For all the rights and wrongs throughout his life as a
career revolutionary, Mao's profile guarantees mixed feelings and
comments.
On official records, in history books and school
textbooks, he is the man who tolled the death knell for the exploitation of
Chinese territory and installed the working class as "master of the State.?He is
the man who led our young republic through the difficult years of international
isolation, and the one who launched the disastrous "cultural
revolution.?
If Mao used to be deified into a near-saint ?the Great
Helmsman who was "always correct??he is now more like other secular politicians
who share common human frailties.
Increasingly, we see from the media his colourful
personas as a husband, father, poet, etc.
At the height of the "cultural revolution?(1966-76), when
Mao's selected poems and other quotations were enshrined as "supreme
instructions?that guided class struggles, who could have imagined the sorrows
and joys behind the published and unpublished lines of the revolutionary
leader?
From the recent TV serial "Mao Zedong The Poet,?for
example, one can follow the sentimental highs and lows of the revolutionary and
get a closer look at the sentimental revolutionary romantic.
Many might know Mao, the enthusiastic swimmer, wanted to
conquer all the major rivers he could access. But few knew about his failed
promise to swim across the Yellow River, and his unfulfilled dreams to swim in
the Ganges and the Mississippi rivers.
Twenty-seven years after his death, Mao's gradual return
to the secular world as a mortal like every one else parallels, or is simply the
result of, a similar process in Chinese politics.
The awakening of individual rights has cultivated a
profound re-definition of the relationship between the State and its
citizens.
As Mao Zedong becomes more than ever like who he was, the
personality cult is vanishing.
That is a tremendous gain for this
country.
(China Daily)
