In Mao’s hometown, a profitable legacy

Or if the founder of Communist China, who fretted about “the serious tendency toward capitalism among the well-to-do peasants,’’ could hear this blithe assertion by a visitor here: “I think that what Chairman Mao really intended was for Chinese people to get rich.’’

A wave of Mao nostalgia is sweeping through China, and it crests here in his birthplace, the village of Shaoshan (population 1,387). The Hunan province town - a cross between Bethlehem and Mount Vernon, Va. - is expected to draw a record 3.5 million visitors this year, most of them Chinese pilgrims paying homage to their late leader.

Even on a weekday, the queue to get into the mud-brick farmhouse where Mao was born in 1893 is three people wide and snakes around to the front lawn. The tourists elbow for space to get their photos snapped in front of the many statues and fill their shopping bags with Mao memorabilia.

“Business is better than ever,’’ said Mao Juxiang, a 36-year-old sales clerk, who stands behind a glass counter stocked with bronze busts ($85), snow globes ($7), and key chains ($4.25).

Like many of the villagers, she claims common lineage with Mao, whom she credits for China’s current prosperity: “We have a brilliant life because of Chairman Mao’s ideas.’’

The Shaoshan where Mao grew up was a nondescript rice farming village whose residents grappled with poverty and hunger. Today, not only have living standards improved dramatically throughout rural China, Shaoshan has the additional stimulus of the Mao phenomenon.

No matter that Mao expressed no great love for his hometown and visited only twice after he became China’s leader. The village boasts a dozen hotels; a history museum; and the headquarters of Mao’s Family Restaurants, a chain run by a distant relation that serves some of Mao’s favorite dishes, such as “hong shao rou,’’ or red braised pork.

Business has ebbed and flowed along with the political tides. During the 1980s, Mao’s legacy was reexamined in light of the brutal Cultural Revolution and of the tens of millions of deaths from starvation during the “Great Leap Forward’’ of 1958 to 1961. Former Communist Party chairman Deng Xiaoping blamed Mao’s cult of personality for the excesses, and even a leading party newspaper editorialized that Mao had brought “great disaster’’ to the Chinese people.

Throughout China, Mao was dethroned from his pedestal, as statues were removed on government orders.

“There was a time that the Chinese people lost faith in the system,’’ said Mao Yushi, chairman of the Communist Party in Shaoshan and a party member for three decades. “But this year, the Chinese people have seen the way that Western governments were not able to protect their people from the recession, and that gives them more faith in the decisions made by the Communist Party.’’

Mao’s rehabilitation appears to have official sanction. In September, a film commissioned by the Communist Party to mark the 60th anniversary depicted Mao as a jovial man of the people whose human flaws (in one scene he gets drunk after a battle victory) made him more lovable.

“The Communist Party’s propaganda office is promoting him as if he is a god to give the younger generation something to believe in,’’ said a prominent Beijing sociologist who asked not to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the subject. “That’s why people go to Shaoshan - because they take Mao as their god.’’

Whether it is merely because Mao is the favorite son, or because so many people here make their living selling Mao memorabilia, Shaoshan residents frequently use quasireligious honorifics to refer to Mao.

“I definitely believe that he will bless me,’’ said Shen Yong, a 21-year-old taxi driver with a plastic Mao affixed to the dashboard.

The number of visitors to Shaoshan has risen about 10 percent annually over the last few years and is expected to hit a record in 2009, Mao Yushi said. At the same time, the number of party members in Shaoshan has risen from 50 to 90 over the last six years, reflecting a nationwide resurgence of interest in the party.

The vendors selling Mao memorabilia shrug off ideological questions of communism vs. capitalism.

“From everything I’ve seen in his writings, I think he was an open-minded and tolerant person,’’ said a Shaoshan businessman named Liu who sells Mao souvenirs on Taobao, the Chinese equivalent of eBay. “I don’t think he would have minded people making a little bit of money.’’