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THE CHAIRMAN MAO MEMORIAL HALL Daniel Leese Today

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THE CHAIRMAN MAO MEMORIAL HALL Daniel Leese Today A PLACE WHERE GREAT MEN REST? THE CHAIRMAN MAO MEMORIAL HALL Daniel Leese The Chairman Mao Memorial Hall is the most prominent memorial hall of the [Chinese Communist] party and the nation. It is the memorial hall of the first generation of revolutionary party leaders with Comrade Mao Zedong as its core. It is a national place of patriotic education.1 Today, scientists searching for an official interpretation of the Chair- man Mao Memorial Hall (Mao Zhuxi Jiniantang 毛主席纪念堂), located at the heart of Tiananmen Square 天安门广场 in Beijing, probably come across the aforementioned passage on the website of the Chi- nese Communist Party (CCP, Zhongguo Gongchandang 中国共产党). The passage both claims the hall’s supreme importance within the party’s memorial landscape and hints at changes within the official interpreta- tion regarding its prescribed function. It probably comes as a surprise for those unfamiliar with CCP politics that the memorial hall is to be understood not only as a monument for former party chairman Mao Zedong 毛泽东 (1893–1976), but also as a place of remembrance for the first generation of party leaders. Generally, these first-generation party leaders include the leading comrades of the Seventh and Eighth National Congresses in 1945 and 1956, respectively: party vice chair- men Zhou Enlai 周恩来 (1898–1976), Liu Shaoqi 刘少奇 (1898–1969), Zhu De 朱德 (1885–1976), Chen Yun 陈云 (1905–1995), and former secretary-general Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 (1904–1997). Excluded from official memory is Lin Biao 林彪 (1907–1971), who attained his party vice chairmanship in 1958 but became persona non grata after his failed attempt to flee China in September 1971. Visitors to the memorial hall only learn this information when they, in addition to visiting the physical remains of Mao Zedong on the ground floor, ascend to the hall’s second floor. Here, a total of six rooms have been devoted to the lives of the aforementioned party leaders. Each room is decorated with a marble statue, corresponding 1 “Mao zhuxi jinian tang gaikuang” [n.d.]. 92 daniel leese documents, works of art, and photographs. Yet the majority of visitors, which amount to sixteen thousand a day and a total of more than 160 million since 1977,2 probably remain unaware of, or are indifferent to, the subtleties of party ideology. Their main purpose for visiting the hall is not directed at the showrooms upstairs but at actually seeing the embalmed corpse of Mao Zedong, the founder of New China. Nevertheless, the CCP has spared no efforts in turning the monument of individual worship into a site of “patriotic education” that is to add stability and legitimacy to the CCP dictatorship. The Chairman Mao Memorial Hall has received considerable and erudite scholarly attention in Western academia. It has been scrutinized for Western and Chinese artistic influences3 and has been compared to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (Zhongzheng Jiniantang 中正纪 念堂) and the tomb of Sun Yat-sen 孙逸仙 (1866–1925).4 It has been placed within the context of political monuments in Tiananmen Square5 and has itself been read as a text from the perspective of an “implied pilgrim.”6 In China, on the other hand, there are barely any scientific works that deal with the monument or its meanings. The most detailed analysis is found in a commemorative volume, entitled A Place Where the Great Man Rests, published by the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall Management Office under its former director, Xu Jing 徐静, on the occasion of Mao’s one hundredth birthday in 1993 (Xu Jing 1993). It describes the work of preserving the late chairman’s body and of establishing the hall as part of a perfectly working party machine. The portrayal thus is highly at odds with the chaotic situation depicted in the memoirs of Mao’s private physician, Li Zhisui 李志绥 (1919–1995), concerning the embalming of the deceased dictator (Li Zhisui and Thurston 1994, esp. chapter 1). Otherwise, there are a vast number of contemporary statements extolling the hall’s magnificence, and especially in the past decade, dozens of short articles have appeared that deal with specific details of the memorial hall, such as the refined techniques that went into fashioning the sarcophagus, and the process of creat- ing the embroidered tapestry behind the Mao statue in the northern entrance hall. They serve to satisfy a more sensational interest in the 2 Ibid. 3 Ledderose 1988: 321–345. 4 For Chiang see Wakeman 1988: 254–288, as well as chapter 3 in this volume. For Sun, see Chen Yunqian 2009 and Li Gongzhong 2009. 5 See Wu Hung 1991: 84–117. 6 Wagner 1992: 378–424..
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