Imagethief

Tag: Politics

  • Why American tech companies betrayed me, not China

    American technology companies are helping China censor the Internet. I am angry and disappointed — probably more than the Chinese people actually affected. Yet, in a world full where corporate amorality is often taken for granted, why does this bother me so much? I’ve been trying to understand the reasons for my anger.

    The remaining wisps of my youthful idealism are largely responsible. I started using commercial online services in 1992, and I started building websites in 1994 when I was in grad school. The Internet’s promise as a publicly accessible and democratizing mass medium hypnotized me and dictated the course of my career, into the technology industry, to Singapore and then to China.

    The story of the technology industry’s moral collapse before the gleam of Chinese gold is the story of my commercial coming-of-age. The reason why I am so disappointed by the concessions of Microsoft, Cisco, Google and other complicit companies is that these are the companies of my generation. In my naïve heart of hearts, I hoped they would be different. Different from the oil companies that we somehow naturally expect to do business with sordid governments and wallow in environmental depredation. Different from old industrial giants, the car makers and manufacturers that we linked with rust-belt smokestacks, layoffs and economic decline. Different from the defense companies that were happy to sell weapons to our despotic allies. Different from everything that had come before.

    It didn’t help that I was deeply immersed in the utopian fit of the technology bubble. I was so steeped in the rhetoric of the unstoppable, transformative power of the Internet that I internalized those beliefs and carried them even after the once bright-eyed startups auctioned the last of their Italian furniture. But technology companies still do their best to keep these fantasies alive. To this day, they market to us in the lexicon of freedom and transformation.

    Where do you want to go today? asked Microsoft, suggesting that it could be anywhere you want, and never hinting that they might choose to keep some destinations off limits.Any time, any place, any device, they said, but not any word, they neglected to add.

    Do no evil, lectured Google. The first line of their mission statement: Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.Universally accessible. That’s a nice idea. I wonder if it would work, now that we know Dan Gilmore was wrong all those years ago.

    Our culture drives us to set high standards for corporate integrity and to give back by using our resources for a positive global impact, says Cisco, in explaining their corporate citizenship. But some parts of the globe are impacted more positively than others.

    As a spin-doctor for technology companies I have written words like these myself. I, above all people, should be cynical about them. But I always carried that core of idealism with me. The Internet would be different, I thought to myself, and the people who had founded technology companies, many of them from my cohort, would somehow bring a different set of values than business had previously known. These were the companies of my generation. I had forgotten the core of greed and shallowness that lurked behind the technology industry’s evangelical mask in the terrible years of 1999 and 2000, when we all piously awaited the digital Rapture.

    It was foolish, of course. The system is what it is, and it exerts its own terrible, transformative power, even on the most noble of companies. I had ridden one of those companies myself, a once promising venture in Singapore that crumbled from the inside as we succumbed to our own avarice and desperately pushed numbers around to please investment bankers with fast smiles and empty eyes. In the end we were unemployed, poor and bitter, but wiser. Or so we thought.

    Technology entrepreneurs told us they would transform the world, and they were right. It has been a miraculous decade, and I wouldn’t change what the Internet brings me, especially here in Beijing, so far from my friends and family. But when we heard “transform the world” we only saw the good implied in that statement. Any technology brings its dark side, and we have spent the last five years discovering the Internet’s teeth. A tool for opening minds can be a weapon for closing them, and the arms merchants can turn out to be people we thought we knew.

    So we confront the uncomfortable question of how we expect American companies to represent “our” values. By this, I mean the noble American ideals that we casually throw around in conversation but which are so fiendishly tricky to nail down in practice: freedom, democracy, human rights. The same words that vanished from MSN Spaces in a cloud of dark irony. The depressing reality is that public corporations, as much as they have their place, generally make dismal ambassadors for these ideals. It’s not because they’re evil, or because they are run by bad people. They’re not. It’s simply that the incentives the system creates lead in a direction where idealism is hard pressed to follow. But that doesn’t make the disappointment less bitter.

