The Passion of the Mao

Mao as deeply flawed demagogue – that’s easy enough to accept. From JFK’s womanizing to Churchill’s crippling depressions, we’re used to accepting that all idols have feet of clay. But economic progress during the Great Leap Forward, or social enrichment during the Cultural Revolution? That’s tampering with historical aphorisms, like suggesting World War II was anything other than good guys versus bad guys. If you’re comfortable with such blasphemy, handled with clumsy humor, then The Passion of the Mao is one of the more entertaining, provocative China documentaries you’ll find at your favorite pirate DVD shop.

Made in 2006, The Passion of the Mao is named and executed in ham-handed parody of the film that made Mel Gibson infamous. Writer/director Lee Feigon makes a hash of the analogy, and his subject is ill-served by South Park quality animation shorts and Aaron Freeman’s supercilious narration. Still, the movie concisely bundles the personal and public sides of Chairman Mao unpredictably, in ninety minutes to boot. For the 99.9% of us disinclined to wade through hefty biographies, that’s a boon.

Watching only the first half hour or so would convince that Feigon is just another irreverent Mao deconstructionist. Cults of personality necessarily burst with contradictions – biracial Malcolm X, industrialist scion Engels, and so on – but it’s always fun to explore others hypocrisies, intentional or otherwise. Mao’s father was not just a landlord but a money lender. Mao referred to him as a son of a bitch, mainly for forcing him to work periodically for the financial support that continued well into his twenties.

Mao still clung to privilege while his peers risked their lives for a free China. He sat out the 1911 Republican revolution, mistrusting his chances in rainy Wuhan without a proper pair of galoshes. He eventually signed on, but with the regular forces, not the radical troops. Even then, the path to military heroism took many detours. He enrolled in business school, but dropped out in dismay over the heavy English bias in class lectures. At his next alma mater, he became a fervent admirer of democracy, writing paeans to Teddy Roosevelt in the school journal. Mao’s mid-twenties found him a respected elementary school principal, married to the daughter of a prominent intellectual family.

These inconsistencies only cause harm to those who might have had the temerity to point them out when Mao was in power. But Feigon shovels much more damning dirt on his memory. Apparently Mao did as much dallying as fighting on the warpath, to the detriment of all concerned. Taking up with a comely 18 year old cadre, he left his wife disconsolate, threatening suicide. Chiang Kai-shek saved her the trouble by executing her. Their three children were shuffled off to distant relatives in Shanghai, and ended up living on the streets. Mao’s new honey fared little better, forced to accept new romantic betrayals, and worse, to abandon her babies to peasants encountered on Mao’s adults-only guerilla army maneuvers.

By the time Feigon gets to the Great Leap Forward, the documentary appears an extended drubbing of China’s man of the 20^th century. But there’s much more than snark. Plenty of rare stock footage depicting China in various stages of tumult – executions, battles, and demonstrations – are skillfully interwoven with testimony from middle aged Chinese recalling the travails of their scapegoated parents. The jaw-dropper comes as Feigon launches into an apologia for the GLF, citing all sorts of easily-quibbled statistics. Still, with all the contemporary propaganda clips of coal mines and irrigation ditches being dug, as well as homemade furnaces brimming with molten steel, it’s easy to see how Mao and other stakeholders might have been convinced the leap was worth the landing.

However, Feigon places the blame for the subsequent famine squarely on Mao’s shoulders, flashing sixteen million as the death toll amidst an army of advancing skeletons. Then it’s back to the scandalous Helmsman: more chippies, passes at young male cadres, holding meetings in an ill-joined towel, refusing to brush his teeth.

Just when the Great Leap Forward rewrite seems a quirk, Feigon steers us to a place where the Cultural Revolution had its considerable rewards. He lines the path with some facts surprising to the Mao neophyte, such as his outspoken dissatisfaction with Soviet style bureaucracy, and proposal for a timeline to democratic elections in ’64. It’s unsettling to see a contemporary Soviet Union propaganda film denouncing Mao as a traitor to the world communist cause for impugning his own bureaucrats.

However, it’s downright startling to hear narrator Freeman pshaw the idea of the ensuing Cultural Revolution as a “wasted decade”. According to Feigon’s research, rural school numbers jumped from sixteen to sixty five million from 1965 to 1976, a thirty-factor increase given population gains, also significant during the period (can a time when so many people were arriving rather than dying in China be so bad?) How about the holocaust of Confucian tradition and relics, replaced with revolutionary slop? Feigon calls in Drew University’s professor of Chinese studies Di Bai to defend the model opera and assert that peasants by the million got heaping helpings of culture while city-slickers were being deprived of theirs.

Wang Zheng, professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, goes to bat next, enumerating the radical advances in women’s rights during both the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (and yes, she was there.) All those thick-wristed, pigtailed communist poster girls striking defiant stances apparently had their effect. To her many remembered charges of having been brainwashed, Wang brings up American cheerleaders and rock climbers. Touche – we all make clowns of ourselves and suffer needlessly, given the right input. The average modern historian may be left choking with rage, but others will be gratified by the plentiful footage of students harassing teachers and Little Red Book waving rallies.

By the time Feigon winds things up praising Mao’s international outreach and China’s industrial growth during the Cultural Revolution, one is left with a lot of inside info on the Chairman and some confusion over the documentary’s point, if there is one. Fair enough – real lives and real history never make a whole lot of sense. The closing animated clip of Mao sprouting a beard, a crown of thorns, then angel wings, while ascending to the heavens, only makes it clear that Feigon had a lot of fun with his subject.

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