Michael Dutton, From Culture Industry to Mao Industry- A Greek Tragedy

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From Culture Industry to Mao Industry: A Greek Tragedy

Michael Dutton

Essentially, there are two ideal types of politics in this world, one

that intensifies political conviction and ‘‘throws’’ the subject, the other that

‘‘grounds’’ the subject and keeps him or her grounded through instrumental

reason and endless consumer distractions. A politics of the first type pro-

duces intensities worthy of Martin Heidegger’s Dasein but organizes these

around the single life-affirming/threatening dialectic of friend and enemy.

This then becomes the basis of a political dialectic that rechannels all desire

into a political quest for the affirmation of self within a collective notion of

the good or the true.

The other type of politics inhabits a vastly different world. It offers a

far more modest set of claims about its ontological and ontic value. Indeed, it

is built around an attempt to rechannel every possible desire away from the

aggregated political form that produced the life-and-death rendering of the

political dialectic. Instead of channeling everything into an either/or ques-

I would like to thank Shaorong Baggio for her help in researching and preparing this

article, Deborah Kessler for checking it, and the Australian Research Council for funding

the research.

boundary 2 32:2, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.



152 boundary 2 / Summer 2005

tion of politics, this more modest political form pushes everything that might

‘‘throw’’ the subject out of the reach of politics. Because of this, one can say

that this type of politics grounds the flight of our desires, and as it does, we

are in a very Heideggerian way, thrown back into the world of the mundaneand the everyday.1 In this world, political intensities are either repressed

through instrumental reason or transported into the realm of the commodity

fad. Desire is therefore either repressed or commodified. Theodor Adorno

once noted that it is just this form of politics that draws us away from those

critical situations in which ‘‘strong impulses’’ or intensities produce ‘‘Truth.’’ 2

While both Heidegger and Adorno speak of these things under the code of

Reason, I suspect that their real motivation lies in the reason of politics.

It is with Adorno in mind that I have begun this interrogation of themove away from a politics that ‘‘throws’’ the subject to one that distracts him

or her. Recent events in China show this most graphically, for China has

undergone this transformation from one form of politics to the other. Read in

this larger frame, therefore, this is a tale of relevance to all forms of politics.

In the work of Adorno and Max Horkheimer, we are led through this trans-

formation, not, I should hasten to add, under the banner of politics but in the

name of Enlightenment Reason. Little wonder, then, that their work speaks

to the world from the West and, like many good Western narratives, begins

with allegories drawn from ancient Greece.

In Homer’s Odyssey , Circe warns Odysseus of the dangers of the

hypnotic sounds of the Sirens. Odysseus’s overwhelming desire to hear the

Sirens is tempered by Circe’s warning that their song will lure him and his

men to their death. To avoid this, Odysseus has his oarsmen plug their ears

with wax. With ears plugged, they are not tempted by the Sirens and con-

tinue to row on unaffected. Odysseus, however, wants to hear the Sirens,

so he orders his oarsmen to tie him to the mast so he cannot move. He thus

hears the Sirens’ song but avoids the fate of all those who have heard theirbewitching yet tormenting sounds. Emotionally ‘‘thrown’’ into bliss, but physi-

cally unable to move, he begs his men to untie him, but with wax in their ears,

they are deaf both to his calls and to the Sirens’ song. In this way, Homer

tells us, Odysseus is able to listen to the Sirens’ song, yet saves himself and

his shipmates from a terrible fate.

1. Magda King says that Heidegger’s notion of the everyday is that which turns the poten-

tial Dasein in all of us away from such concerns. See Magda King, A Guide to Heidegger’s

Being and Time , ed. John Llewelyn (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 81.

2. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Signifi-

cance , trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 606.



