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feminine in him. An instinctive hostility sprang up inside me, and I became so occupied with trying to master it, that I heard hardly a word of what followed. . . . 81
The Mao suit only added to the sexual egalitarianism of the Mao image. While in his later years Mao was a wrinkled, green-toothed, slack-jawed old man, the official description of the Chairman was of a vibrant and healthy individual whose features remained unravaged by that mighty sculptor, time. His pictures were airbrushed to perfection and his appearance in documentary footage carefully doctored to present the best possible image so that even in terminal decline official propaganda could claim that he "glowed with health and vigor, and he enjoyed a ruddy complexion" (see "The Sun Never Sets").
In the popular imagination, however, Mao remained above all a martial hero and patriot possessed of the genius of Zhuge Liang, the strategist par excellence, and the "style of a great knight-errant" ( daxia qidu ). 82 A number of the selections in the present volume give obvious and undeniable reasons for Mao's rebirth; other, more deep-seated cultural and psychological causes for his rehabilitation are only hinted at. Li Jie goes as far as any in speculating on the "force field" surrounding Mao, and Liu Xiaobo makes important contrasts between Mao and Deng Xiaoping, as does Wang Shan, the author of China Through the Third Eye. In selections from a sensationalistic popular magazine such as True Tales of the Adventures of Mao Zedong (see "Martial Mao") we also can discern elements of Mao's roughness, callousness, and heroic charisma that make him an attractive martial
     

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hero for a population succored on traditional tales of chivalry, violence, and acts of courage (see Figure 2). 83
In the popular imagination Mao is EveryMao: he is the peasant lad made good; warrior/literatus as well as the philosopher/king. He is an ideal, and his heartlessness in the face of massive suffering is not something his constituents would necessarily find abhorrent. Interestingly, the 1993 survey by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, published in Beijing Youth News (see "Galluping Mao"), reveals an abiding admiration for Mao even among his victims. 84 Whether this is the view we would get if there was press freedom and an end of one-party rule in China is a matter for speculation. Indeed, the most fearful thing about the Mao Cult may be that it has become a permanent part of China's cultural landscape, and nothing, be it economic development or political upheaval, can alter this.
The exact origins of the new Mao Cult of the early 1990s are uncertain. In the following pages there are those who argue that the fascination with Mao began among university students in Beijing who were disillusioned with imported intellectual fads from the West (see "From Sartre to Mao Zedong" and "A Typology of the MaoCraze"). Others claim that Mao never really disappeared but was merely resting throughout the 1980s while the people of China got on with the pressing business of economic Reform (see "The Sun Never Sets"). But for many, the post-June 4 popular Mao Cult really began when talismans (commonly called guawu, they can be interpreted in traditional terms as hushenfu ), laminated images of the Chairman hung from the rear-view mirrors of taxis, buses, and trucks, first appeared in South China and gradually spread throughout the country from 1991.
According to a story that was to become one of China's most widely told urban myths, the driver of a vehicle involved in a serious traffic accident in Shenzhen that left a number of people dead survived unscathed because he had a picture of Mao on the dashboard. Another version of the story claims that the accident occurred in Guangzhou and a whole busload of people were protected by Mao's image. Shortly after the tale began spreading, laminated images of Mao appeared in vehicles in cities, towns and villages throughout China. These