupe. Shaoshan is, of course, a mandatory destination every year. Huang was candid about his disappointment with the way the Communist Party of China, co-founded by Mao, had “gone astray”, no longer providing people with jobs, houses or medical care. For him, singing Red songs was a kind of resistance.

Interestingly, even though the government has made Mao’s hometown easily accessible — hourly high-speed trains from Hunan’s capital, Changsha, take just 25 minutes to reach Shaosan — Mao’s birthday is not a holiday. A suggestion that it be celebrated as ‘People’s Day’ resulted in a call by the authorities to the pro-Mao website where it was made. The suggestion, the website was told, could not be implemented.