    Meanwhile, the Chinese will manage without our hand-wringing. They can use the proxies if they want, choose to avoid MSN Spaces, cheerfully internationalize despite the best efforts of the CCP. They’ll wrestle with the problems in their own way. They might discover that there are places besides the Internet where interesting ideas can flow more easily. And if the climate in the US was ever to change, we might someday discover the same thing.

    And that’s why I am so sad, and why it doesn’t matter whether the Chinese themselves care about this or not. It wasn’t about China’s expectations. It was about my own. In the end I wasn’t angry because technology companies had betrayed China. I was angry because they sold out the promise that I fell in love with twelve years ago. They betrayed me.

    Some notes:

    Several recent events made me want to write this. The first is a tightening of control domestic websites and blogs by the Chinese government, most recently with the MII’s website registration act. This is part of a general trend that has also affected mainstream media. (Both of those links from the invaluable Danwei.org, and see also this good storyfrom the UK’s Guardian via Howard French’s “A Glimpse of the World” blog.)

    The second event is the renewed vigor of the Chinese government’s censorship of foreign blogging engines, with Typepad the most recent in a string of victims. The third is the outing of Microsoft’s entirely voluntary attempts to placate China’s censors in advance by preventing the use of the words “freedom”, “democracy” and “human rights” in the titles of posts in the China version of their Spaces blog engine. While the blocking of Typepad has been noticed mostly by bloggers themselves, Microsoft’s move was widely reported and generated scorn and outrage. (Wired; BBC; Financial Times, etc.) Rebecca MacKinnon haswritten a good piece on the overall situation for Yale Global, and it has been picked up by several newspapers. She’s also explored the Cisco situation in some depth.

    The entire trend is part of a worrying regression by the Hu Jintao government (here analyzed by Philip Pan of the Washington Post), long suspected of a somewhat less progressive outlook than that of Jiang Zemin (and there’s an alarming statement). The combined effect has been to call scrutiny to the complicity of American technology companies in China’s strengthening censorship apparatus. We should keep that issue alive.

  • The abstraction of diplomacy and the reality of rocks through windows

    From my blog reading, some of the widespread conclusions about the ongoing stream of anti-Japanese protests in China are:

    1. The nominal grievances, Japan’s textbooks that gloss over culpability for wartime atrocities and generally insufficient post-war contrition, are, in reality, minor.
    2. The protests were sanctioned by the state, which is tacitly condoning broad, anti-Japanese sentiment.
    3. There is a whiff of hypocrisy about the whole affair.

    So, rather than a spontaneous outpouring of grassroots sentiment in response to a profound, historical grievance, the facile textbook row is just theatrically blunt diplomacy rooted in grubby, contemporary issues, such as competition over East China Sea gas deposits and Japan’s bid for permanent representation on the UN Security Council.

    Stripping the lingering romance of the heroic Anti Fascist War reduces the protests to messaging, and the protestors to manipulated patsies. The government has decided to send an implicit threat: We have not forgotten and we are still angry. (It’s only implicit at the state level. In published vox populi quotes it’s explicit.) The dismal subtext of the message is that the legacy of the War, six decades later and counting, may still be future retribution.

    Pardon my Outraged Masses
    To engineer its message, the government is indulging in a timeworn bit of political sleight-of-hand. Stoking nationalist fury at Them (in this case, the Japanese) amplifies the diplomatic message, fills an ideological void and deflects activism that might otherwise be focused inconveniently inward. This old chestnut seems to fare particularly well in places where the state has a functional monopoly on public discourse. The refrain is familiar from other times and places: All your miseries are caused by the Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Tutsis, Blacks, Irish, Latin Americans, etc.

