China may be modernising apace, but Chairman Mao remains ubiquitous – as a tourist attraction and artistic inspiration. Gary Bowerman reports

Chen Yan has a unique career.

The 51-year-old woman from China’s southwestern Sichuan province was discovered on a TV show in 2005, and now showcases her talents before city-centre crowds nationwide. But unlike China’s burgeoning wave of talent show boy bands and syrupy balladeers, Chen is not seeking pop stardom. Instead, she earns a living impersonating one of the most controversial figures in Chinese and world history: Chairman Mao.

Wearing a front-buttoned, grey zhonghuazhuang Chinese suit – first adopted by Republican leader Sun Yatsen, and later by Mao – swept-back hair and bearing an eerie resemblance to the former dictator, Chen is regularly pictured in the newspapers waving to Chinese shoppers. The responses on their faces tell many stories – because 31 years after his death, China is still struggling with the legacy of the Great Helmsman.

Today, Mao Zedong – the man who founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and ruled it in absolute terms until his death in 1976 – is paradoxically both omnipresent and semi-invisible. Anyone buying or selling goods in China will see Mao every day; his face adorns all Chinese currency notes. Tourists encounter myriad Mao artifacts, such as posters, T-shirts, fridge magnets, alarm clocks and copies of the Little Red Book, in markets from Kunming to Haerbin. Mao’s name even graces China’s nightlife scene: Music, Oasis and Art (or MAO) is a pulsing new Shanghai nightclub, while Mao Livehouse in Beijing is a hip live music venue. More offbeat is Shirtflag, a Shanghai clothing retailer specialising in left-field interpretations of Mao-era propagandist slogans.

But, China’s currency aside, the official use of Mao’s face and revolutionary slogans – which were once daubed across buildings and public squares nationwide – is almost non-existent. Apart from a museum in his hometown of Shaoshan in Hunan province, a mausoleum and portrait in Beijing and statues on public squares in a handful of cities like Chengdu, Guiyang and Shenyang, Mao is rapidly assuming Yesterday’s Man status as China seeks to present a futuristic face to a newly engaged outside world.

In May, the dichotomy of Mao’s historical significance and his relevance in modern China emerged once more. Gu Haiou, a 35-year-old unemployed man from northwestern Xinjiang region, threw a burning object at the giant portrait of Mao hanging at the entrance to the Forbidden City in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, causing it to be replaced. The portrait retains great symbolism in China, particularly for Beijing – the political capital of this vast nation. More than just China’s most-photographed tourism attraction, Mao’s image marks the spot where, in 1949, he proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China – offering it renewed hope of unity after the humiliating World War II occupation by Japan.

Fifty-eight years later, China’s sustained economic transformation, particularly during the last decade, has upgraded the ambitions of its market-oriented urban society. Where once Mao’s pro-Communist imagery and slogans were as revered as the luxury brand hoardings and high-definition TV ad screens that dominate Chinese east-coast cities, now they are mostly gone. The internet, rather than propagandist history texts, now galvanises the minds of aspirational young consumers, while older citizens often seem bemused by the scale of China’s absorption of imported culture from overseas.

Large-scale urban migration is also shifting the societal balance from what was, under Mao, a predominantly compliant agrarian nation. China’s state news agency, Xinhua, admitted as much in September, noting that: ‘Western pop culture prompted education authorities to add 171 new terms to the national language registry.’ Additions include the rather uncomradely phrases: ‘mortgage slaves’ and ‘Dinks with pets’. Xinhua also reported the ‘wild creativity’ in naming children in China. ‘This is in part a response to the staid, politicised names such as “Wei Dong” [meaning: “Guarding Chairman Mao”] favoured at the height of the Cultural Revolution [between 1966 and 1976].’

Shanghai-based author and journalist Duncan Hewitt has been monitoring China’s urban ideological revolution since 1986, and has published a book entitled Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China. ‘Chinese society has been dragged from Stalinism to the extreme fringes of capitalism in less than 20 years,’ says Hewitt. ‘To live in China in the early years of the 21st Century is to be surrounded by change, on a scale and at a pace arguably unprecedented in human history. The whole value system has been shaken, but people are still expected to believe in communism.’

Beyond China’s boundaries, Mao retains a visible global presence – an irony not lost on the Chinese media. Last November, China’s newspapers eagerly reported that a Christies’ auction in New York garnered a record price for a work by Andy Warhol. The pop-artist’s 1972 Mao portrait was purchased by a Hong Kong collector for $17,376,000 – one million dollars more than Warhol’s iconic Marilyn Monroe portrait.

‘The [Mao] work has staggering wall-power and is an icon of the 20th century,’ says Brett Gorvy, deputy chairman of Christies’ post-war and contemporary art sale. ‘At that moment in history, 1971-72, it was the reopening of China to the West. Nixon had been to China so Chairman Mao’s image was everywhere. Warhol understood that it was famous not just for that moment, but famous forever.’

Mao’s wall power has lost its lustre in China, however. ‘Chairman Mao was right here,’ a municipal cleaner tells me, while pointing to a thick new layer of tangerine-painted concrete grafted onto a Shanghai neighbourhood wall. ‘This wall was renovated in June, so now he is gone,’ she adds, matter-of-factly. The wall was mildly famous for its chipped mural of a waving Mao Zedong painted during the Cultural Revolution. Because of the scarcity of such images, it had started to be featured in foreign guidebooks and tours. Shanghai’s city leaders – concerned that Mao no longer represents the appropriate face of China’s most market-oriented city – decided to cover it in perpetuity.

