Inspiration, Emulation, or Forgery?

A propaganda poster issued by the Revolutionary Committee of Beijing Applied Art Academy in August 1967 shows Chairman Mao holding a traditional calligraphic brush, writing the slogan 炮打司令部 (“Bombard the Headquarters”) on a broad piece of paper (fig. 1). The image alludes to the famous text 炮打司令部 : 我的第一張大字報 (“Bombard the Headquarters—My First Big-Character Poster”), which the chairman had written one year earlier, on 5 August 1966. By calling his rivals in the party leadership a “capitalist headquarters,” the slogan gave direction to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In this woodblock print poster, the chairman’s head radiates like the sun, illuminating the universe. Under the rays, young men and women are marching with large posters of their own, one of which reads 誓死保衛毛主席 (“Defending Chairman Mao, even at the price of our lives!”). Others are holding up copies of 毛澤東選集 (Selected Works of Mao Zedong) in the iconic gesture of Moses holding up the stone tablets. While Chairman Mao’s body is printed in black, the tip of his brush, like the big-character calligraphy he writes and the wave of Red Guards, is red, suggesting the revolutionary power that his writing exudes and the influence it exerts on the youth. The poster is captioned 千鈞霹靂開新宇—炮打司令部 (“A mighty thunderbolt creates a new universe—Bombard the headquarters!”).Footnote ³

Fig. 1.

Poster showing Mao Zedong writing with a calligraphy brush with mass demonstration in the background.

The phrase 千鈞霹靂開新宇 (“A mighty thunderbolt creates a new universe”) has seven characters and follows the classical prosodic rule of regulated verse. The fact that it appears on a poster showing Chairman Mao holding a brush and featuring the chairman’s words suggests that it is a quotation from a poem by Chairman Mao. And this line, together with the stanza from which it was excerpted, was frequently cited throughout the Cultural Revolution as a Chairman Mao poem. It appeared on the China Central Television evening news (on the prime-time program Xinwen lianbo) on 9 January 1967, in 人民日報 (Renmin ribao; People’s Daily) on 23 February 1967, and in numerous Red Guard publications (see, e.g., Li Zhengzhong 250) in a way that ascribed its authorship to Chairman Mao.Footnote ⁴ But the author was not Chairman Mao: the poem was written by a young researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Because he professed to have authored a dozen poems that had been mistakenly attributed to Mao, he was accused of counterfeiting the chairman’s poetry in December 1966, a potential capital offense in the era of Red Horror, and subsequently investigated by a Central Case Examination Group.

This young man from Shanghai, Chen Mingyuan (陳明遠), eventually survived the Cultural Revolution to tell his version of the story (see Hongdong, Jiehou, and Wangnianjiao). According to Chen, he became acquainted with Guo Moruo (郭沫若), China’s foremost scholar and Mao’s poet laureate, at a very young age. Guo appreciated his talent and often received him at his home, almost treating him like a son. Through Guo he also befriended Tian Han (田漢), a pioneer of modern Chinese theater. Guo and Tian taught Chen to write poetry by meticulously correcting his free verse and classicist poems. Around the 1966 National Day (1 October), after he graduated from university and entered the Institute of Acoustics in the Chinese Academy of Sciences as a researcher, he came upon a collection titled 未發表毛主席詩詞 (Unpublished Chairman Mao Poems) that had been circulating in hand-copied form all around Beijing and beyond during the summer. He was shocked to recognize that, of the twenty-five poems, nineteen—a number suggesting either a fascinating coincidence with, or deliberate emulation of, Chairman Mao’s Nineteen Poems—were in fact his own compositions! Chen had previously sent his poems to a few senior intellectuals but had no idea how they had been leaked and circulated under the chairman’s name. And given their wild popularity, he felt obliged to report the matter. He wrote to Premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來) and to the Cultural Revolution Group urging them to correct the mistake. Nothing happened for months. In December, with the chairman’s birthday (26 December) approaching, Red Guards throughout China began to print various versions of Unpublished Chairman Mao Poems as celebratory tributes (see fig. 2). Chen found that combative phrases from his poems, like 戰惡風 (“battling the evil wind”), 開新宇 (“creating a new universe”), 赤遍全球 (“reddening the globe”), and 懸耀乾坤 (“illuminating the cosmos”), had been used to name numerous Red Guard factions (Hongdong 15). On 21 December, he decided to write a big-character poster to ask that the poems not be circulated under the chairman’s name. The next thing he knew, the Red Guards had accused him of counterfeiting the chairman’s poetry and deliberately circulating the forgeries under Mao’s name. After a few days of torture, Premier Zhou personally intervened: he sent a message to the Red Guards and asked them to stop the prosecution, considering Chen’s proactive confession. Nonetheless, Jiang Qing (江青; “Madame Mao”) ordered a Central Case Examination Group to be set up for further interrogation. Even though in March 1967 the group concluded that Chen had not deliberately counterfeited the poems and that their circulation had been an accident, Jiang Qing refused to rehabilitate Chen. He was detained in a niupeng (牛棚; “bullpen,” an unofficial prison) and later sent to a labor camp by the Bohai Sea for reformation. All the while, he continued to see his poems copied and printed as Chairman Mao’s across China. Occasionally these shoddily produced pamphlets contained an editorial note admitting possible errors—some even name Chen Mingyuan as the accused forger—but such suspicions did not deter their printing. In fact, according to Chen Mingyuan, in 1972, after the death of the persecuted Marshal Chen Yi (陳毅), two mourning poems that he had written were again misattributed to Chairman Mao, leading to public speculation that the chairman would rehabilitate Chen Yi and rectify his own leftist mistakes soon. This time, however, Chen Mingyuan prudently did not reveal his authorship until after the Cultural Revolution.