    The Chinese government has been careful to stress that its complaint is with the Japanese government, not the Japanese people, but news coverage and official statements are loaded with charged language. (Unfortunately, my language limitations mean that I have to use Xinhua and the China Daily, which are for foreign consumption, as proxies for broader press coverage. I would be interested in hearing if the Chinese language press is the same, better or worse.) Some of the language that has caught my eye in the China Daily in just the past three days:

    “Japan Told to Face Up to Past” (April 13)

    “…whitewashing of its wartime atrocities…”
    “…bad practice and attitude…”
    “…history of aggression…”

    “Japan’s textbook revisions cause for concern” (April 14)

    “… all its killings of civilians, exploiting, especially sexually, of women, brutalities…”
    “… orgy of atrocity…”
    “…the three bloodiest massacres…”

    “Schroeder to Japan: Be self critical of history” (April 14)

    “…heinous crimes…”
    “…wanton slaughtering…”
    “…germ wars…”

    I’ve deliberately pulled these phrases out of context because that is how they work. It doesn’t matter how measured or balanced the language around them is. These are “villain words” that, repeated often enough (the essence of propaganda) will leave a deep impression regardless of efforts to balance coverage or to mitigate the impact by distinguishing between Japanese “rightists” or the government and the population-at-large. Charged words stick. When passions are sufficiently inflamed, the ultimate result becomes the following: Japanese historical crimes + you are Japanese = your crimes.

    Also worth a look are the China Daily editorial cartoons of the past six weeks, several of which invoke Japan. I pulled them together on one web page here [link now dead, see original pages below -WM]. Samurai outfits and Tojo moustaches are caricatures of Japanese militarism (the cartoon featuring Koizumi being notable for its artistic restraint). The depicted attempt to “buy” a Security Council seat reminds me of anti-Semitic propaganda. The thread began on March 9th, well before the demonstrations got going. (The original pages are here: March 9, March 16, March 28, March 30, April 7, April 12.)

    Speaking of anti-Semitism, one sadly recurring outcome of this kind of propaganda is a pogrom. Charged language and imagery can be read as state-sanctioned contempt and, thus, as a license to violence. The Chinese should be sensitive to this situation, as their diaspora has been on the receiving end of this very tactic, most recently in the Indonesian riots of 1999. There is a reason why ethnic Chinese across much of Southeast Asia, who are often the backbone of merchant class, take local names and try very hard to assimilate and keep low profiles.

    This may all sound a bit hysterical, and I don’t think that an actual anti-Japanese pogrom is going to erupt in China, but threats to people and property are escalating on both sides. Furthermore, the attitudes and prejudices that this kind of propaganda teaches do not go away. They just go out of view, to be expressed later as racism, violence and, if we’re particularly unlucky, future policy as another indoctrinated generation assumes power.

    My xenophobes can lick your xenophobes
    Of course the long-term consequences of this will be to drive Japan towards the US and further empower the Japanese right, the very element of Japanese society most likely aggravate Chinese fears. Thus the great circle of self-fulfillment might roll on.

    None of this exonerates the Japanese government, which regularly seems to find ways to irritate neighbors who still remember the war. The Koreans, fellow victims of the Co-Prosperity Sphere and no slouches at nationalism themselves, are also fond of good anti-Japanese demonstration. In the years I lived in Singapore, I encountered many bad memories of the Japanese occupation and much lingering ill will. But no one is guilty of their father’s crime, even if they don’t apologize sufficiently for it, and a regional cycle of nationalism and escalating tension won’t do anyone any good.

    I like to think of myself as an optimist, and I don’t expect a full-scale crisis. But it’s sad that the Japanese foreign ministry has to advise Japanese citizens against travel to China, and it’s worse that the abstraction of diplomacy has already become the reality of rocks through windows. My neighbors are Japanese. They have a three-year-old daughter who is infatuated with my cats and giggles so loudly that I can hear her through the walls. I wonder how they are feeling right now.