Dutton / From Culture Industry to Mao Industry 153

Enter the cultural theorists, Adorno and Horkheimer. For them, ‘‘the

Odyssee [sic ] is the first document on the anthropology of man in the mod-

ern sense, that means, the sense of a rational enlightened being.’’ 3 This

reading is predicated upon their Kantian-inspired understanding of the En-lightenment4 and the fact that Odysseus employed reason in outwitting the

Sirens. In plugging the ears of his oarsmen and lashing himself to the mast,

Odysseus produced, they claim, the perfect allegoric form of a contempo-

rary dilemma. Here is a mythic beginning that also flags the ontic end of what

they famously label the ‘‘dialectic of enlightenment.’’ This familiar Greek tale

becomes the story of our own modern fall from grace, with contemporary

workers taking on the role of the oarsmen and the modern bourgeoisie as

the perfect counterpart for Odysseus.In this reading, the oarsmen, like contemporary workers, are short-

changed, for they are offered nothing other than a continuation of their

(boring) lives. There is no joyous rapture awaiting them. Instead, they func-

tion and focus, much like contemporary workers, only on the practical tasks

at hand. Yet it is in their very practicality that they are deaf to other possi-

bilities. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, they follow a logic dictated by

the factory bench, the movie theater, or the collective (DE , 34). In effect, the

workers are deaf to the Sirens’ song.

If this is the destiny of the oarsmen as modern worker, what twisted

fate awaits the contemporary analogue of Odysseus? For Adorno and Hork-

heimer, Odysseus, like the contemporary burgher, is alive to the Sirens’

song but too tightly ‘‘tied down’’ by innumerable restraints to answer the call.

Where Odysseus is held in place by rope, the modern bourgeois classes

are restrained by the instrumental logic of a system of their own making,

namely, capitalism. For worker and burgher alike, therefore, all that is left is

a ‘‘Taylorism of the mind’’ (DE , 242). Locked into a world of instrumental rea-

son that offers no opportunity for enchantment, the Sirens’ song no longeroffers the possibility of enlightenment. Instead, enchantment is reduced to

‘‘art.’’ Yet even here, it is ‘‘art’’ on its way to the slaughterhouse.

3. Letter from Horkheimer to Friedrich Pollock, March 20, 1943, cited in Wiggershaus, The

Frankfurt School , 323.

4. Adorno and Horkheimer make this clear when they point out that for Kant, enlighten-

ment was man’s emergence from self-incurred immaturity. The immaturity lay in an inability

to use our own understanding without the guidance of another. To be without the guid-

ance of another was, for them, liberating, for it was understanding guided by nothing other

than reason. See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment , trans.

John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979), 81. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically

as DE .




In a world dominated by instrumental reason, argue Adorno and

Horkheimer, art is drawn into the realm of commodity relations and, in this

form, is increasingly standardized, routinized, and made imitative of ‘‘real

life.’’ It no longer has the ability to transcend reality and enchant the subject,much less offer social critique. Even when it attempts critique, the form of

‘‘dissonance’’ it produces is little more than ‘‘the trademark of anyone who

has a new idea in business’’ (DE , 132). Ultimately, art becomes industry—

the culture industry—and, as such, forfeits any real possibility of effecting

change (DE , 130–31).

I have taken this detour through Greek mythology, German cultural

theory, and questions of the Enlightenment in order to highlight what is at

stake in the development of a culture industry in China. Moreover, the overtlypolitical theme of key elements of the Chinese culture industry, coupled with

its relative newness, enables a series of novel arguments to be proffered in

relation to Adorno and Horkheimer’s thesis. China proves particularly impor-

tant because the emergence of its culture industry correlates with the devel-

opment of what Chinese refer to as the ‘‘red industry,’’ and what I have called

the ‘‘Mao industry.’’ The strength of this linkage is such that it enables me to

point not to Enlightenment at a standstill but to the political role of the cul-

ture industry in reducing politics to a form of distraction. What this Chinese

example shows is that the Sirens’ song that enchanted Odysseus, but also

threatened his life, wasn’t the sweet lyrical rhyme of Enlightenment Reason.