Fig. 2.

Six paperbound volumes of Unpublished Chairman Mao Poems.

Chen’s poems are highly Maoesque. Take, for instance, the following three poems, which are the most frequently cited:Footnote ⁵

The poems adopt the bombastic, combative, and hypermasculine voice of a cosmic hero. The universe becomes an allegory for his struggles and the rising sun a metaphor for his ambition. He even impersonates the creator: with a “mighty thunderbolt” and a “hauling east wind,” he creates a new universe with a new humanity and sweeps away the residue of clouds (referring to any resisting forces). The atomic bomb becomes his alter ego, fighting devils and demons north and south. He laughs or smiles in every poem, exuding confidence and optimism toward history’s teleological progress. Judged by the standards of classical Chinese poetry, the poems’ literary merit is limited: the language is crude, the parallelisms are stiff, and the imagery is highly formulaic. But it was perhaps precisely such shallowness and stylization that gave the poems currency for their broad circulation as they were copied, recited, or memorized, leading sometimes to popular variants (see, e.g., Zhou Ziren 59).

In his published poetry collection, Chen Mingyuan details all the “corrections” made by Guo Moruo, giving the impression that he was Guo’s protégé and disciple. Some researchers therefore believe that Guo was responsible for leaking the poems as Chairman Mao’s poetry (see, e.g., Pohl 206n5). There is, however, a major caveat: through a highly publicized lawsuit in 1997 and ensuing disclosures, Chen Mingyuan was found to have lied and engaged in fraud repeatedly. The court determined that he falsely claimed that Guo had collaborated with him in secrecy over years to produce a joint collection of poetry and that he adulterated and forged Guo’s letters (Lei; Wang Rongsheng). The devastating image of Chen Mingyuan thus revealed was that of a vain young man infatuated with Guo Moruo, whose fan letters did receive responses from Guo between 1956 and 1962 but were entirely ignored ever since. Because of Guo’s lack of interest, Chen stopped sending him poems after 1963. In effect, it is unlikely that Chen ever saw Guo Moruo except at public events, let alone that Guo befriended him when he was a child. And instead of being a sober critic of the Cultural Revolution, he was an active Maoist (see, e.g., Chen Mingyuan, “Juexin”) who wrote a big-character poster to denounce Guo Moruo, the president of his university (Wang Rongsheng 212). His claim that Guo Moruo (and Tian Han) revised his poems was simply fantastical. Some of the poems that were purportedly written under surveillance in reeducation camps may have been backdated to create an image of him as a resistance hero. Chen’s forgery, however, has broadly contaminated scholarship on Guo Moruo. The fraudulent letters were collected in 郭沫若書信集 (Guo Moruo’s Letters), published in 1992 (Guo, Guo Moruo shuxin ji 59–163). They were often used by researchers as evidence of the late Guo Moruo’s redemptive remorse (see, e.g., Jia 301–05). Chen’s poems were anthologized in collections, and his account was accepted by multiple Chinese-language monographs on Cultural Revolution poetry long after it was discredited (see, e.g., Yang Jian 202–05; Wang Jiaping 228; Mei 64–65). It seems that, for many scholars, his stories are too good not to be true.

Given that Chen Mingyuan was an unreliable witness and that prosecutions in the Cultural Revolution were poorly documented, determining the degree of veracity in his account is nearly impossible. He likely wrote the nineteen poems circulating as Chairman Mao’s, since he got into trouble for them. He probably did not deliberately pass them around as Chairman Mao’s, unless his vanity was suicidal. A plausible scenario is that he sent his poems to a senior figure who had access to other unpublished poems by Mao circulating among the elite and whose house was later raided by the Red Guards. His other uncorroborated claims must be treated with caution.

