China in Ten Words Read Online Free Page B

death of a genuine leader, ersatz leaders are sprouting up everywhere in China. Since 1990, as beauty contests have swept across the country, competitions to select different kinds of leaders have followed hot on their heels—contests to decide fashion leaders and elegance leaders, leaders in charm and leaders in beauty.
    Although there are many varieties of beauty contests, they ultimately are all somewhat confined in scope. For example, there’s the Silver-haired Beauty Contest for women over sixty, the Tipsy Beauty Contest for pretty girls who have knocked back a few shots, and the Artificial Beauty Contest for veterans of plastic surgery.
    Contests for leaders, on the other hand, are not subject to any particular limitations, and so leaders from every walk of life are emerging thick and fast. Youth leaders, child leaders, future leaders, innovation leaders, real estate leaders, IT leaders, media leaders, commercial leaders, and enterprise leaders—their numbers make one’s head spin. With so many leaders on the loose, there are naturally lots of summit meetings to go along with them—summits that make practically as many claims for themselves as does the G8. Leadership contests even extend to geography and technology, so that now we have leaders in natural scenery and leaders among elevators. Such is China in the post-Mao era: even elevators have leaders. When the sun comes up tomorrow, who knows in what corner of the land we’ll find a new pack of leaders sprouting up. If we were to hold a contest to choose the word that has lost the most value the fastest during the past thirty years, the winner would surely have to be “leader.”
    In the Cultural Revolution, however, “leader” was a powerful, sacred word, a synonym for “Chairman Mao”—Mao’s exclusive property, one might say. Nobody then would have had the temerity to claim that they were a leader, not even in their dreams. “Sacred and inviolable is the motherland” was a line much favored in those days, and “sacred and inviolable” could equally well have applied to the word “leader”—and to the surname Mao as well.
    In the little town where my wife grew up there was a workers’ union whose branch chairman was named Mao. “Chairman Mao” was what the locals called him, naturally enough, and it was a name he answered to quite readily. But as a result he became a target in the Cultural Revolution: he had set himself up as a second Chairman Mao, and there was hell to pay. Stung by the charge, he tried strenuously to defend himself, tears streaming down his face. “That’s what other people call me,” he cried. “It’s not what I call myself!” But the revolutionary masses would have none of it. “Other people can call you that if they want,” they said, “but you shouldn’t have answered them. By acknowledging the title, you were counterrevolutionary.”
    When I was little, I thought it very unfortunate that I had the surname Yu and wished there had been a Mao on either my father’s or my mother’s side of the family, not realizing that for ordinary folk like us Mao was a name that projected authority but could be dangerous, too.
    Another figure of speech was much in vogue in those days: the Communist Party was “mother of the people.” If there’s a mother, I thought to myself, then there has to be a father, so who is the people’s father? The answer was obvious: Chairman Mao. Logically, the Communist Party was Mao’s first lady, but where did that leave Madame Mao, Jiang Qing? Being a junior Red Guard, I knew only of monogamy and the equality of the sexes, not realizing that men in the old society used to have concubines and never imagining that in two or three decades it would be common for men to have mistresses and second wives. Much as I racked my brains, I never found a solution that could reconcile the legitimate claims of both Mao’s partners.
    Apart from Mao I was aware of four other leaders, all foreign. In my