To enchant and to ‘‘throw’’ a subject, the Sirens’ song invokes some-

thing more than reason. To enchant, the call of the Sirens must, in part,

flirt with the poetic and the emotive. In revolutionary China, that which en-

chanted and would ‘‘throw’’ a social subject into a Daseinian world of self-

understanding and inspection was always coded politically. With the trans-

formation of the iconography of this form of politics into a commodity form,

however, we begin to see how this new ‘‘art form’’ (which was once politi-cal) is now transformed into a form of distraction. Revolutionary China once

reified the political, transforming all aspects of the social world into a form

of political Daseinianism. Reason did not propel this dialectic of enlighten-

ment, politics did. Indeed, we can go so far as to say that any dialectic is

always a dialectic of struggle . The struggle for enlightenment, therefore, is

always a political struggle, and there is no better way to understand this than

to examine the process through which Chairman Mao was transformed into

a commodity.The reemergence of Mao as commodity is of special significance,

not because his face, posted on billboards, watches, and cigarette lighters,




threatens a new wave of radicalism but because it does exactly the opposite.

Mao, who once offered the Sirens’ song of revolution to the Chinese masses,

was, after 1992, transformed into an icon that further distracted the populace

from any intense engagement with politics. Transformed into a commodityshell, this ‘‘after-life’’ shadow of the chairman allows a powerful and quite

directly political light to be shone on Adorno’s notion of the culture industry.

It is for this reason that the Mao industry offers a revealing way to reinterro-

gate Adorno’s notion. In tracing the development of this industry in China,

we are, in effect, plotting the life cycle of Siren politics as it nears death. In

tracing the post-Mao uses of the Mao image within the red industry, we are

able to recognize the nature of the problem.

As economic reform developed into a consumer revolution, Mao’simage was transformed from Great Helmsmen into the great logo. He

became, if only momentarily, the fashionable embodiment of that mass-

produced art form of the common and the everyday. The importance of such

kitsch forms of Maoism lies in the fact that they are not just born on the

gravesite of the ‘‘Siren politics’’ of Mao Zedong Thought but actually consti-

tute one of its most determined gravediggers.

Gravediggers of Another Kind: Two Stories, Two Times

In 1984, I was a student at Beijing University. At that time, the offi-

cial de-Maoification program was at its height. Statues of the chairman were

being torn down throughout the city. Indeed, it was as though the sanqikai

(70% correct, 30% incorrect) assessment of the Chairman’s Thought being

proffered by the then new, reform-era Central Committee was now being

transformed into an urban renewal plan. The cult of Mao that this new Cen-

tral Committee was fighting had left China awash with images of the chair-

man. There was a Mao statue in every town square, another at every workunit entrance, and, once inside these compounds, a statue in every office

and home. Sanqikai , therefore, involved more than a reassessment of Mao

Zedong Thought; it also required the party to do something about this physi-

cal domination of public and private space by the late chairman.

It was at this time that a Slovenian friend discovered something that

she knew would interest me. At the back of the university campus, outside

an old 1950s-style administration building, was a huge pile of smashed white

plaster statues. On closer inspection, the pile turned out to be the univer-sity’s own contribution to the de-Maoification program. On the ground in

pieces lay hundreds of little Mao statues that had been taken down from




their exalted positions in the administrative offices and unceremoniously

dumped into piles awaiting rubbish collection. What my Slovenian friend had

discovered was not the burial ground of Chairman Mao but the graveyard

of his symbolic power. As foreigners, however, this dumping ground of thechairman’s fractured plaster body parts held no symbolic power over us, so

we had no qualms about looking through the pile, collecting body parts for

souvenirs. Soon we were joined by inquisitive primary school children. They

asked us what we were doing, and when we told them, they joined in. Before

long, we were happily trading body parts: ‘‘I’ll give you an arm and a leg of

the chairman for his nose,’’ said one kid. ‘‘No, I want his ear,’’ came my reply.

Such irreverence did not last long.