Ultimately, however, it does not matter how many Chairman Mao poems Chen really authored or for what purpose. Like millions of other young Chinese writers, he began writing classicist poetry only after Mao published his poems in 1957, and these served as his major source of inspiration and paradigm. He even felt emboldened to match Chairman Mao’s poetry in rhyme, following the example of Guo Moruo (Chen Mingyuan, Hongdong 35).Footnote ⁸ Apparently, counterfeiting Chairman Mao’s poetry was a sacrilegious act. But what about being inspired by the chairman and emulating his lyric voice in one’s own poems? When a naive young man, appropriating the grandiloquent voice of a cosmic hero, declares that he shall “create a new universe” or “battle the evil wind,” and even assumes the viewpoint of the atomic bomb, is he not impersonating Mao, the icon of the Chinese proletarian revolution? What separates inspiration and emulation from impersonation and falsification? It is not the antihero Chen Mingyuan or his mediocre poems that are interesting but the mechanism that creates the lyric voice of “Chairman Mao” as the collective chant of the Cultural Revolution, to the extent that it can be appropriated, impersonated, hollowed, and abused to serve various—sometimes conflicting—functions.

From National Form to the MaoVoice

In the popular Internet novel 鬼吹燈 (Ghost Blows Out the Light; 2006–08), two People’s Liberation Army veterans find a career path in the roaring 1980s as zombie fighters who chant Chairman Mao’s poetic lines like magic spells while robbing ancient graves. It is a ritualized act that the protagonists had acquired in the army: whenever they faced fear or experienced the traumatic loss of a comrade, they recited Mao’s poetry. By chanting these rhythmic, sonorous, authoritative lines deeply seared into their memories, they feel empowered to tame the unknown. The poems become talismanic incantations formulaically imposing order on a violently enchanted world.

Barbara Mittler, in her creative study of Cultural Revolution culture, proposes the neologism “MaoSpeak” to characterize the “word-magic” of canonized Mao quotations, which exercised normative authority in highlighting particular arguments in ways akin to quotations from Confucian canons throughout premodern China (251). But unlike MaoSpeak, which is routinely introduced with “Chairman Mao says” or “Chairman Mao has instructed us,” Mao’s poetic lines are cited in Cultural Revolution–era publications almost always without naming the author and sometimes even without quotation marks. For instance, in a text criticizing the literary theorist Tao Zhu (陶鑄), a Red Guard propagandist writes:

While the first quotation—of a prose line—explicitly begins with the name of the chairman, the second—of a poetic couplet from the heptasyllabic regulated verse poem 到韶山 (“Arriving at Shaoshan”; 1959)—does not. Of course, the Red Guard publicists must expect readers to know both quotations by heart, but why, then, are they cited differently?

The reason, I surmise, lies in the different functions of prose and poetic citations. While a prose citation represents an oral instruction received from a higher and often transcendental authority, like Confucius, Buddha, or God, a poetic line intimates formulaic emotions in response to certain situations: the chairman has codified them, and his revolutionary children are expected not only to feel these emotions but to articulate them as if the words through which they have been received were their own, imbuing the corresponding situations with a sense of déjà vu and thus rendering them manageable. The MaoVoice, in other words, was born to be impersonated. As such, these poetic lines not only enjoy the broadest range of applicability when they are creatively appropriated to address ever-changing situations of the Revolution but also seep into the depth of the collective unconscious through mnemonic internalization.

Poetic voice refers to the distinctive linguistic presentation that allows the reader to imagine an individual subjectivity, furnished with their gender, dispositions, proclivities, and eccentricities, who speaks through the poem. While a Romantic ideal of lyric poetry considers it to be “utterance overheard,” as John Stuart Mill famously claimed (Jackson and Prins 3), contemporary critics increasingly regard the lyric voice to be dialogic and social and the lyric I to be plural (Kim and Gibson) and relational (Simecek). Based on Käte Hamburger’s insight that the relationship between the lyric I and the poet is indeterminate (233–34), Jonathan Culler argues that the subjectivity at work in the lyric may be understood as a formal principle of unity that helps subject a series of poems by the same author to a coherent interpretation (350). The primary function of the poetic voice, as Tony Hoagland remarks, “is connective, binding the speaker and the reader into a conversation compelling enough to be called a relationship” (1). Building on Kendall Walton’s thoughtwriting model, Hannah Kim and John Gibson argue that the lyric I often “gives voice” to experiences that are manifestly not those of a single subject but rather shared forms of experience and that the implied subject of the lyric I is thus “a creature not of fiction but of culture: it organizes and gives expression to thoughts, desires, anxieties, and feelings of a constellation of selves” (106). Karen Simecek works the “self-other differentiation” that Kim and Gibson propose further into a relational model, “according to which the lyric I invites first-person uptake but ultimately resists this; one strives for identification but is left having to make sense of difference (in connection and disconnection)” (66). For Simecek, the voice of the poem “expresses relationality through the use of the lyric I but the lyric I need not itself refer to an individual, singular self” (55). This insight helps describe the relation between the MaoVoice and the revolutionary masses.

To understand the characteristics of the MaoVoice, I briefly analyze here a regulated verse, 人民解放軍佔領南京 (“The People’s Liberation Army Has Occupied Nanjing”; 1949). All four couplets of this poem are among the most frequently cited in Cultural Revolution Red Guard publications, according to my survey of hundreds of such papers collected in the Hoover Institution Archives.

