Sep 14: Mao/Ozymandias

I don't quite have the Mao thing down yet. I haven't read up extensively, and I haven't really asked anyone -- though I will once I get to the symposium -- so there's probably good reason why I don't understand. But I'm not yet getting how there's a simultaneous acknowledgement of his faults (if killing thousands of people, and encouraging the destruction of temples can be called "faults") while simultaneously revering and respecting him. The answer may well be that on an individual level people don't do both simultaneously, but on a country-wide, face-to-the-public scale this does seem to be the case.

I mean people queue up for hours to get a glimpse at his scarily-intact, perfectly-embalmed body for goodness sake. Eleni and I refrained, but I would have gone had we had the time--the better to understand you, my dear. As it was, we've gotten our Mao dose through a giant statue in Chengdu and the 12-foot high poster of his face hanging over the entrance to the Forbidden City. Having your Communist face up over the Emperor's palace is a pretty nice contrast. . . and it has given me my first inkling at an understanding. It's certainly not the whole story, and might not even be a large part, but it's something. . .

It has to do with a certain embracing -- perhaps romanticizing, but at the very least a constant awareness -- of history. I first noticed this in Xi'an. When archaelogists found well over 6000 smashed statues buried underneath a farmer's field, the insinct was not merely to analyze the ruins, or even put the ruins on display, but build them back as they were. And not, say, a handful for a museum, but every single one. My guidebook said they deserved the Nobel Prize in World Tourism. Which, well, they do. But I think part of the desire to recreate the army is wrapped up in how aware everyone here is of their own history. The first emperor of the Han dynasty, who had the terra cotta warriors built to protect his tomb, is still a fixture in the Chinese mental landscape, almost as much so as he was in the third century BCE when he lived. And so where the Western world might be content to gaze at the ruins, a la Athens, his legacy is being painstakingly rebuilt. I thought as I looked at the statues: "No Ozymandias, here."

The Great Wall is the same way. While most of it is in disrepair, crumbling in places, overgrown with plants everywhere, the government has carefully rebuilt the wall in four different visitation spots around Beijing. It is assumed that tourists want to visualize the wall as it was -- a living fortification -- not see it as it is.

I have begun to imagine Chinese history like the study of philosophy. Not, as in science, where when a hypothesis changes the old one is discarded, but where value is seen in learning it all -- even if just about everyone agrees some dated theory was so much scholastic gobblety-gook. Western philosophy is almost a static thing, things get added, but nothing gets taken out, and there's no real heierarchy for the various branches. Chinese history seems to be the same way -- unjudged, and all of it present simultaneously.

As far as I can tell, any educated Chinese person can instantly recall the names and dates of every dynasty back to the Bronze age, which ok, fine, I have several friends who can name every U.S. president, but nonetheless this sort of constant awareness of one's past isn't as inherent a part of the American soul.

Mao Tse Tung, after his political cohorts were tried upon his death, underwent a radical decline in popularity (cf that whole "faults" thing above) and then in the 1990s he had a popularity comeback. And I think, perhaps part of it, is that he had become "history." And history is revered here, kept close to one's breast, breathed in and out daily. Mao is as much a part of that as -- and weighted no more and no less than -- the Forbidden City. When all the past is simultaneously here in the present, there really seems no reason to distinguish between the two.