The cult of Mao has enjoyed a tenacious afterlife that has not received the attention it deserves
of the 20th century’s bloodiest dictators are synonymous with evil. Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin: even to joke about them is in poor taste. Yet one tyrant’s name has a milder impact. Indeed, many still revere him. His face is on almost every banknote in circulation in the world’s second-largest economy. Thousands of people queue up daily to see his embalmed body lying in state in a glass sarcophagus.
The origins of the legend owe a surprising amount to an American. Ms Lovell explores the startling role played by Edgar Snow in creating the Mao myth more than a decade before Mao seized power in 1949. Snow was a journalist who managed to enter the remote north-western area where Mao and his followers ended up after their epic Long March to escape the forces of Chiang Kai-shek.
Ms Lovell’s descriptions of these global strands of Maoism are well-researched and colourful. She concludes her book by examining Mao’s afterlife in China itself. This is where the creed’s importance is most starkly evident.After many years during which Mao had become increasingly marginalised in Chinese political culture, China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, is trying to re-establish the late chairman’s authority. He has ordered party members to brush up on Maoist ideology.
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