The Mao Phenomenon

Li Jie, a Shanghai-based cultural critic, wrote a lengthy study of Mao Zedong in early 1989 from which the following excerpts are taken. This idiosyncratic but thought-provoking article was published in A Hundred Schools (Baijia) a controversial Anhui journal banned following 4 June 1989. Li Jie's critique was daring even for the pre-4 June era of outspokenness. Readers familiar with the work of the U.S.-based academic Lung-kee Sun, author of The "Deep Structure" of Chinese Culture, which had such an impact in China in the early to mid-1980s, may see something of Sun's style here. Perhaps the only comparable critique of Mao by a mainland intellectual at the time was published in Hong Kong by Liu Xiaobo, one of Li Jie's bêtes noires, in late 1988.1 Both Li's and Liu's writings on Mao are suffused with the venomous anger-not to mention the overweening self-importance-of ill-tempered and unfilial sons resentful of a patriarch whose influence lives on beyond the grave. Or as Li Jie puts it: "It is obvious that the Chinese father complex is not one that leads to patricide but merely to jealousy of the father figure." This excerpt from Li Jie is followed by two denunciations published in the post-1989 purge. It is also instructive to read Li Jie in juxtaposition to He Xin's pro-Mao palaver. An interesting point is that Li Jie's highly negative evaluation of the contemporary Chinese character is essentially the same as that made by He Xin elsewhere

Art · Character (mathematics) · China · Literature · Mainland China · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Resentment · Sociology · Style (visual arts) · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Law · Philosophy · Psychology