CHAIRMAN MAO’S hardline communism is not as fashionable as it was, but the Great Helmsman’s legacy lives on in China on every banknote, outside the Forbidden City in Beijing and now in the shape of his only grandson, who has just been made the youngest general in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), aged just 39.
Mao Xinyu is a military historian and armchair commentator with little military experience, but the name still carries a lot of weight in China.
He is the son of Chairman Mao’s second son, Mao Anqing, who died in 2007 at the age of 84. Mao Xinyu’s mother, Shao Hua, became a major-general in the PLA in 1995.
Mao Xinyu is a corpulent figure who bears remarkable resemblance to the pudgy version of Mao in his declining years.
He is a member of the main advisory body to the country’s annual parliament and a fierce defender of his grandfather’s legacy.
He becomes the first PLA general born in the 1970s and, according to local media reports, he was elevated to major-general rank “recently”.
He has a blog, and has written a biography of his grandfather, and sung songs to praise his ancestor.
Chairman Mao is currently celebrated in an all-star propaganda movie called The Founding of a Republic, which was made to mark the 60th anniversary of the revolution that overthrew Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and established the People’s Republic of China in 1949. He is very sympathetically portrayed in the film, even though he fell out of favour for inspiring the period of ideological frenzy known as the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976 that destroyed millions of lives in China.
He is also held responsible for the Great Leap Forward, a disastrous agricultural experiment, which caused a famine in which millions died.
The general view of Mao these days is that he was 70 per cent good, 30 per cent bad. His portrait still gazes down on Tiananmen Square in downtown Beijing.
Mao kept an iron grip on power right up to his death in 1977, and his embalmed body continues to lie in state in the “Mao-soleum” in the heart of the capital.
Mao Zedong married four times and had nine children, including a daughter by his last wife, Jiang Qing, who was one of the famous Gang of Four held responsible for the Cultural Revolution.
His second wife, Yang Kaihui, Mao Xinyu’s grandmother, was killed by a warlord in 1930, aged 29. His first son, Mao Anying, was killed in action during the Korean War, while Mao Anqing suffered from mental illness.