The image of Chairman Mao can nowadays be found on paintings in luxury apartments, on clothing worn by the grungy and the chic alike, and on household goods ranging from bottle openers to plush pillows. Within the visual text of secular commodities, Mao's image signifies irony, humor, and nostalgia. In earlier times, however, the image of Mao Zedong was an icon that inspired awe and exaltation, as the central symbol of a political “cult.” Using previously unavailable local sources, Daniel Leese seeks to make sense of the history of the Mao cult, especially of the rhetoric and the rituals of worship during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. By taking up this important but understudied subject, he intends to shed new light on the legacy of Mao Zedong.
Leese analyzes the Mao cult as a special case of a modern personality cult. A modern personality cult, he contends, resembles a commercial brand in that it secures political unity by generating emotional bonds of loyalty. Since communist dictatorships lack formal rules of ascent and succession, he argues, political rule must be forged through “charismatic leadership” (built on bonds of personal loyalty rather than on formal rules, pp. 19–20), and political careers must be forged through the cultivation of patron-client relationships within the Party bureaucracy. Within the context of “authoritarian political communication” (p. 16), the personality cult provides a way for subordinates to signal loyalty to a leader and a means for superiors to recruit followers. According to Leese, the unauthorized, self-interested use of the symbols and rhetoric of the Mao cult by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution makes the Mao cult unique among modern personality cults.
After an introductory chapter tracing the origins of the Mao cult to the 1930s, Leese divides his examination of its subsequent manifestations into three parts. In part 1, he shows that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) introduced the phrase “personality cult” (geren chongbai) into public discourse in April 1956, in an editorial that criticized such cults and affirmed collective leadership in response to Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in February. By the time of the Great Leap Forward, however, Mao had come to favor a personality cult, as a means to promote the worship of truth and to “eradicate superstition” (pochu mixin)—that is, to eliminate belief in the Soviet model of development. According to Leese, this reconceptualization of the Mao cult made the cult into a theoretical instrument, rather than a device of rule. Parts 2 and 3 of the book deal with the events of the 1960s, beginning with the promotion of the study of Mao Zedong Thought in the army and the compilation of the Quotations of Chairman Mao. Leese argues that between 1966 and 1968, the central leaders stopped using the cult as a means of charismatic mobilization and instead began using the cult as a means of enforcing compliance: rather than staging mass receptions to mobilize Red Guard activism, they instituted Mao Zedong Thought Activist Congresses to expedite the formation of revolutionary committees. While Leese maintains that the Mao cult during the Cultural Revolution allowed individuals to maximize political gains through the cultivation of personal loyalty, he also argues that opposing factions deployed cult symbols in unintended contexts and used cult rhetoric in unintended ways, resulting in what he calls “cult anarchy” (p. 87). He best demonstrates this for the period from September 1967 to September 1968, when new forms of Mao worship—such as the competitive creation of Mao statues and the performance of “quotation gymnastics”—fueled violent factional struggles that hindered the center's attempt to regain control of the polity. After a brief overview of the demobilization of the Mao cult in the early 1970s, Leese concludes that as long as one-party rule persists in China, leader cults and authoritarian political communication will remain a feature of the political landscape.
The central problem with Leese's analysis is that he uses the notion of the “personality cult” as a transcendent category and consequently all but ignores historical discussions of that very category in Mao-era China. It is telling that the reader does not learn the Chinese phrase for “personality cult” until page 32, and that the fate of other central terms—such as the replacement of the term geren chongbai with the term geren mixin in 1958, and the discontinuation of both terms during the Cultural Revolution—receive haphazard treatment. Only occasionally does the reader glimpse the charged debates occurring in the background of Leese's analysis. Cadres in Hebei struggled to grasp the crucial distinction that the 1956 CCP editorial made between the love of a national leader and a personality cult. National leaders and local cadres similarly deliberated the meaning of key words: “superstition” and “worship” in the 1950s, “formalism” in 1967–68, and “genius” and “religion” in the 1970s. If Leese had historicized his central analytical category and had accepted that the production of meaning is itself a force in shaping history, he could have offered a more nuanced narrative of the successive permutations of the Mao cult and could have identified more precisely the legacy of that cult in political discourses and policy solutions of the present.
