It does no harm to reflect on the evils of Maoism.
The 16th-century Anglo-Italian writer John Florio warned that he “who sleepeth with dogs shall rise with fleas,” and he was far from the first to advise that keeping bad company can have bad consequences — and in similar terms.
And so to the soccer team Real Madrid and its response to the Beijing regime’s hissy fit over a meme.
As I mentioned yesterday, Kylian Mbappé, the captain of France’s soccer team and a player for Spain’s Real Madrid, was asked on an online sports show which meme about him had made him laugh the most. He cited one in which he is dressed up as “a Chinese dictator.” That unnamed dictator was (quite obviously) Mao.
China’s foreign ministry, keen to throw Beijing’s weight about and, presumably, send a message to Western companies wanting to do business in China, said that it had taken note of the matter and commented that “words and actions that hurt the feelings of the Chinese people will naturally face unanimous opposition from all sectors of Chinese society.”
Unanimous, eh?
How would they know?
Benedict Rogers on this site today:
In a society that does not allow independent opinion polls, let alone free elections or free speech, how can they know how 1.4 billion people really feel? It is quite likely that many of them, especially those who have suffered under Mao and his successors, would agree with Mbappé that Mao is a dictator — as is China’s current ruler, Xi Jinping.
As it is, many more people in China will have heard about the controversy (or the regime’s description of it) than have watched Mbappé discussing the meme(s) or, for that matter, seen the “offending” images themselves. In any event, Chinese companies quickly started severing their connections with Mbappé, a well-known figure over there. China’s state TV is suspending the main Spanish soccer league from its schedule.
Mbappé has apologized, citing his “deep respect for the Chinese people,” but, to repeat what I wrote yesterday, if he really had “deep respect for the Chinese people,” he would issue a new statement condemning Mao for the hell to which “the Great Helmsman” subjected them — for decades.
As Rogers noted, Real Madrid, and La Liga — the Spanish soccer league — have also apologized. He added:
The withdrawal of Chinese corporate sponsorships and television audiences will be financially painful for soccer players and their teams for a while. But Mbappé, Real Madrid, and La Liga should have stood their ground and, over time, sought alternative corporate sponsorship, instead of kowtowing. Their fans should feel ashamed, not by Mbappé’s original comments but by the failure to defend them.
Quite.
It does no harm to reflect, as Rogers does, on the evils of Maoism.
Li Zhensheng was someone who understood Maoism (and in particular the Cultural Revolution) for what it was. Not only was he in China at the time, but he photographed some of what was going on. I reviewed Red-Color News Soldier, a book containing some of his work, in 2004, the year after it was released in English.
Li was born, as the Communists liked to say, “in the old society,” the chaotic, war-torn China of 1940, but came of age “under the Red Flag.” Blessed with talent and an appropriately proletarian background, he made his way to film school and a job as the photographer for the principal newspaper in China’s far Northeast. It was 1964, the era of the Socialist Education Movement, Li’s camera records the rallies, military maneuvers, and, with grim inevitability, and in images reminiscent of the Soviet destruction of the kulaks, the persecution of enemies of the people, in this case, “rich peasants.” Two supposed plutocrats are forced to stand for hours, grubby and exhausted in their worn, tired farmer’s clothing, their worn, tired farmers’ heads bowed before a sullen crowd, denounced by a local woman who has managed to whip up tears and indignation for the occasion. There’s a photograph of one of their “mansions,” a rundown house in a rundown village surrounded by a rundown crowd shipped in for the spectacle. Inside, a gorgeous hoard is on display: some shoes, a radio, a leather jacket, and a watch, more than enough to condemn a man. . . .
At the beginning,[of the Cultural Revolution in 1966] Li was an enthusiast, “excited,” at the prospect of revolutionary renewal, but it isn’t too long before his photographs begin to reveal his doubts. There’s something off-kilter about many of these pictures, a strangeness that goes beyond their bizarre subject matter. Li says now that this was a sign that he was beginning to have his own opinions about what was going on. Even when photographing relatively benign events, of workers, say, singing songs based on the chairman’s slogans, “I frequently tried to choose angles or compositions that showed it was all a bit crazy to me.”
Photographers were allowed to witness the cultural revolution in all its ingloriousness, but they had to hand over what they had taken. Nothing that reflected badly on what was going on could be shown or even retained.
But:
Li followed a different course. After he had processed his films, he held back some of the negatives, “all those images ‘beyond the assignment’ — the condemnations and the executions” and stashed them away, first in his office, later in a hiding place at his home. Remarkably, over 30,000 of them survived and, excluding whatever may be in China’s official archives, they may be the best remaining record of that terrible time.
Inevitably, the most striking photographs are also the most horrific. We are shown picture after picture of victim after victim, head bowed before the mob or crowned with a dunce’s cap, face and clothes spattered with ink and worse.
Or take the case of Wu Bingyuan, a technician accused of counterrevolutionary activities (a pamphlet):
Li recalls that when Wu heard his sentence, death, “he looked into the sky and murmured, ‘this world is too dark’; then he closed his eyes and never in this life reopened them.” The photographs show Wu being paraded through the streets of the city. Later, shackled and bound, he’s pictured at his place of execution. His eyes are still shut. We see him kneeling, back turned to the firing squad. His eyes are still shut. The final image is of Wu’s corpse. His eyes are still shut.
From Real Madrid’s statement of “values”:
Real Madrid’s universality extends beyond borders, is timeless and is accessible to everyone in the world. It doesn’t consider race, ideologies, cultures, religions, ways of thinking, place of origin or social status.
Truth, historical accuracy, and free speech are different matters, it seems.
Ever since the row over Mbappé erupted, Beijing and its flacks, automated and otherwise, have been emphasizing the immense regard with which Mao is held in China, something that, as alluded to by Rogers, they are curiously unwilling to put to the test. Nevertheless, it may well be that decades of mythologizing by the Chinese Communist Party have given the old monster enough of a sheen to impress many Chinese, fewer than half of whom remember his rule.
Then again:
Towards the end of the book, there are photographs of the ceremonies with which Li’s city marked Mao’s death. Hundreds of thousands gather in a stadium… Li searches for signs of genuine grief in the crowd but succeeds only in finding one woman “with a few teardrops on her coat.”