    One final China Daily quote, from an editorial published on March 28:

    “It is the young, after all, who urgently need to learn about the falseness of promises offered by nationalism and its romanticization of national glory.

    The truth is, the past never disappears. In fact, it often returns to haunt one.

    It is an unforgivable sin to turn one’s face away from past atrocities while many of the victims are still suffering from the abuse they endured.”

    I couldn’t agree more.

  • In praise of Google in China

    The BBC’s website is blocked but many international apartment buildings get BBC World. My colleague was watching the BBC in her Beijing apartment this morning when a report on Google’s agreement to censor key words and sites via its upcoming google.com.cn service aired. Needless to say, they were only moments into explaining how Google had agreed to meet Chinese content control restrictions when Nanny dropped the hammer on the Beeb, leaving legions of bewildered expats to wonder exactly what it was Google was doing with the Chinese authorities. Censoring of censorship news seems like one of those things that might cause the universe to collapse in on itself.

    For the record, Imagethief thinks that Google is doing the right thing, and taking a reasonable approach to the conundrum of operating in China. I have to confess some disagreement with RSF’s take-no-prisoners approach to complicity with the Chinese government censorship regime, despite my respect for them as an organization. I believe that American Internet firms should remain in China, but should take as many reasonable steps as they can to avoid putting themselves in untenable situations, such as turning over e-mail communications belonging to Chinese dissidents or journalists. As I wrote previously [note: this link now dead – WM], I think there are shades of grey in this situation, where the benefit of offering Chinese people more choice can be balanced against compliance with some of the Chinese government’s less onerous restrictions. Filtering keywords is bad, but it is not in same league as becoming an unwitting tool in the imprisoning of dissidents.

    As reported yesterday, Google’s approach is to post notifications that some content has been removed when search returns are filtered. It will also refrain from offering its “Blogger” blogging service and Gmail service in China, so as to avoid placing itself in a situation similar to Yahoo’s recently, when it was required by the Chinese authorities to turn over journalist Shi Tao’s e-mails. Those are reasonable steps, and, as someone who has been party to a few boardroom discussions (PR people get to be flies on lots of walls), I am willing to believe that there was substantial debate within Google as to the merits of proceeding down this path before they made a final decision.

    That being said, for any company with interests in China there will be no perfect defense. Once Google has an established business in China that they have a stake in protecting, the Chinese government will gain a degree of leverage over them regardless of whether google.com.cn in separately incorporated or where the mail or blog servers live. If the authorities wish to receive information on a Gmail user, they’ll still effectively be able to hold Google’s Chinese business hostage. What would be an interesting –and traumatic– test for Google would be how they would react in such a situation, where they have no obvious legal obligation (as Yahoo apparently did), but a clear interest in protecting their China business. That is a situation carrying substantial PR risk because the widely-used “legal obligation” PR shield, thin as it is, would no longer be available as a defense.

    As to why I support US Internet firms being in China, it’s a matter of providing choice for Chinese users, even if that choice isn’t as rich as what users in other countries would get. This is essentially what Google has offered up as an explanation, and I accept it. We need to be clear with ourselves what group we’re trying to serve by pressuring US (and European) Internet firms to withdraw from China. It certainly isn’t average Chinese users. Perhaps I see this issue through too much of a personal filter. (Perhaps all of us bloggers working and living in China do; we seem to have similar opinions on this issue.) I work with seventy Chinese colleagues, almost all of whom use Google to run searches as part of their work and 100% of whom use MSN messenger to chat with friends, colleagues etc. (Don’t ask me why; that’s what they like. I’m an AIM user myself.) I certainly wouldn’t want to be the person wandering around the office explaining that the MSN Messenger servers were no longer accessible to them because Americans felt it was inappropriate for Microsoft to offer it as a service to them as long as it meant following Chinese content restrictions. And I certainly don’t see how restricting them to Chinese Internet services only serves their interests, even though it may salve our national conscience.

