Merry Mao-mas!The chairman’s birthday this month will put Xi Jinping to the test
Dec 7th 2013 | SHAOSHAN | From the print edition
THE village of Shaoshan in the green hills of Hunan province in east-central China is gearing up for a big party on December 26th: the 120th birthday of its most famous son, Mao Zedong. Debate rages in China over Mao’s historical role. Some call him a tyrant for the violence he put at the heart of his rule, causing the deaths of tens of millions of people. Others worship him almost as a god. In Shaoshan he is a money-spinner, with the farmhouse where he was born attracting millions of Chinese tourists every year.
Neither left nor right will easily be silenced, however. This anniversary of Mao’s birth is the first significant one in the age of online social media, which despite attempts at censorship have given ordinary Chinese unprecedented opportunity to engage in public debate. Through their blogs and websites, Maoists have urged that December 26th be declared “Mao Zedong shengdanjie”. The term shengdanjie literally means “sacred-birth festival” and also happens to be the Chinese word for Christmas. They note that, given the time difference between West and East, China’s Mao-mas overlaps with Western celebrations of Jesus’s birth. Thus, as one vitriolic leftist website put it, “Westerners with yellow hair and blue eyes and big noses celebrate their fictitious shengdanjie” on the same day as Chinese and the “global proletariat” celebrate the “real” one of Mao.