Free Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader by Geremie Barme Page A

reflects the dizzying progress of Party policy over the years. As a young and energetic relative of Mao, she had led the local peasants to "get organized" and established the first agricultural cooperative in Xiangtan County. In all subsequent campaigns she was a tireless activist. Guilty at first about exploiting the Mao name for her own profitand she's done well out of it, as a picture of her taken in Beijing with other "outstanding model entrepreneurs" and Premier Li Peng testifiesTang gradually managed to reconcile a revolutionary past with her pecuniary present. Already in her sixties when the Mao Family Restaurant took off, Tang literally made a million out of the Chairman's legacy and, in the centenary year, she opened a branch of her restaurant in Beijing. 174
Throughout Shaoshan, other locals who ran restaurants, hotels, or stalls mostly named after Mao or members of his family displayed pictures showing them with Mao or relatives of theirs photographed with the Chairman. Every gimmick was used to exploit the image, and their range of Mao wares is discussed below in "Modern Mao Artifacts and Multi-media Mao."
Shaoshan also benefited from official largesse during the years leading to the Mao centenary. Among other things, a new highway between the provincial capital of Changsha and the town was built, as was a spacious guesthouse, presumably constructed to accommodate foreign tourists and the Chinese dignitaries who are obliged to make the pilgrimage to the birthplace, and a new "forest of stelae" ( beilin ) on Shaofeng Peak in which the leader's poems were engraved on one hundred tombstonelike stone blocks. 175
Other major construction projects in Shaoshan linked to the centenary were: the building of a 10.1-meter-tall bronze Mao statue 176 designed by Liu Kaiqu (the man responsible for the bas-reliefs on the Monument to the People's Heroes in Beijing); a Revolutionary Martyrs' Park to commemorate the 148 people from the town who died for the revolution, including six of Mao's relatives; and a Mao Zedong artifact storehouse and library. The latter was planned as the largest center for the study of and research into Mao Zedong Thought in the world. 177 The family home, gaudily repainted clan temple (see Figure 17), and the often reorganized Mao museum, which among other things features the cream-color, Soviet-built Gaz limousine Mao had used during his 1959 visit and a replica of his Zhongnanhai residence, were all open to visitors. 178 Another favorite spot on the Shaoshan tourist map was the guesthouse at Dishuidong outside the town, where Mao lived during his mid 1966 secret sojourn in the early phase of the Cultural Revolution. 179 In 1992 it was particularly memorable for the one souvenir
     

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that was sold there: reproductions of a U.S.$100 bill printed on cloth on which the image of Mao had replaced that of Franklin. At the time, nearly a year before the New Year's paintings featuring Mao and money appeared, this simple tea towel-size cloth eloquently expressed the Chairman's reformist reincarnation (see Figure 18).
Not everyone in Shaoshan, however, was willing to cash in on the Mao Cult. Mao's aged cousin, Mao Zelian, was scornful of the mercenary revival of the flagging spirits of the Leader. "Chairman Mao had no love for private business, and he would despise those who now make money from his name . . .," he said. "Chairman Mao's idea was to make the country rich, while Deng's idea is to allow a few people to get rich. It's all gone wrong." 180
In early December 1993, a reporter for Beijing Review, the English-language propaganda weekly produced by the Foreign Languages Press, commented dourly on the threat, not of the Mao Cult, but of the depredations of the "M-Cult," or Money Cult, that had overwhelmed the nation, including Shaoshan. 181
As the Mao Cult of the early 1990s faded and Shaoshan became just another quaint destination on the tourist map, one writer did formulate a means for keeping