    But, as I also wrote previously, US Internet firms need to be clear on where they draw the compliance line, without having to wait to be pressured into it or forced into it by a crisis. There does come a point at which the tradeoff is no longer worthwhile. Personally, I think it’s worth making concessions to content filtering to offer wider –if crippled– choice. But is it worth being complicit in the detention of journalists and dissidents? Answering at a personal level again, no. Google’s decision not to offer certain services in China is recognition of this division, even if it is imperfect and a bit risky. Other companies need to be clear where the line is for them, and explain it to their stakeholders at home. Otherwise we won’t have seen the last of this issue.

    Finally, some will be tempted to say, “they’re just doing it for the money!” Yes. That’s what listed, joint-stock corporations do, and what they should do, pursuant to sensible regulation. I’m not aware of there being any mystery or hidden agenda about that. From a business point of view it’s totally understandable that companies should want to pursue the China market. The fact that many do is directly responsible for Imagethief having a job right now (just so you are clear on my personal interest in this issue). But, at the same time, companies need to be consider what costs and risks beyond the obvious financial ones they are willing to endure to pursue the market here. And exactly what compromises they are prepared to make.

    Disclosure: Imagethief does not represent any company currently affected by Chinese Internet censorship issues. But he is damn happy Google is available in China. He is also awaiting the inevitable flames for taking the position stated above, and is aware that some bloggers he likes and respects feel otherwise.

    As always, personally I think censorship is abhorrent. But I lay it at the feet of the Chinese government, not Google, and I’d still rather have Google here than not.

    Other (blog) reading (various points of view):
    Peking Duck 1: His original post on this issue. Conflicted.
    Peking Duck 2: On Google fighting a US government subpoena. A double standard?
    Roger Simon (Via the Duck): Boycott Google.
    Rebecca MacKinnon: “Don’t be too evil.”
    Danwei: Keep cool…still.
    Fons: Yi koutou! Er koutou! San koutou!
    Life After Jiangxi: Agonizing…

    Added Jan 27th:
    Asiapundit: Dumb move by smart guys.
    Billsdue: Ka-CHING…Not.

  • The standard issue chairman mao

    I had never before lived in a country where there was a real cult of personality. China has fixed that.

    Oh, Americans give it their best shot. God bless them if they don’t want Reagan on everything these days: Ships, money, Mount Rushmore, text books, dog licenses. But as a nation, they seem to have a fair aversion to elevating deceased leaders to godhood.

    This is a good thing. I am not in favor of cults of personality or the deification of human beings, living or dead. I am in favor of a scrappy press and an angry body politic that delight in jerking the rug out from underneath the people that run the country.

    I am not, however, opposed to enshrining the memory of leaders who have had a significant impact on the history of the nation. Even I misted up at the Lincoln Memorial as I read the Gettysburg Address, one of history’s great orations, from the text etched on the wall in the shadow of the great man’s statue.

    But what keeps America great, even in one of its darker periods, is that someone so inclined (perhaps a southerner with a Civil War chip) can stand on the steps of that very same monument and loudly declare, “Lincoln was an asshole!” without fear of state retribution or persecution.

    Just try that on the steps of the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, smack bang in the center of Tiananmen Square, and see how long it takes the state to dish out some retribution.

    China knows cult of personality, and Mao is the beneficiary. I realize that “cult of personality” is often used with regards to a living person, but I suspect that, in the Chinese national consciousness, Mao is not entirely dead. One of the interesting things about being in China now is that the country still seems to be building the Mao mythology, even as it modernizes at a breakneck pace and wrestles with itself about Mao’s legacy.

    Before I share any further observations, I need to make a disclosure. I am not a China expert, nor a China historian. As with all the other entries in this journal, I write as a layperson awash in China for the first time. If you want to take scholarly issue with any of my observations, the comment form is at the bottom of the page. Among all the articles I have posted on this blog, this is the one for which I would most like to see some input from other people living in China.

