Mao still a touchy subject despite economic revolution

Letter from Beijing: Shortly before 7.30 on Friday morning I was watching CNN when a report about the 30th anniversary of Mao Zedong's death, on September 9th 1976, came on the screen. It reached a filmed interview with Mao's most recent biographer, Jung Chang, whose relentlessly negative Mao: The Unknown Story, written with her husband Jon Halliday, came out last year.

Jung's face flashed up for a microsecond, and then sound and vision both disappeared. I thought for a moment that the TV had simply gone kaput. But the report returned with Mao's onetime English translator on screen and then vanished again when Jung Chang popped up for another quote. An hour later (CNN does tend to repeat itself), the report came back on. This time, the censors had their fingers poised on the buttons, and the blackouts started earlier, removing both Jung and the translator, so that viewers would not have known what they were missing.

The censorship was as stupid as it was crude. The vast majority of CNN's viewers in China are expats, and it seems unlikely that any of them would have been shocked to the core by the revelation that Mao was no saint. The book written by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday is not hard to get hold of: I ordered it from Amazon and had it sent to Beijing without any difficulty. I haven't met anyone in China who doesn't think that Mao's signature initiatives - the Great Leap Forward, which sparked a devastating famine, and the Cultural Revolution, which almost destroyed intellectual life and the education system - were great ideas. Just last week, on state television, I heard someone argue that the Cultural Revolution should be referred to in future as the "Cultural Devastation".

The censors who blacked out CNN managed to reveal far more than they concealed. They showed that even 30 years after his death - a period in which China has travelled light years away from orthodox Maoism - the Great Helmsman is still a touchy subject. The Little Red Book may now be sold mostly as a curiosity to tourists. Images of Mao may now appear in a post-modern, self-consciously kitschy way on watches and alarm clocks. Yet Mao is still a deeply troubling presence in the collective psyche. Not for nothing does his portrait still gaze down from the Tiananmen gate at the heart of Beijing, keeping a baleful eye on the crowds who queue to enter his mausoleum.

That portrait itself tells a tale of deep ambivalence. Last May, the original painting on which it is based was listed for sale at a Beijing auction house. It turned out that it had passed into the hands of an American collector in the 1990s - a poignant symbol of the shift from Maoism to the market. But the proposed sale generated a spontaneous eruption of outrage on the Internet, with young Chinese people, many of whom could not have remembered much about Mao in power, demanding that the sale be prohibited. The pressure was such that the auction house finally issued a terse notice to the effect that it had abandoned the sale after "advice from the government", and that the owner would instead consider donating it to a Chinese museum. On the one hand, this relic of Mao mattered so little that it could end up in foreign hands. On the other, it mattered so much that it had to be saved for the nation.

This ambivalence persists at a popular level too. A while ago, I chanced on an extraordinary little village in the mountains just 50km from Beijing. It had high defensive walls, stone pathways and an ancient grinding stone, all suggesting that it went back to medieval times. I called in at random on one of the families there. We chatted for a while and they took me to the back of the village to show me a tiny Taoist temple that had, they said, been attacked and almost levelled by Red Guards during Mao's Cultural Revolution - an act they spoke of as if it had happened yesterday and they were still recovering from the shock. They were clearly devout - a picture of a portal deity hung on the door to their courtyard.

And inside, in pride of place at the centre of their living room, was a white plaster bust of another demi-god, Mao Zedong.

This, I suppose, is one of the reasons why Mao cannot be left behind - a force so big, symbolising such massive upheaval in an ancient culture, has a power that transcends good and evil. Another reason, though, may be that Mao provides a fixed point in a rapidly-shifting landscape. His successor - and nemesis - Deng Xiaoping famously likened the process of reform in China to crossing a rapid river in the dark, feeling with your foot for the next stone. As you try to keep your balance, it is useful to be able to look behind now and then at the receding shore. China has not gone far enough across yet for the far shore to be visible or for the one behind to be out of sight.