History's Palate Cleanser part 1 of 3

I stood in the doorway conflicted. The history buff in me with his weak spot for kitsch was doing battle with my better judgment. To my wife’s credit, she was doing her best to protect me from myself. It was our first evening in the old town of Lijiang and we had stumbled upon a photo studio. For a dollar a person could have his or her picture taken with a life-size wax figure of Mao Zedong. The wall behind the cashier’s counter was lined with 8x10 photos of groups of smiling friends, families, and couples all cheerfully gathering around The Great Helmsman.

Whether I’ve seen it Hong Kong or in the Mainland, I continue to be taken aback by the amount to Mao Zedong, Great Leap Forward, and Cultural Revolution memorabilia that’s for sale. There must be a fairly robust demand for it based on the sheer volume that‘s available. Pins, posters, figurines, Mao’s little red book, t-shirts with the benevolent visage of The Chairman beaming down upon the masses. In Berlin the wall may have come down over twenty years ago, but here in China, echoes of Mao’s cult of personality still resonate.

Given communism’s track record, I stood by a little perplexed shortly after we move here while Hong Kong –who purports to still be fairly independent from Beijing- pulled out all the stops to celebrate the 60th anniversary of birth of communist China.

In the 1840s, Karl Marx, the German philosopher and father of modern communism, predicted that communism would take hold in the industrialized nations of the world such as England and Germany. As with so many other things, Marx got it wrong. Instead, communism took hold in pre-industrialized, feudal nations (such as Russia) and in impoverished and colonialized nations (such as Vietnam).

The twentieth century was the bloodiest century in human history primarily because governments –predominantly communist governments- turned guns on their own people. Fascists in Germany exterminated six million people, but Stalin in communist Russia was responsible for the death of 10 million of his countrymen. Mao Zedong was responsible for the death of 20 million of his people - in just one year.

But for some reason, communism doesn’t seem to draw down upon itself the same type of unequivocal condemnation that other failed, brutal ideologies do. In Germany, not only is memorabilia from their dark, mid-century past not collected as kitsch, it is actually illegal to do so. Yet, five train stops from our apartment, I could go to the Mong Kok market tonight and buy a Che Guevara shower curtain or a Mao Zedong mouse pad.