As is typical for classical Chinese verse, there is no explicit personal pronoun in the poem. The implied voice of the lyric I, however, is distinctively collective, majestic, and even imperial. It offers a perspective that moves from cosmic (spatial) to historical (temporal). The first couplet presents an aerial view of the battlefield; the second connects the geographic majesty of Nanjing as an ancient capital, where proverbial tigers crouch and dragons coil, to its experience of yet another regime change. The poem then admonishes the communist revolutionaries not to repeat the mistake of Xiang Yu (項羽; 232–202 BCE). Though Xiang made the greatest contribution to the downfall of the despotic Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), he did not eliminate his rivals, was ultimately defeated, and committed suicide. The phrase 天若有情 (“Were Heaven sentient”) is taken verbatim from a poem by the ninth-century poet Li He (李賀). While the original poem laments separation, the passage of time, and the ruthlessness of insentient nature, Mao’s poem reworks the line into an uplifting affirmation of cosmic change, in this case caused by triumphant revolutionary violence.

Mao’s war poems never show individual suffering. In the rare cases where a soldier appears in a poem, he either is part of a collective tianbing (天兵; “Heavenly Troop”; Mao zhuxi shici [1963] 9) vanquishing earthly foes or serves as the mouthpiece of the optimistic spirit of conquest (e.g., 10, 24). Mao’s poems glorify impersonal and triumphant historical forces. The lyric I is the Revolutionary Poet writ large, through which the revolutionary masses may speak, even ventriloquize, as long as they do not mistake themselves for the chairman.

As scholars have pointed out, Mao’s poems have been improved by others—indeed, Mao regularly sent his poems for correction by professional writers like Guo Moruo and Zang Kejia. But this fact does not reduce their efficacy in speaking in the MaoVoice. In effect, the social creation, exchange, and improvement of poems has always been a staple feature of the classical Chinese poetic tradition. Lesser and major poets alike impersonate the voices of literary precursors in creating their own lyric personae. The precursor poet’s voice thus continues to develop in an afterlife of poetic ventriloquism that enriches the original through infinite echoes (see, e.g., Z. Yang, Dialectics 127, 162). What makes the MaoVoice distinctive is how it connects to the masses by offering a unique perspective for understanding their own historical function.

Mao’s poetry gained such power that even fake Mao poems appropriating the MaoVoice could exert similar authority in inspiring the revolution because, although Mao’s poems were first authored by Mao Zedong the individual, their political function was collectively created as part of the CCP’s cultural policy of mass indoctrination and manipulation. It was this process of finding a national cultural form to buttress the Chinese proletarian revolution, a process that coincided with the spectacular rise of the Mao cult in the CCP and in China, that breathed charisma into those few dozen poems and turned them into China’s Red Canon.

As Paul Pickowicz points out, the first CCP leader to realize the limits of the May Fourth New Literature in moving the illiterate or semiliterate Chinese farmers and workers in the direction of a proletarian revolution, as well as the importance of finding national forms for that goal, was Qu Qiubai (瞿秋白), who served as CCP leader between 1927 and 1931. Though Qu was a pioneer of the New Culture Movement that promoted vernacular literature in imported Western forms as necessary to save the nation, his work as a communist leader among the rural masses eventually convinced him that the legacies of Europeanization had haunted the leftist literary movement and reduced its influence (Pickowicz 105–06). The new literary language did not represent the true vernacular spoken by the masses but, Qu contended, had become a “new classical” language, a “mule” that was the sterile offspring of classical Chinese and Europeanized languages (108). The solution was to truly learn from the people, using their own languages and art forms, especially folk music and popular drama (205–07).

Qu had limited authority in the CCP, and his proposal failed to become its official dogma. The situation changed, however, in October 1938, when Mao—in a speech given during the expanded Sixth Plenary Session of the Sixth Central Committee of the CCP—proposed to replace Marxist 教條主義 (“dogmatism”) with 新鮮活潑的、為中國老百姓所喜聞樂見的中國作風與中國氣派 (“fresh and lively Chinese styles and Chinese manners that common Chinese folk love to hear and see”); it meant integrating 國際主義的內容 (“the content of internationalism”) with 民族形式 (“national forms”; “Kangri,” sec. 7.13). Only by doing so, Mao argued, could a CCP member be simultaneously an internationalist and a patriot, joining the United Front in a war of national resistance against the Japanese invaders.Footnote ⁹ Just as this meeting was pivotal in consolidating Mao’s leadership in the CCP, the speech was also crucial for establishing the policy of the sinification of Marxism. But what were the “national forms”? Given Mao’s rather ambivalent formulation, opinions diverged among leftist theorists.Footnote ¹⁰ The key points of debate were the functions of (communist) art and the status of foreign influence. After all, was the purpose of art only to please and not to edify? Were there not universal values, like those of Marxism, that transcended national roots? The Yanan intellectuals were divided. David Holm summarizes three major groups: first, the “cultural populists” or “cultural nationalists” who proposed the large-scale use and creative refashioning of Chinese folk and popular forms as the future basis for China’s national culture; second, the faction of Zhou Yang (周揚) at the Lu Xun College of Art and Literature, which emphasized the need to sinify artistic content by bringing writers and artists into contact with the masses and to elevate the latter (the “elevation faction”); and third, those who, following Xiao San (蕭三)—who was primarily concerned with poetry—advocated the use of old forms and denigrated the May Fourth tradition (“National Form” 216).

