Bing Bao Mao Ze Dong

At HBA we talk about a lot of politically sensitive issues, most recently Tiananmen Square and the questionable appropriateness of hanging a giant portrait of Mao Ze Dong above its main gate. Foreigners, being all too quick to judge the practices of the Chinese government, love to point out that this kind of institutionalized worship for a political figure would never fly in a place like the United States.

And that's when our teacher said, 'Don't you guys have a MOUNTAIN with four ex-presidents' heads carved into it?'

...Oh yeah. And it doesn't stop there. If you've ever been to our nation's capital -- which oh by the way is just one of many US cities named after the founding fathers -- you start to get into some serious worship stuff: the world's largest stone phallus, dedicated to Washington, opposite an enormous stone statue of Lincoln, carved stone reliefs honoring the men of the Philadelphia Convention at every turn.

We struggled for a few minutes to justify these national monuments while remaining critical of Mao portrait. In the end, we were pretty much forced to give it up. As far as the People's Republic of China is concerned, Mao Ze Dong was the guy who started it all. I guess to them it doesn't really matter that he killed a ton of people in the process, or that Americans are inherently biased against the Chinese Communist Party. What it comes down to is that China wouldn't be what it is today if it weren't for Mao, and for that the Chinese thank him.

Americans seem to have this distorted outlook on China which I think is the result of a flawed education system. When we're young we're told it's this magical place with thousands of years of rich imperial history, and when we get older our textbooks frame Chinese communism as a hiccup in that storyline, as if Mao and his party came along and destroyed what was once a utopia. But if we think of the PRC as a relatively new country with just 50 years of history as we rightfully should, it becomes a lot harder to critique. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the Cultural Revolution was a good thing, and I'm not saying I support communism. I just think it's important to take a step back and really think about why Mao gets his portrait hung at Tiananmen before we go off about brainwashing, a lack of political freedom, and crimes against humanity.

And with that, I leave you with this glorious piece of CCP propaganda.

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