Here he is, Chairman Mao, lying in state. On September 9, it was fifty years since he passed away, but the party leadership in Beijing chose to make as little as possible of the anniversary. A few commemorations were held here and there, but with little fanfare.
Mao had been ill for several years when he finally died, at the age of 82. Three years before his death, he began having increasing difficulty moving his arms and legs. He also struggled to speak clearly, chew and swallow, and hold his head upright. In 1974, he was examined by several neurologists. According to Mao’s personal physician, Li Zhisui, they concluded that he was most likely suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — ALS.
The disease destroys the nerve cells that control the muscles, while mental faculties are normally preserved. The descriptions fitted Mao’s condition well, for he continued reading documents and making political decisions almost until his death. His final struggle was nevertheless dramatic. In early September, he could barely breathe. Mao asked the doctors whether he was going to die, but no one was willing to tell him the truth.
“Everything will be all right, Chairman,” Dr. Li Zhisui assured him.
Mao looked content as he lay there, before pink patches slowly appeared on his cheeks.
“He breathed out deeply. His eyes closed. His right hand fell lifeless from mine. The ECG line went flat. I looked at the clock. It was ten minutes past midnight on September 9, 1976.”
An era was over, but Dr. Li felt no grief. As he sat there, he let his thoughts wander. For twenty-two years he had served Chairman Mao both as physician and confidant. At first he had admired him as China’s saviour, but by 1976 he had long since lost all his illusions, for Mao was not the man he claimed to be.
The Chinese reacted largely calmly to the news of Mao’s death. Many wept, but the tears were not necessarily genuine. Where people were expected to cry, they cried. Where they were left alone, life went on much as before, although many felt uncertain about what lay ahead.
The American Sidney Rittenberg was still languishing in the notorious Qincheng Prison outside Beijing. While the death of Premier Zhou Enlai in January that same year had unleashed a genuine flood of tears, few if any were crying this time. Nor was Rittenberg, who had revered Mao for two decades:
“I could not understand my reaction. In my mental universe Mao was the most important person in the world, wise, gifted, philosophically sound, a master strategist … Yet I could not produce a single tear when the news of Mao’s death came. Not one. What will the prison guards think? I wondered … My worries proved unnecessary, for I could neither see nor hear any particular emotional reaction from them either.”
In the village of Huangshi, far to the south, lived fourteen-year-old Chen Da. His father had been a landowner before Mao seized power, and the family was therefore harassed in every conceivable way. At school, Da and his sister were always made to sit at the back of the classroom. They were not allowed to wear the red scarves of the Communist Young Pioneers or take part in the school’s dance and theatre performances.
Mao’s death hit the village like a bombshell. Ever since he was a little boy, Da had heard the peasants shout, “May Chairman Mao live for ten thousand years!” Now, suddenly, he was no more. If he had to die, however, the peasants thought he had at least chosen the right day to do so: the ninth day of the ninth month, for the number nine symbolised imperial power.
Over the next few days, heavy rain clouds hung above the village, and the peasants took them as a sign that Heaven was weeping for its dead son. But Da’s father interpreted the clouds differently: Heaven was weeping because Mao had not died much earlier.
In Huangshi, one mourning ceremony followed another, but Da and his family were forbidden to attend. Nor were they allowed to wear the compulsory black mourning armbands.
Day and night, slow funeral music poured from the loudspeakers, as though the end of the world were near. Da’s father took the children aside and told them that he feared both a state of emergency and civil war. It was therefore more important than ever to keep a low profile.
“But although my parents hated Mao, I had embraced him in my own way … A cult mentality had already taken root in me. In my heart, there was no other leader who meant so much, no matter how good or bad he might have been.”
In Liuyang, a small town in Mao’s home province of Hunan, lived thirteen-year-old Lu Decheng. His grandmother hated the Communists and remembered how their home district had been ravaged during the Mao-led Autumn Harvest Uprising of 1927. Mao’s forces swept through the villages like a hurricane, and before they disappeared into the mountains to continue the revolution, the rice was gone.
Afterwards, the villagers suffered for years. With the Communist seizure of power in 1949, his grandmother witnessed still more brutality, and in quiet moments she made sure Decheng understood what she thought.
Decheng did not like Mao either. When he started school in 1970, the pupils were made to praise the infallible Chairman from the first lesson of the day to the last. People were still queuing to obtain food and clothing. The most ardent Mao supporters were usually the best at elbowing their way to the front, and his grandmother often returned home empty-handed.
Now and then, everyday life was interrupted by crackling loudspeakers announcing the pronouncement of sentences in the parade ground. Decheng and his friends would run off to watch the spectacle, which often ended with death sentences and pistol shots.
After the loudspeakers announced Mao’s death, most people tried to look sad, and some cried. But not Decheng, who appeared unmoved by the tragedy. As a first warning, he was sharply reprimanded by the local neighbourhood committee, with his grandmother present as a witness.
Nine days after the Chairman’s death, memorial ceremonies were to be held throughout the country. Preparations were in full swing on the parade ground in Liuyang, and the pupils at Decheng’s school were given precise instructions on how to behave:
“Do not talk to one another. Just as you cry when your parents die, you must cry for Chairman Mao. Walk slowly, with light steps. When you stand before the portrait of Chairman Mao, go forward two by two, bow your heads, and then leave.”
To be on the safe side, the pupils had to go through a full rehearsal in the school auditorium. Once again, Decheng stood out for his lack of grief, and the teacher became furious.
“You have no love for Chairman Mao! Why didn’t you cry?”
“I didn’t cry when my mother died either,” Decheng replied.
“But this is different — this is Chairman Mao!” the teacher screamed.
On September 18, at the same time as one million people gathered in Tiananmen Square in Beijing to bid farewell to Mao, 45,000 people stood under the blazing sun on the parade ground in Liuyang. Pupils from the district’s many schools were properly dressed in white shirts and blue trousers or skirts, and all carried white flowers as a sign of mourning.
Three hours after they had taken up their positions, the ceremony began, and as if on command the pupils started sobbing and crying. But Decheng remained calm.
When the ceremony was over, the teacher gave him another dressing-down: “Lu Decheng! What is wrong with you? You must correct your political attitude!”
As punishment, he was barred from taking part in the school’s graduation ceremony later that autumn.
Thirteen years later, in 1989, Lu Decheng and two companions, Yu Dongyue and Yu Zhijian, appeared in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. In their bags they carried around thirty eggs filled with red, blue and yellow paint.
With remarkable accuracy, Decheng and Dongyue hurled the eggs at China’s largest and most sacred portrait of Mao. Before they were arrested, they managed to hang up two banners. One read: “Five thousand years of autocracy can end here.” The other: “The cult of personality can end from now on.”
The daring protest ended in long prison sentences for all three. Decheng was sentenced to sixteen years behind bars but was released in 1998 after serving nine years. The other two received even harsher sentences. Zhijian was sentenced to life imprisonment, while Dongyue received twenty years. Both were released in the early 2000s.
Lu Decheng now lives in Canada, while Yu Dongyue has spent many years in a care institution in Indiana in the United States. He has suffered from memory loss and severe psychological problems after years in solitary confinement. A Chinese writer wrote last year that he had almost lost the ability to express himself. Yu Zhijian was also allowed to leave for the United States, where he died in 2017.
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Want to read more?
Torbjørn Færøvik: Maos rike. En lidelseshistorie, Cappelen Damm, Oslo, 2012
Denise Chong: Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship, Random House, Toronto, 2009