A Communist Party ‘‘responsible cadre’’ came out of the administra-tive building, yelling, ‘‘You are not allowed to touch the chairman’s parts. It’s

disrespectful.’’ The kids ran off, but we held our ground. ‘‘We’re not being

disrespectful,’’ we responded. ‘‘That honor goes to the cadre who had the

chairman’s statues removed from administrative offices, smashed to pieces,

then shoveled into this pile.’’ Our response did little to assuage his anger.

Instead, he ordered us off his little Mao Mountain, warning us that Security

was on the way. He then turned and offered his final remark, which was deliv-

ered like a coup de grace: Our university department would be told of our

reprobate behavior, because, as he put it, we were ‘‘here to study, not fossick

around in other people’s affairs.’’ ‘‘Ah, but we are studying,’’ answered my

quick-witted Slovenian friend. ‘‘We are from the Archaeology Department!’’

As the security guards began to arrive on bikes, we beat a hasty

retreat. Gathering up what booty we could, we loaded it onto our bikes and

tried to make a run for it, but, followed by a detachment of security officers,

in what became a Keystone Cops bicycle pursuit around Weiminghu (the

lake with no name), we didn’t stand a chance. Finally caught, we were our-

selves ‘‘de-Maoified,’’ sent back to our respective university departments,and criticized by teachers and our own ‘‘responsible cadres.’’

That was China in 1984. Less than ten years later, it was a very dif-

ferent story.

The chairman’s image was not so hard to find on the campuses of

Beijing in 1993. He was, once again, just about everywhere. This time, he

reappeared as part of the ‘‘Mao craze’’ that was sweeping China as it pre-

pared for his one hundredth anniversary celebration. Ten years later, in

2003, he would return once more, but this time, with the help of marketingstrategists and advertising executives. Where the ‘‘craze’’ of 1993 still had




an air of consumer spontaneity and the hint of trouble, 2003 had only the

hallmark of a well-oiled advertising campaign within an established indus-

try, the Mao industry. There is something perversely ironic in this regular

reappearance of the chairman at a time when the new long march towardconsumerism was hurling China away from everything the chairman stood

for. Perverse ironies aside, however, one needs to recognize that this con-

tinual return of the chairman was more a sign of his fall from grace rather

than any lingering sense of revolutionary devotion. Mao returns not as revo-

lutionary leader but as commodity spruiker.

The Mao Industry

No one really knows how this process began. One starting point

would be to interrogate the origins of the 1993 Mao craze, and on this most

commentators agree. It probably all began after a multicar pile-up on a

Guangdong highway in 1989. Fatal for many, the only person to walk away

unscathed from this horrific crash was the driver of the car with a Mao tal-

isman.5 As word of this story spread, the image of the mystical Mao, who

had powers to protect those who possessed a representation of him, was

born. Transformed from revolutionary leader into god of good fortune, Mao

became a soothsayer for troubled times. From then on, other ‘‘miracles’’ con-

firmed his beatification. His shadowy apparition appeared on the surface

of a pebble drawn from the waters of the Yangtze River;6 it appeared as a

ghostly apparition on the surface of a peasant’s wall where his portrait had

once hung;7 and it even surfaced as nature’s own handiwork, etched onto

the rock face of a mountainside on Hainan Island, which became known

as Mao Mountain (Maogongshan). Many different forms of Mao began to

appear in what was the early phase of the Mao craze. Popular movies and

books about Mao also emerged at this time, but these portrayed the chair-man not as a mystic who saved the driver in Guangzhou but in more mor-

tal ways.

5. Zhou Qun and Yao Xinrong, ‘‘Xin jiu Maozedong chongbai’’ [Mao Worship Old and New],

Twenty-First Century 21 (December 1993): 37.

6. Zhang Guozhu, ‘‘Xide maozedong xiangzhang’’ [The Lucky Stone with Mao Zedong’s

Image on It], Paimai shoucang Zhoukan [The Weekly of Auctions and Collections], no. 6,

November 18, 2001.