As Guo Moruo pointed out, much controversy ensued as to whether 喜聞樂見 (“beloved”) by “common Chinese folk” meant 習聞常見 (“popular”) and whether 民族 (“national”) meant 民間 (“folk”). He argued that what was “popular” was not always good for the people, and it remained a task for writers and artists to edify and educate the masses; moreover, “popular” forms always evolved, and as long as something was produced by the Chinese it should be considered “Chinese”—for instance, whiskey was not Chinese but could still be loved by the Chinese, and how much better if it were also brewed in China! On a more serious note, he argued that foreign forms could become—and indeed had become—the origin of a certain “folk form” after thorough sinification, just as Buddhist sutras and treatises gave rise to late imperial vernacular novels. Guo suggested that writers and artists 投入大眾當中，親歷大眾和生活，學習大眾的言語，體驗大眾的要求，表揚大眾的使命 (“throw themselves into the masses, experience their lives, learn from their languages, understand their demands, and praise their missions”), which should naturally lead to genuine realism in content and popularization of forms (“‘Minzu xingshi’” 44). This was precisely what Mao Zedong had prescribed for writers and artists in the 1942 Yanan Conference on Literature and Art (Mao Zedong’s “Talks”; see also Holm, Art 91–94). Guo refused to predict what such new forms would look like, but he believed that they should combine the artistry of the literati tradition with the accessibility of folk traditions and should further benefit from foreign elements. As for poetry, although the prosodic harmony of classical Chinese poetry should serve as an inspiration for the future, the liberation of the genre was inevitable: 以詩言，絕不會是千篇一律的絕句、律詩、彈詞、鼓詞 (“there will no longer be repetitive and homogenous quatrains, regulated poems, tanci, or guci”; “‘Minzu xingshi’” 46)—in other words, no more strictly classicist prosodies, elite or popular.

Guo’s remark on the need to liberate poetic forms seems to be a pointed refutation of Xiao San’s proposal. In Xiao San’s opinion, modern free verse suffered from the fatal flaw of lacking form or prosody. It lacked orality, memorability, and an affective connection to China’s literary traditions. As a result, true emotional responses to contemporary events often found expression through classical lyric forms. While this opinion was shared by many at the time, Xiao San’s originality was to use Lu Xun and Mao Zedong as examples to prove that new poetry should continue to employ national forms and be conducive to 民族情感 (“national emotions”; 6). The literati and the folk poetic traditions were both necessary, Xiao San held, to create this new poetry, which must employ meter and rhyme to be memorized and chanted. The Mao poem that Xiao San referred to was the heptasyllabic regulated verse poem 長征 (“Long March”; 1935), which appeared in photocopied manuscript form in Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China, published by Victor Gollancz in London in 1937 (the Chinese version appeared in 1938). And yet, despite Guo Moruo’s own love and practice of classical poetry or the hint of Mao’s literary penchant, in 1940 Guo remained convinced that the liberation of poetry from prosodic restrictions was necessary for creating a new national literature. Judging from Mao’s apologetic letter to Zang Kejia, Mao in 1957 was also reluctant to publicly endorse classical prosodies as the national form of the new proletarian China. The aesthetics of early editions of Chairman Mao Poems corroborate this observation: the 1958 first edition, for instance, looks rather austere, using mostly traditional characters (fanti; 繁體) in vertical layout (despite the officially codified simplification of Chinese characters since 1956). In short, it conforms to a kind of 士大夫 (“literati”) aesthetics (Chen Anji 39).

This kind of aesthetic conservatism is rooted in the function of Mao’s early poetry. Prior to their open publication, Mao’s poems primarily circulated in handwritten form among the traditionally educated, left-leaning cultural elites. The support of this group was vital for the legitimation of the early People’s Republic of China (PRC), and Mao’s literary talent was an essential component of his appeal to win their friendship and trust. A representative case is that of Liu Yazi (柳亞子), a prominent democrat and classicist poet. After the foundation of the PRC, Liu adopted a revolutionary vernacular in classicist poems limning the new age for the proletarian masses, but his poems addressing Mao Zedong were written in a language of erudition and intense allusiveness. Liu thus implied his respect for Mao’s education and included Mao in the inner circle of the classically educated—though in some cases, such an act of inclusion was also a subtle form of censure (see Z. Yang, “Tower” 183–85). In this and other similar cases, Mao’s classicist taste in literature and art provided him with a vital channel connecting him with this prestigious group of supporters.

