I have been ingesting large swathes of Qin Dynasty and modern Chinese history, economy and culture. It is fed directly to me trough-style in the forms of books, articles, films and lectures. This has created an intellectual digestive problem “something akin to packing a musket” (Sedaris, 88-89). I am so full of cultural soil that I am practically bursting with Chinese agrarian fecundity. Or so I feel.
But through all of these forced feedings of Chinese discourse there repeats the pattern of strong individuals standing above the rest of the population of China. I’m writing about these asymmetric behemoths that have the force and personal audacity to mow through humanity as a scythe through wheat to achieve what they desire. In the movies and the books these characters have loomed mightily. Like Cao Cao in Red Cliff or Hong Xiaqaun and his illustrious Middle Eastern brother, all of these stories are revolving around these colossal figures. Sometimes the name alone is enough to provoke lasting internal images.
Mao.
Little red books and softly framed portraits immediately come to mind. This one part of one person’s name evokes so many points of contentious contemporary worldview in Chinese and 外国人 (wàiguórén – foreigner) society. Even the May Fourth movement intellectuals labeled themselves as zhishi fenzi, or the “politicized intelligentsia,” (Schwarcz, 10) different and enlightened before the revolutionary masses. How do all of these characters and events carry back to us something differential to our experience?
I had begun noting some of the characteristics of individual hero/leaders from our media selection. I had found: women problems, ignoring omens, foreign invasion, delusional thinking, genocidal behavior, esprit de corps and blood-soaked battlefields. Each seemed in touch with a large supernatural lineage or a physical manifestation of divine relation through acts of super-human courage and strength. Clearly this is visible God’s Chinese Son, and again in gory effect in Warlords. On the battlefield many of the hero characters manage stunts and feats of such power and force that as a member of the audience we must compel that these figures are truly strong and divine in kith and kin.
But is this independent to other cultures tendency to lionize the powerful regardless of moral justification? In other words, is this something Chinese or just a universal packet of human historical narrative formatting? Achilles rampaged the battlefield with Hektor’s dead body after massacring the army of Troy. Mr. Bill and the cat always came back after a horrible end, transcending both the cycle of dharma and the yucks that their Heavenly voyage created.
I find Mao an incredibly interesting re-polarization of the traditional and supernatural power base that Chinese leadership had traditionally ascribed to itself. He is the anti-emperor. Instead of acting as a divine umbilical between man and Heaven, Mao developed a narrative from which his power was derived from the very people of the nation and the soil of its land. As the force of Chinese culture fell from the antique Dynastic system to the nationalist Guomingdong instability, a new power arose. Here Mao reestablished himself as the authority by replacing the consecrate leadership by Heaven with icon of “the Mass Line” (Lieberthal 64).
I did find the cognitive dissonance of his hypocritical lifestyle to be difficult to deal with, except that I have been on this earth for 35 years and if there is one thing I do know is that all of us humans are fucking hypocrites. So Mao would be no exception. However it is almost like Mao was acting as the Dao with his disregard to ideological linearity towards policy. And perhaps it was the culture of his personality that helped develop the leadership and hierarchy. He is still some simulacrum of emperors past, though. In the past the emperors had a direct connection to the Heavens and the gods and all that divination could lead to. From the populism of the people did Mao rise to power.
We have repeatedly asked the question in seminar of what does it mean to lead in China, or rather, what are the qualities that repeat or seemed mandated somehow by the cultural circumstance historically rooted in the 19th and 20th century. We have looked at God’s Chinese Son. We have looked the fall of the Qin dynasty and the rise of the Guomingdong. And now we have read about the rise of the PRC and the icon that forced China’s presence onto the world stage. But now everything seems to be on pause waiting for the world economy to collapse completely, in which case this conclusion and all things intellectual will be lost to a man versus man death hunt dystopia.
Happy Saint Valentine’s Day.
Sources:
Lieberthal, Kenneth. Governing China: From Revolution Through Reform. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.
Schwarcz, Vera. The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Sedaris, David. Naked. New York: Back Bay Books, 1998.
Spence, Jonathan D.. God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. New York: Scranton, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1996, 1996.
The Battle of Red Cliff (First Print Edition) DVD. Dir. John Woo. Perf. Chen Chang Yong Hou. DVD. Beijing Film Studio , 2008.
The Warlords (First Print Edition) DVD. Dir. Peer Chen. Perf. Jet Li. DVD. Bonzai Media Corp., 2008.