Across the city, Mao’s legacy is commemorated differently. On a side street running behind Shanghai’s showpiece Nanjing Road shopping district, three adjacent construction sites work around the clock. At the west end, Park Place, a glassy three-towered shopping mall and luxury hotel, is nearing completion, while further east, foundations are in place for a new Shangri-La hotel. Enveloped by 24/7 noise, dust and jackhammers is a small two-level balconied shop-house that has, unlike all original buildings on the block, avoided destruction. A small plaque on the pavement explains why: ‘Chairman Mao Resided Here in 1920,’ it reads.

Finding an official representation of Mao in Shanghai, revered nationally as the birthplace of Chinese communism, is no easy task. A statue still stands in the grounds of Fudan University in the northeast of the city, but the former leader is otherwise conspicuously absent. That is until you enter the Memorial Site of the First National Congress of China’s Communist Party.

Here, in July 1921, 13 Communist intellectuals, including a young Mao Zedong, held the first clandestine congress of China’s Communist Party. Officially, this meeting marked the founding of Chinese communism, though Jung Chang in her biography: Mao: The Unknown Story (which is banned in China), argues the party was actually formed in 1920, but July 1921 was Mao’s first verifiable attendance at a party gathering. The site is now a museum detailing the complex economic and societal factors that led to the creation of communism in China. Its signature exhibit depicts an upright waxwork Mao holding court over his seated comrades.

Eighty-six years after the Shanghai conference, Mao symbolism is officially confined to specific state-sanctioned sites of interest. The Beijing government is selectively promoting Red Tourism – whereby Chinese tourists are encouraged to visit historic sites along the route of the fabled Long March by Mao and his communist revolutionaries. But, China mostly prefers to look forward rather than back. In a brave new world of share ownership, property rights and 3G mobile phones, materialism not Maoism is the doctrine favoured by its urban masses.

Removed from the political world, Mao’s symbolic presence increasingly infuses contemporary art rather than ideology. In the western city of Chongqing – China’s World War II capital, and where Mao once held talks with his civil war nationalist adversary Chiang Kaishek – artist Tian Taiquan sits in a small modern studio. The Tank Loft contemporary arts district was once China’s most productive military munitions factory. Today, it is the site of Tian’s latest exhibition. An intense Chongqing-born man wearing black jeans, T-shirt and a wispy goatee, Tian creates bold photo-based art that illustratively conjoins China’s Cultural Revolution era with its capitalist new millennia.

My gaze is drawn to a vivid yet macabre photo mural. Eyeless Chinese school children wearing bright red neck-scarves walk in a leafy graveyard, where dismembered body parts of revolutionary soldiers are draped across the tombs. ‘These children are walking blind,’ says Tian enigmatically. ‘It means that although they are wearing new trainers and are thinking ahead, young people can’t see the future, and they can’t relate to the past.’

This explanation gains clarity as Tian points to the next picture. The body of a green-suited soldier wearing a red Communist Party armband is partially submerged in a sea of bright red lapel pins – each bearing the face of Chairman Mao. The series of images shows the soldier, whose shirt is ripped open to the waist, slowly drowning in Mao imagery until only a green-sleeved arm with a red arm-band holds aloft a copy of the Little Red Book. ‘At one time, everyone in China revered and cried for Chairman Mao while at the same time people were fighting each other,’ Tian says. ‘So people forget themselves and their own identity.’

China’s redefining of its national identity and global positioning inevitably means rejecting aspects of its history, says Peter Mousdale, a New Zealand-born artist and veteran China expert. His Words on Walls painting collection, shown in Shanghai earlier this year, was inspired by Cultural Revolution-era slogans daubed above doorways in an old Shanghai lane.

Though most pro-Mao slogans have been covered over, Mousdale found some scratchy Chinese characters urging: ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’ and ‘Long live the Communist Party’ around some old doorways, which he photographed and painted. ‘My paintings record part of Shanghai’s history and document the events in people’s lives before they are lost forever through urban re-development,’ he says.

Six Mao Hot Spots

• Tiananmen Gate, Beijing Seminal Mao portrait at the entrance to Beijing’s Forbidden City.

• Sun Yatsen Square Statue, Shenyang One of few remaining Mao statues depicts an over-coated Mao surrounded by revolutionary soldiers, peasants and workers.

• Propaganda Poster Art Centre, Shanghai Fine collection of pro-communist propaganda posters painted to Mao’s orders during the 1950s and 1960s.

www.shanghaipropagandaart.com

• Zunyi This city in Guizhou Province held the 1935 Zunyi Conference where Mao emerged as leader of China’s Communist Party.

• Shaoshan The village where Mao Zedong was born in 1893 features an interesting museum and statue.

• Mao Ephemera Online market for Mao badges, artworks and even MP3s of his most famous speeches.

www.maoephemera.com

Where to stay

The Ritz-Carlton Beijing
1 Jin Cheng Fang
Street East
Financial Street
Beijing 100032
Tel: (+86) 10 6601 6666
www.ritzcarlton.com

The Westin Beijing
9B Financial Street
XiCheng District
Beijing 100032
Tel: (+86) 10 6606 8866
www.starwoodhotels.com

The Kerry Center
Hotel, Beijing
No1 Guanghua Road
Beijing 100020
Tel: (+86) 10 6561 8833
www.shangri-la.com

Four Seasons
Hotel Shanghai
500 Weihai Road
Shanghai 200041
Tel: (+86) 21 6256 8888
www.fourseasons.com

Le Royal Meridien
Shanghai
789 Nanjing Road East
Shanghai 200001
Tel: (+86) 21 3318 9999
www.starwoodhotels.com

Grand Hyatt
Shanghai
Jin Mao Tower
88 Century Boulevard
Pudong
Shanghai 200121
Tel: (+86) 21 5049 1234
www.shanghai.grand.hyatt.com