Another reason for Mao’s decision to publish his poetry probably lies in the inherent multivalence and ambivalence of poetic speech, which constitutes another crucial difference between MaoSpeak and the MaoVoice. As I have noted elsewhere, Mao’s most famous lyric song, 沁園春·雪 (“Snow, to the Tune of ‘Spring Permeating a Garden’”; 1936), was first circulated after he showed the poem to Liu Yazi in 1945, when he met Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) in Chongqing to negotiate peace terms (Z. Yang, “Classical Poetry”). Though Mao declined to publish the poem openly, Liu put the manuscript in a calligraphy exhibition, and the subsequent unauthorized publications made the poem instantly popular throughout China. But the last lines—in which the poetic persona enumerates the most militarily accomplished emperors in history and belittles them one by one, only to declare in the end, 數風流人物 / 還看今朝 (“For the truly dashing personality, / Look to this age alone!”; Mao, Mao zhuxi shici [1963] 22)—caused intense debate among its readers. Many denounced its lyric voice as imperial (Zhou Yonglin 41–53), calling out a feature that even Mao’s defenders did not deny in declaring it to be the voice of a modern 人民的領袖 “leader of the people” (qtd. in Zhou Yonglin 56). After Mao published his poems in January 1957, he explained that “the dashing personality” is actually plural, referring to 無產階級 (“the proletarian class”; qtd. in Zhou Yonglin 62). The publication of the collection shows that, eight years after the People’s Republic was founded, Mao was confident that he could control the interpretation of his poems.

In June 1957, the Antirightist Campaign was launched. A decade-long persecution of intellectuals, including many who had previously considered Mao a friend, began. Mao’s publication of his poems served as a test balloon to measure the public reaction to his classicist literary penchant. The avid response might have helped convince him that the traditional elites were no longer needed to touch the hearts and minds of the “common Chinese folk,” that he himself was sufficiently equipped with the means to appropriate and transform China’s cultural past, and that he could tame the innate ambivalence of poetic expressions, making his poetry highly effective in a propaganda campaign to strengthen his personality cult.

A further step that signaled a change in the PRC’s policy toward cultural traditions was the compilation and publication of such Great Leap Forward propagandist ditties as the 紅旗歌謠 (Red Flag Ballads), edited by Guo Moruo and Zhou Yang and published in September 1959. The book collected three hundred poems from the millions of folk songs celebrating the movement and grouped them into four categories. The number of songs alludes to the three hundred (actually three hundred five) odes of 詩經 (Shijing; Book of Odes), a foundational text of the Chinese lyric tradition (see X. Tian 626–27). The four categories also correspond to the four sections of Shijing. This correspondence was intended; two of the editors explicitly called the collection 新國風 (“the new ‘Airs of the States’”), referring to the most celebrated category of odes in Shijing, which consists of “airs” representing different feudal states of the Zhou dynasty (Guo and Zhou 2). And while the first subsection of Shijing is 周南 (“Zhounan”), which collects songs from the fiefdom of the duke of Zhou, a figure traditionally seen as the moral and cultural center of the Zhou dynasty and cited by Confucius as his spiritual precursor, the first subsection of the Red Flag Ballads comprises eulogies of Chairman Mao. It thus established the Mao cult as the origin of the new PRC cultural tradition. At the same time, the ballads are mostly quatrains in seven-syllable lines, rhyming in an aaba pattern. Even though the poems do not strictly abide by the prosodic rules of elite classicist poetry, these features define them as traditional in form, if novel in content.

It was, I surmise, the enthusiasm that common workers and farmers demonstrated in embracing the political task of writing “folk songs” coupled with the wild popularity of Chairman Mao Poems that gave party propagandists the confidence to promote Mao’s poetry as the lyric voice of the New China. By integrating the literati and folk traditions, revolutionary nationalism metamorphosed into revolutionary classicism. In a certain sense, this development was necessary. As Boris Groys remarks, for the totalitarian aesthetic, a specific ideological significance “had to be ascribed to all the images, devices, and forms found in the history of art.” While the avant-gardists practiced historical asceticism and were prepared to give up the entire vocabulary of the art historical tradition, the totalitarian aesthetes attempted to dominate the historical heritage of the arts in order to “utilize them strategically in actual battle” (97). In this view, the embrace of Chinese cultural legacies, elite or folk, also signaled the CCP culture’s thorough transformation from one of a vanguard to one of totalitarian control. Revolutionary classicism grew out of the need for total domination—not only of the present but also of the past.