    The thing that got me thinking about Mao’s place in the Chinese national consciousness was a small photograph that my father bought at a curio store when he was here for a recent visit. Prior to that, I had noted the giant painting on the Forbidden City, the Mausoleum, and Mao’s portrait on all the new currency in a kind of offhand way. The photograph was nothing special. A relic from the 1960s, it shows three students in, naturally, Mao jackets posing at the feet of a Mao statue in front of what appears to be a university or government building.

    The statue of Mao is large and imposing, perhaps near ten meters tall. He stands resolutely, gazing forward at the horizon/future/building across the street. He appears to be facing a moderate headwind, as the bottom of his greatcoat is swept back in the imaginary breeze.

    I was walking home from class by a back road a couple of days after my father bought the photograph when I passed one of the nearly one-hundred universities in the Haidian district. I can’t remember which university this was; the University of Panel Beating, or the University of Flocculent Textile Sciences or some such. What was important was that it had the Mao statue and what appeared to be the same building in the background! Oh my god, I thought, that’s the goddamn statue! This is the place in the photo! What a coincidence!

    I whipped out the digital camera and took a couple of furtive shots, and strolled on past the Starbucks, the Subway, and the other franchise businesses that were, cunningly, located down the street, just outside of Mao’s still resolutely communist gaze.

    Well, of course it was not the same statue or the same building. This became completely obvious when I spotted first one, then two, then three other identical Mao statues in front of the indistinguishably drab institutional buildings that still represent the cutting edge of Chinese academic architecture. This was, it turned out, the standard issue Mao statue, planted in front of what appeared to be all public facilities that existed during the 1960s or 70s. On Xueyuan Lu, not far from where I live and study, two of the statues gaze resolutely at each other from opposite sides of the street, in a breathtaking tableau of entombed narcissism.

    This experience got me thinking about the rest of the Mao iconography in Beijing, and about how Chinese people today actually perceive Mao. There is no doubt that the Chairman is omnipresent. If the statues on the university campuses aren’t enough, in many Beijing restaurants, a bust of Mao occupies the same spot of honor that, in Singapore, would have a small Buddhist or ancestral altar. Many taxi and van drivers have a Mao medallion hanging from the rearview mirror. On one side will be Mao, and on the other will be either Zhou Enlai or Kuan Yin. (I am not sure why the option.) At this moment the Chinese government is in the midst of introducing new currency in which all the bills feature the Chairman’s likeness.

    Tiananmen Square is, of course, the centre of the Mao cult in China. The Chairman’s immense portrait hangs on the front of the Forbidden City, gazing across the square at the Monument to the People’s Heroes and, beyond that, his own tomb, the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall. The portrait is a mandatory stop for the legions of Chinese tourists who make pilgrimages to Beijing to stand at the heart of the empire. Everyone has their photo taken in front of the Mao portrait. The tomb itself is a monumental attraction, and as the focal point of the average Chinese tourist’s Beijing pilgrimage, plays as a central and formalized a role as the Kabaa does in the Hajj.

    But despite the cult of personality, the mythmaking and the iconography, it seems that the Chinese don’t really agree on Mao’s legacy. During my father’s recent visit to Beijing, we were invited to the house of three academics whom, for obvious reasons, I won’t identify. In the midst of a lovely meal of home cooked dumplings, vegetables, and surprisingly palatable Chinese brandy, the topic of Mao came up. Two of the academics were in their fifties and had come from prosperous families. During the Cultural Revolution, as teenagers, they were both shipped to a northern province to till the earth for eight years. They were blunt in their assessment of the Chairman. “We hate him,” said one, leaving little room for argument.