7. Zhang Fangyu, ‘‘Maozhuxi qiguan zaixian, shijian jue wu jiyou zhenwen’’ [Mao’s ImageReappeared, This Is Rare News], Sanmenxia Public Security , January 28, 1994.




Like the mystic Mao, this other, more sentimental representation of

Mao came to light in 1989. In that year, a new postscar 8 literary trend de-

scribed as a ‘‘search for Mao’’ emerged.9 This new literary trend broke the

mold of Mao writing, for rather than adding to the chairman’s mystique,as both scar literature and party hagiography had done in almost opposite

ways, it offered a radical denouement. Works by such authors as Quan Yan-

chi, by Mao’s former bodyguard, Li Yinqiao, and by his former head of secu-

rity, Wang Dongxin, all personalized the chairman and suggested that his

was a simple life, free of the desires of the consumer society yet rich with

the same emotions and dreams that the common people had.

Greatness (hagiography) and great excess (scar literature) were now

replaced by a focus on the everydayness of Mao. A tabloid voyeurism deter-mined to reveal the intimate details of a private life combined with a youthful

nostalgia for simpler times to produce this new and highly popular genre.

Perversely, this nostalgia began with a political face, and this again reached

its apogee in 1989, in the protests that took place at Tian’anmen Square.

While students chanted the new Sirens’ song of democracy and lib-

erty in their fight against party corruption, the pragmatic worker participants

pulled on the oars of nostalgia, resurrecting the image of the chairman that,

at that time, remained political. Mao’s image was used to remind the party

of their now forgotten obligations to their working-class constituency. In the

early years of economic reform, the chairman became the symbol under

which labor activists dramatized the loss of worker security and welfare

provisions. With the Tian’anmen Square protests, this well-worn weapon

of worker protest reappeared in the heart of the capital. From the political

nostalgia of the protesting worker emerged another more widespread and

genteel form of longing for the past. Former Red Guards, now middle-aged

and remembering their youth, developed a form of revolutionary nostalgia.

This relatively well-off group was, by this time, an important niche marketfor movies, magazines, and novels about China’s revolutionary past and the

8. Scar literature (shanghen wenxue ) was the name given to a trend that emerged in China

after the demise of revolutionary realism. After 1976, revolutionary realism gave way to a

less romantic form. Concentrating on the nightmare experiences of those who had suf-

fered during the Cultural Revolution, it focused on the pain and suffering of rustified youth,

of intellectuals, and also of the common people. The most important work in this genre

comes from Liu Xinwu. See Liu Xinwu, ‘‘The Classroom Teacher,’’ Renmin wenxue , no. 11

(1977). The term itself came from Lu Xinhua, who named one of his stories ‘‘Scar.’’ SeeLu Xinhua, ‘‘Scar,’’ Wenhuibao (Shanghai), August 11, 1978.

9. Geremie Barme, Shades of Mao (New York: M. E. Sharp, Armonk, 1996), 4.




chairman. By the early nineties, all these aberrant and contradictory trends

started to congeal. What tied them together wasn’t Mao but the growing

entrepreneurial realization that ‘‘Mao sells.’’ Slowly, the hallowed images of

Mao and the revolution were being transformed and were now well on theirway to becoming pure commodities.

This process of commodification began innocently enough. During

the spring festival of 1990, a number of publishing houses discovered that

the republication of Mao’s official portrait had a bigger market appeal than

they had initially anticipated. Approximately 3.5 million copies of Mao’s offi-

cial portrait were sold in that first year of republication, and, in the three

years that followed, over 11 million copies were sold. Realizing that this was

an opportunity to profit, other entrepreneurs joined in with their own tokensof Mao. Indeed, almost anything revolutionary now seemed to have a mar-

ket. Even revolutionary-era songs were revived. A 1992 disco remake of

revolutionary tunes was an overnight Karaoke sensation, selling seventy to

eighty thousand copies in its first week of release, and over 1 million copies

in its first month.10

Long-neglected revolutionary sites became popular tourist attrac-

tions. By 1990, Shaoshan, the place of Mao’s birth, boasted around twenty-

five hundred visitors per day, reaching a peak of nearly three thousand per

day the following year. As this ‘‘love of Mao’’ grew, so, too, did the fears and

suspicions of party cadres, who were still mentally held hostage to the belief

that any revival of Mao’s image must also be a revival of his politics.

