Mao Zedong, founding father of the People's Republic who was born 110 years ago today, is a name that initiates disparate associations and qualifies for multiple labels in present-day China.
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 colorful 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instructions" that guided class struggles, who could have imagined the sorrows and joys behind the published and unpublished lines of the revolutionary leader.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 December 26, 2003)