    Also at the table was a younger academic, in her forties, who was the head of the institute where one of the other two worked. She was not a victim of the Cultural Revolution, and she had a different opinion. She saw Mao as the founder of modern China, and a figure to be revered. I don’t know much of this sentiment was sincere and how much was a political necessity of her position. I was, however, impressed with the fact that the three of them were willing to share their differing opinions with us, and able to be colleagues and friends despite their fundamentally different outlooks on the most charged figure in modern Chinese history.

    Originally, I thought the younger academic’s sentiment might be representative of post-Cultural Revolution Chinese in general. It seemed likely that, if you had not personally had to endure those miserable years, you might be more receptive to the modern mythmaking and reformation of Mao. But a read through the transcript of a Taiwan discussion forum on the Beijing University Website, provided by my friend Dave Hull, made me re-think that. Amidst the lively and somewhat worrying debate about whether China should invade Taiwan were several references to Mao. Clearly, as a group, educated Chinese youth aren’t really sure of Mao’s legacy either. Some admired his charisma and vision. One, screened by the anonymity of his posting, pointedly referred to him as “that madman”.

    Meanwhile, here in Beijing, the official iconography of Mao, while still powerful, is slowly being diluted by the transformation of Cultural Revolution imagery, including Mao imagery, into tourist kitsch. On any stroll through Tiananmen Square you will be besieged by hawkers touting Mao watches (the second hand is his waving arm, moving back and forth) and little red books of Mao Tse Dong thought, helpfully translated into English. Go to the Hongqiao Market, near the temple of heaven, and you will find dozens of curio stores selling reproduction Cultural Revolution posters featuring socialist-realist and revolutionary-romanticist renderings of the great figures of the Chinese revolution. Shops in Qianmen sell T-shirts with portraits of Lei Feng, the idealized communist soldier.

    The Chinese clearly recognize all of these things as kitsch, and no one seems to mind. Of course the Chinese History Museum, on Tiananmen Square, displays waxworks of the great figures of Chinese history, with a strong emphasis on revolutionary figures. This is done without any visible irony whatsoever, so who really knows how the Chinese view a Mao watch. They don’t wear them.

    With all of these conflicting signals, there was only one thing to do. I had to visit the heart of cult, and make the pilgrimage to Mao’s tomb. Technically the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, this is an enormous, square, Stalinist edifice on the southern end of Tiananmen Square, near Qianmen. It is a huge attraction for the thousands of Chinese tourists who come to the capital.

    An artificial scarcity is maintained by only opening the tomb for two or three hours a day, five days a week. The result is a queue that can stretch well over a kilometer, enhancing the Chairman’s mystique. After all, it wouldn’t be so flattering if the Chairman was open round the clock, like a Seven-Eleven, and you could just wander in any time. (Notice: Cashier does not have the keys to the crypt.) No, the government has clearly taken a calculated step to enhance the sense that all the world has come to see Mao.

    If you are ever in Beijing, I highly recommend going to see the Chairman. The joy of it is not in actually seeing the body; it’s in witnessing one of the world’s last remaining bits of great, communist theater. Dave Hull and I spent an hour in the immense queue that wound, in crisp right angles, across half of Tiananmen Square. We baked in the brutal, Beijing summer with the salt of the Chinese earth; ordinary people who had come from across the country to see the big city sights. The crowd was a mix of families, old aunties and uncles, and colossal Chinese tour groups in matching caps, dutifully following young women with colored flags and megaphones. Foreigners were rare. People from the countryside, where, I am told, the cult of Mao still holds strong sway, were common. Kites flapped overhead, and water and ice cream hawkers roamed the line, flogging temporary relief and trailing a cloud of beggars who competed with each other for the empty plastic bottles.

    We moved quickly, under the constant bombardment of a public address system that explained, in Chinese and English, the decorum that should be observed in the queue and in the mausoleum. Every twenty yards or so, an attendant with a megaphone kept an eye open for queue jumpers and forbidden bags and parcels.