Reading the various heterodox trends that fed into this craze, not as

fashion or as fad but as a potentially troublesome return of Siren politics, the

party leadership was initially suspicious of this Mao craze. They were afraid

that they could be facing a backlash against their liberal economic reform

policies and that Mao’s image might well become the symbol around which

the masses would rally to revive the revolution once more. They were notthe first ruling class to be worried about mass entertainment providing the

venue for popular unrest and revolution. Indeed, from the very first moment

business began promoting mass entertainment and the mass tourist indus-

try, political leaders worried about their effects. Perhaps the reason for this

lies in the arguments of Roger Caillois.

If read politically, Caillois’s extraordinary study of the ancient art

10. Xinlang Dushu, ‘‘‘Mao Zedong re’ xianxiang’’ [The Phenomenon of ‘‘Mao Craze’’],Sina , March 24, 2003, available at http://book.sina.com.cn/2003–03–24/3/2502.shtml

(accessed March 24, 2004); see also Zhou and Yao, ‘‘Xin ju Maozedong chongbai,’’ 38.




of festivals gives us some indication as to why such events could evoke

fear. Drawing a picture that combines the notion of resistance operative

within Mikhail Bakhtin’s assessment of the carnival and Georges Bataille’s

focus on excessive expenditure and sacredness, Caillois creates an eventin which, he asserts, the world renewed itself. Festivals enabled ‘‘creative

licence,’’11 allowing a return to the sacred world of ‘‘intense emotions’’ that

transform us (F, 282). They were a key technology that gave access to the

realm of the sacred, which Caillois calls the Great Time and Great Space

(F, 288), the time and space of an ‘‘inversionary order’’ in which ‘‘[e]very effort

is made to behave in a manner that is exactly the opposite of normal behav-

iour.’’ Over time, according to Caillois, the festival waned, fading first into

parody, then culminating in the symbolism of the medieval European festivalof fools (F, 298–99), before ceasing altogether in our time to be replaced by

the vacation.

‘‘Vacation is the successor of the festival,’’ writes Caillois (F, 302).

As vacations become the norm, the inspired collective gives way to atom-

ized individualism, paroxysm gives way to relaxation, excess gives way to

respect, and frenzy gives way to work. We are no longer spiritually uplifted

through ‘‘events’’ like the festival but are instead physically transported into

those atomized sites of collective leisure that ground our desires and trans-

form them into material consumption. It is easy to see the link between

the paroxysm of the festival and the intensities of Siren politics, just as it

is clear that the deracinated state that the culture industry produces is but

another word for vacation. Read in this way, we can, in fact, make a clear link

between the work of Caillois and Bataille and what I am calling Siren politics.

When leaders develop an ‘‘affective flow’’ with their people, when they stand

out as something ‘‘other,’’ when they speak in a voice that mutes utilitarian

judgment and produces a desire for the lofty and the exalted, they are like

the festival, flirting with the heterogeneous, claims Bataille.12 Mass ralliesand political protests, therefore, share the same disruptive potential as Cail-

lois’s festivals of old. No longer would these festivals be organized around

the Great Time and Great Space. Nevertheless, the enchanted Sirens’ song

of the political rally still has the potential to produce a political intensity that

11. Roger Caillois, ‘‘Festival,’’ in The College of Sociology, 1937–39 , ed. Denis Hollier,

trans. Betsy Wang (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 291. Hereafter, this

work is cited parenthetically as F.

