At 110, Mao still a powerful icon in China

Mao, born 110 years ago today, has transcended communism backward into Chinese history. He has escaped the harsher verdicts on Stalin and Hitler by entering Chinese folklore, becoming a version of the semi-mythical Yellow Emperor for an age of space capsules and the WTO.

In addition, Beijing needs Mao, and here the picture grows darker. The Chinese Communist Party cannot dismiss Mao as a Stalin, because he was also the Lenin as organizer and the Marx as philosopher of the Chinese Revolution.

Mao's 110th is being honored with exhibitions, speeches, galas, rap songs, pilgrimages to sacred spots, films, and books, all devised by the party-state, but most are being met with a yawn -- occasionally a curse -- from the Chinese people.

In much of urban China, Mao has lost meaning, negative or positive. Youth can dine in a "Cultural Revolution-style" cafe off rough-hewn tables with Mao quotations on the wall as they chat about sex or the stock market. In rural China Mao looms larger as a flawed emperor who yet remains a father figure. His home village has built 110 gold statues of Mao. One is being donated for erection in the Mao Mausoleum at Tiananmen Square. The other 109 are on sale at $25,000 apiece.

After his death in 1976, silence about Mao was safest until the Communist Party sliced him up into good and bad. In 1981, Beijing promulgated a Delphic balance sheet of his "great deeds" and "grave blunders."

Deng Xiaoping, knocked down as a "capitalist roader" in Mao's Cultural Revolution, criticized his predecessor in the 1980s to signal a fresh agenda of economic reform. After Deng's death in 1997, Jiang Zemin made a few pro-Mao gestures, differentiating himself from Deng, reminding people that Mao was 70 percent correct and only 30 percent wrong. The current leader, Hu Jintao, seeking to be less aloof and corrupt than Jiang, has waved a flag of homespun populism that invokes Mao in word but not in policy. Hu said Mao at 110 offers "precious spiritual wealth" to China.

Internationally, Mao's brand of Third World revolution has collapsed like a cold souffle. Pockets of Maoism remain in the hills of Nepal and Peru, but post-Mao China itself has given up the export of communist ideas for the import of capitalist ideas.

Reevaluation of Mao goes on as fashions change. America's need for China as a counterweight to the Soviet Union in the early 1970s, for example, led many in the United States to focus on Mao's qualities and downplay his flaws. Later, Mao's image lost this boost. He shrank from a near-Superman to just one dictator and nation-builder among others.

Some say Deng reversed Mao's revolution, but it is an important distinction that Deng dismantled Mao's whimsical thought yet retained Mao's authoritarian state. Dengism (continued by Jiang and Hu) was a retreat from as much as possible of Maoism without endangering Leninist political power.

We won't know what many Chinese people think of Mao until the monopoly of power by the Communists comes to an end. If it has not been possible to build a museum to the Cultural Revolution, as the writer Ba Jin suggested, or a monument to the victims of the famine caused by Mao's Great Leap Forward, certainly it is not possible -- with the Community Party's image still at stake -- to approach Mao without political blinkers.

Under the surface, the collapse of the Soviet Union has probably begun a reassessment of Mao within China that will one day go far. A future Chinese leader may say the whole Marxist-Leninist phase of China's 20th-century history was an unnecessary detour from the self-strengthening approach to the challenge of the West in the 19th century. And thus, for Mao, Marxism was actually a handicap to his great missions of farmer rebellion and national unification.

Last week in a radio interview I was asked by a caller from Shandong Province if China would have been better off had Liu Shaoqi, Mao's methodical deputy, become top leader from 1949 onwards. A tough question. Without Mao there would have been no utopian Great Leap Forward or fascist Cultural Revolution. But Liu's China, resembling the Soviet Union, would probably have experienced Brezhnev-like stagnation. Mao went off the rails so badly that Deng was handed a tremendous unspoken mandate to be pragmatic in pursuit of prosperity and stability.

Time was lost, yes, I told the man on the phone from Shandong. But the deck was cleared for a fresh voyage.

Ross Terrill's latest book is "The New Chinese Empire." A new edition of his "Mao" was published this week in Chinese in Beijing.