    After an hour of switchbacks we approached the entrance to the Memorial Hall. As we moved toward the front stairs, we passed the flower concession. Here you could spend two kuai on a bouquet of artificial flowers wrapped in official “Chairman Mao Memorial Hall” cellophane. Many people were buying the flowers. As we ascended the stairs we had a chance to buy the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall Official Pamphlet for one kuai. “Chairman Mao will always live in our hearts”, it proclaimed on the front, above a photograph of a still living Mao giving a speech. I bought one.

    Moments later we were at the grand entrance to the Memorial Hall. After an hour of flirting with heatstroke I was suddenly, gloriously, bathed in the air-conditioned breeze. Inside the doors the queue split into two, flowing to either side of a large statue of a seated Mao, arms in lap, legs casually crossed, gazing benevolently over the masses come to visit his corpse. In front of the statue were two enormous metal bins on wheels into which people duly threw the bouquets of artificial flowers they had purchased moments before. Some genuflected briefly, as they would with incense before a Buddhist shrine, before tossing their flowers into the bins. Obviously, when the bins were full, they would be wheeled back out to the flower stall and replaced with empty ones. Someone is doing well on that racket.

    Clouds of starched attendants manhandled the bifurcated queue into neat two-abreast rows and we were rudely prodded into the next room. There was some pressure to keep the visitor throughput up. An auntie and uncle in front of me attempted several times to walk single file so both could be on the inside to get a better glimpse of Chairman, only to be rudely wrenched back into line-abreast by the attendants. Anyone who slowed down or, heaven forbid, stopped was immediately upbraided and poked back into motion.

    Two doglegs later and we were in the Hall of Last Respects. There was the Great Helmsman, tucked under a Chinese flag with only his head and upper shoulders showing, as if napping in a refrigerated, glass coffin were simply the way to pass a hot afternoon. An honor guard of four soldiers kept watch. Of course, who knows if that really was him in the crypt. It could have been a bad waxwork. He did, after all, look puffy and, well, dead. Rumors float around Beijing that the real body is swapped with a wax one on alternate days. It is also said that, when not on display, the corpse is lowered on a hydraulic lift into the chamber below where the mausoleum ghouls perform their grisly maintenance tasks. One friend of mine thought that this meant the Chairman was raised into a standing position when on display, perhaps something like the “Evening with Mr. Lincoln” animatronic at Disneyland. I had to disappoint him, but I do think there is potential in the animatronic idea.

    In the Hall of Last Respects everyone craned their necks for the best look as we swept past. We all had line of sight on the body for perhaps ten or fifteen seconds. And then we went around the back wall and emerged into the gift shop.

    If ever an ironic shock could cause respiratory arrest and death, this was it. Fifteen feet behind the corpse of the literal embodiment of Chinese communism, the gift shop was flogging Mao paintings, Mao medallions, Mao figurines, Mao picture books, and Mao tributes of every other conceivable shape and form. If the gift shop didn’t have what you wanted, behind the mausoleum, stretching towards Qianmen, was a hundred yards of stalls selling even more Mao paraphernalia.

    And that was the Temple of Mao. Admission was free.

    My father, an Englishman by training, is convinced that the enshrinement of the corpse is a Chinese expression of the Arthurian myth. By not returning the body to the elements, Mao is kept alive in the public consciousness and the implicit suggestion is made that, perhaps, in China’s darkest hour, the Great Helmsman will rise again and steer China through its troubles. Then again, many people here believe that China’s darkest hour already came as a result of Mao’s stewardship.

    So Mao continues to loom over China, occupying an uneasy, conflicted spot in the national consciousness, half tyrant, half beloved founder of the modern state. Both views are correct. But the conflict doesn’t seem to be causing the nation any visible agonies. Even those who disparage Mao feel an obvious pride in Chinas current success. Perhaps, one of these days, the Chinese will reconcile their feelings about Mao’s role in their history. Meanwhile, the Chinese might not be sure of Mao’s place in the modern world, but they seem increasingly sure of their own.