This shift was demonstrated, again, in the aesthetics of the party’s publications. When the first corpus of thirty-seven poems appeared in a 1963 edition published by Wenwu Chubanshe, it was printed on double leaves of soft rice paper, thread-sewn. Rather large in size (32.6 × 21.2 centimeters), it was meant to be placed on a desk, with both hands holding the book open, and read in silent contemplation. In contrast, in September 1966, Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe issued a pocket-size book (12.7 × 9.2 centimeters) with a red paper cover, containing the same thirty-seven poems but in simplified characters (jianti; 簡體) and with a horizontal layout. Two years later, the book shrank further in size (to 10.5 × 7.5 centimeters) and was sheathed in a red plastic cover, on which the title shone in gold. The durable material suggests that the book was supposed to be carried around in pockets and constantly fingered. It aesthetically emulated the Little Red Book that served as a pocket bible answering people’s daily spiritual needs and could be held like a torch during a parade. In 1967, the print run of Chairman Mao Poems reached a shocking 57 million copies (Chen Anji 40–41). The book continued to shrink—a 1969 edition, printed together with Mao’s sayings and treatises in miniature letters, is only 9.5 × 7 centimeters, fitting into a child’s palm. The smaller the size, the broader its application. Only in the last three years of the Cultural Revolution, when some of its excesses were rectified, earlier, larger versions of Mao’s poetry began to be reprinted. In May 1976, Renmin Wenxue once again produced a thread-sewn edition on traditional rice paper. This return to a more traditional format suggests that some forces in the CCP were attempting to rein in the Mao cult, even before Mao’s death in September 1976.

Since Mao wrote more poems than those authorized for publication in his lifetime, the selection of poems also reflects his changing expectations regarding their intended readership. The 1958 edition includes poems that represented Mao at his artistic best. The expanded 1963 edition (with thirty-seven poems), in comparison, is more inclusive and relaxed. Some of the added poems were written before 1949 and were excluded from the previous editions, perhaps because of their deficiency in artistry or elegance. The eleven poems (under ten titles) written after 1958 are even more vernacular. Since at that time Mao remained concerned about the artistry of his poems—in early 1964, Mao personally convened a workshop to collect ideas on polishing his poems before their republication (Wang Jianxin)—the heightened vernacularism must reflect a conscious choice. If Mao had previously used his classicist poetry mainly as a way to secure the loyalty of the traditionally educated elite, he had now come to recognize the great potential of his poems to reach the hearts and minds of the masses: he no longer needed the elite’s approval, and in any case, if the masses adored his poetry, the elite, increasingly terrified, would follow. It is perhaps precisely this recognition that encouraged Mao not only to publish poems that he had previously considered inferior but also to continue writing poems that were more casual, straightforward, and prosaic, thereby strengthening a certain “proletarian” aesthetic. With their thorough integration of classicist and proletarian elements, such poems are not uncreative: indeed, they reach the threshold of traditional forms for tolerating vernacular and prosaic expressions.

The canonization of Mao’s classicist poetry, a process that began in 1957 and ended at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, was the result of a consistent effort by CCP propagandists searching for a national form that was both popular and edifying. While, for the first time in Chinese history, the PRC succeeded in reaching deep into the countryside and mobilizing the masses in a collective struggle against the elite—the landlords, the educated, the bourgeois, and the foreign—Chairman Mao’s poetry made the purported inner subjectivity of Mao, symbol of the Revolution, an intimate psychosomatic experience for individual citizens. All of Mao’s poems published before his death speak in a collective, triumphant voice that includes their readers in a collective saga. Their high degree of orality also makes them memorable; they roll off the tongue when chanted in chorus or shouted as verbal talismans. By committing these words to memory, pronouncing them in rhythmic collective chants, quoting them spontaneously in response to danger, self-doubt, or fear, Mao’s children felt inspired by the chairman in the sense of having been filled with his vital essence, as the ancient Greek poets were inspired by the Muses who entered their souls. Their bodies became conduits of collective emotion, instruments of ventriloquism speaking in the chairman’s voice. Through the canonization of the MaoVoice, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was finally embodied.

Chen Mingyuan’s poems could be confused with Mao’s not because of their special aesthetic merit but because their author had turned himself into a vehicle of this collective voice. There were other poems mistaken for Mao’s too, including a quatrain by Zhu De (朱德), Mao’s comrade and rival persecuted in the Cultural Revolution. A dozen other poems have yet to be claimed by any author (Wang Tongce). The dominance of this voice in the private domain of imagination was so thorough that even persecuted intellectuals often adopted this voice in their poems (see, e.g., Tian Han 514); even the “Tiananmen poems” written during the April 1976 protests, broadly credited to have led to the downfall of the Gang of Four and to the end of the Cultural Revolution, are mostly classicist ditties written in the MaoVoice (see Tong, Tiananmen shichao and Tiananmen geming). This canonical voice had been deeply entrenched in the Chinese collective unconscious to represent the lyric subjectivity of the revolutionary masses. Its extreme facility and orality make it perfectly suited for slogans, posters, banners, and chants. And yet, when it becomes the talisman of grave robbers, the undying past is resurrected and violent secrets come back to haunt the living.

Revolutionary classicism was the terrible (but not the destined) child of the New Culture Movement, since only after the disenchantment and dethronement of the past could taboos be broken and boundaries crossed, leading to the totalitarian appropriation and mobilization of cultural legacies. The irreverent instrumentalization of the past does not represent a return to it. Rather, when the borders between high and mass culture or between historical and modern styles are erased, cherished cultural memories are reactivated as propagemes—that is, “semantic markers and narratives of limited complexity that have been repeatedly transmitted to a broad target group over a long period of time with the aid of the mass media” (Gries 256). Thanks to their elementary semantic structure, propagemes are easily appropriated and accepted by the masses. Though the relationship between the Revolutionary Poet and his audience remains hierarchical, the latter participates in the process of political communication as active agents. As Groys observes, totalitarian art attempts to manipulate the collective unconscious of a race or of a class (104). As a result, its value cannot be judged aesthetically, because there is no disinterested spectator left for aesthetic contemplation. The boundaries separating the artist, the artwork, and the spectator are destroyed. All politicized cultural agents are engulfed in a vortex of incessant revolutions, joining the chorus of “us” against “them.” Mao Zedong became a Revolutionary Poet in the etymological sense of poetry as poiesis, that is, an act or process of creation. Through his classicist poetry, chanted and committed to memory by the masses, Mao was a creator-poet who not only remade the Chinese people in the service of the revolution but also re-created the Chinese past in the service of the future. In this sense, revolutionary classicism is entirely modern, since the politicization of the everyday and of the subconscious is a quintessentially modern phenomenon.

But what about the other, uncanonized Mao poems? According to Chen Mingyuan, the Red Guards accused him of planting profanity into certain poems, thereby contaminating the MaoVoice. The lines in question are 延安無屎不黃金 (“In Yanan even shit is gold”) and 不須放屁 (“No need to fart”—i.e., speak nonsense; Hongdong 60). Chen denied that these poems were his. The Red Guards suddenly realized they had a problem: What if these poems had actually been written by Chairman Mao? If that were the case, they would have incriminated themselves in their inquisition by denigrating the chairman. These two poems indeed turned out to be Mao’s. The second was eventually included in Chairman Mao Poems (Mao, Mao zhuxi shici [1976] 37–38) and has since become part of the canon. The first initially appeared in 1947 in a dayoushi (打油詩; “doggerel”) written by Mao in Chongqing in 1945, when he was bargaining with Chiang Kai-shek about China’s postwar future (Yuanzhong). It has never made its way into the sanctified Chairman Mao Poems but only into nonofficial collections of Mao Zedong’s poems (Mao Zedong shici quanbian 335). It shows how low the bar of the institutionalized canon can drop: fart, maybe; shit, no.Footnote ¹¹

It also shows the precariousness of the identification of the historical author Mao Zedong with the poetic persona created by the MaoVoice. The Red Guards faced an impossible conundrum: How could they imagine Mao’s radiant, red-tipped brush writing not lines like “A mighty thunderbolt creates a new universe” but “In Yanan even shit is gold”? How could the chairman possibly utter profanity, like a common mortal? Judging from the fact that the “shit” poem was at best neglected with a polite or mischievous grin while Chen Mingyuan’s line was on the lips and in the minds of the mobilized masses who recited it with rapture throughout the Cultural Revolution, the voice triumphed over the author.

In fact, there are other poems by Mao that circulated in manuscript form during the Cultural Revolution and were never admitted into the official canon of Chairman Mao poems. Since 1986, new editions of Mao’s poetry collections are no longer published as Chairman Mao Poems but generally bear the title Poems by Mao Zedong, which, by calling Mao by his given name, restores his humanity to a certain extent. These collections include poems that are more private in nature, written to friends and family, such as a melancholic poem titled 枕上 (“On the Pillow”; Mao, Mao Zedong shici ji 166), written for his first wife, Yang Kaihui (楊開慧); some were written for erstwhile comrades who later became his political rivals or liabilities, such as General Peng Dehuai (彭德懷) (171); still others are just placid landscape poems. All these were and perhaps still are excluded from the MaoVoice. Through censorship of Mao the mortal, the Revolutionary Poet writ large is born.

In this view, the MaoVoice was never meant to be the individual voice of Mao Zedong but was created and consolidated through a gradual process in a social space of consensus to be the collective voice of the Chinese revolution. It is a poetic persona associated with—but that remains distinct from—the historical person. This persona itself has become a propageme, a shared formulation that “attempts to express central emotional, cognitive, and mental needs in a concentrated way,” an analysis of which points “indirectly to the basic structures of latent or virulent mental dispositions in society” (Gries 263). The MaoVoice versifies through Mao Zedong, through Chen Mingyuan, and through other known and unknown authors whose poems have been mistaken for—or could easily have been confounded with—unpublished poems by Chairman Mao. Perhaps even Mao Zedong himself did not mind such acts of poetic ventriloquism: after all, he named his grandson, born in 1970, Mao Xinyu (毛新宇; literally, “Mao the New Universe”). By using two characters from the line “a mighty thunderbolt creates a new universe,” this name seems to be inspired by—or at least to tacitly acknowledge the power of—Chen Mingyuan’s sacrilegious line.