12. Georges Bataille, ‘‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism,’’ New German Critique ,

no. 16 (Winter 1979): 71–72.




could lead a collectivity to take extreme political action. Perhaps it was an

understanding of this relationship between the excessive exuberance of the

festival and the possibility of revolutionary action that squelched enthusiasm

for the festivals of industry when they first began in London in 1852.When the first World Trade Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace

opened its doors, the ruling classes awaited the consequences with some

trepidation. It was, to be sure, a new type of festival that celebrated work

and industry rather than gods and magic. Nevertheless, how could one be

sure that this collective congress of workers would, in fact, bow before the

greatness of capitalism? They could, after all, turn against this machinery

of their own oppression and rebel against the order being celebrated. Little

wonder, then, that the English ruling classes, fearful of so many proletarianscoming together in leisure rather than work, tried to limit entry. Such fears

very quickly proved unfounded.

Very soon it was discovered that far from fermenting revolution,

such mass entertainment actually quelled it. Once the mesmeric effects

of the burgeoning culture industry began to be appreciated, entrepreneurs

stepped in. Realizing that workers would pay for their enchantment, Thomas

Cook, in conjunction with the Midland Railway Company, organized excur-

sion tours of the exhibition site and, in so doing, initiated the modern tourist

industry.13 By the time of the Exposition Universelle in 1889 in Paris, even

bourgeois governments had to admit that these events were merely a form

of distraction. In Paris, foreign workers who attended the exhibition were

housed at the expense of the French government, while French workers

were given free entry tickets.14

It was just these sorts of lessons that the Chinese Communist Party

would learn. They never gave away free tickets, nor did they provide free

accommodation, but they did recognize a commercial opportunity when they

saw one. By the time of the 110th anniversary of Mao in 2003, the Commu-nist Party was even hiring marketing consultants to ‘‘manage’’ and advise

them about this burgeoning market opportunity. By this time, the Mao craze

had developed into a full-blown industry, the so-called red industry. This new

industry was brought to you not by the bottlers of Coca-Cola but by those

who would bottle the revolution, the Communist Party.

13. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1988), 21.

14. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 86.




With the official endorsement of Shaoshan as a national tourist site in

1993, the party embraced both the Mao craze and its development into the

red industry. Now, almost anything that made money seemed to be permis-

sible. Even the most heterodox and mystical of Mao sites suddenly seemedable to gain official endorsement. In November 1992, the State Environ-

mental Protection Bureau recognized Hainan Island’s Mao Mountain and

upgraded it from a county- and provincial-level site to one of national signifi-

cance. Like the cat theory of Deng Xiaoping,15 pragmatism ruled, and any-

thing that promoted local tourism seemed to be acceptable. Mao Mountain

was certainly doing that.16 Indeed, Hainan’s Mao Mountain became some-

thing of a trendsetter for ‘‘Mao Mountains’’ generally, with at least three other

rival bids for the title now coming from other parts of China.

17

None of this would have been possible had it not been for the help-

ing hand of petty-bourgeois capital. While the party had shown an initial

reluctance to embrace the Mao industry, Chinese entrepreneurs, much like

their earlier European counterparts, showed no such hesitation. For them,

the growth of Mao iconography and paraphernalia was simply another mar-

keting opportunity. Old Lady Tang of Shaoshan, for example, became one

of the earliest entrepreneurs to cash in on the earning potential of the late

chairman by renaming her small restaurant ‘‘Maoist.’’ Beginning as a humble

green bean noodle soup stall owner, she ended up repackaging her busi-

ness as a ‘‘Mao restaurant’’ and made a small fortune. Having success-

fully marketed her business to tourists in Shaoshan, she then set about

broadening her market opportunities by opening up a chain of Mao res-

taurant franchises across the country.18 She was but one of the many new

‘‘Mao merchants’’ helping to repackage the chairman. Whether because of

15. Deng famously made the remark that it doesn’t matter what color the cat is, just as

long as it catches the mice.16. Baoguo State Farm of Hainan, ‘‘Maogongshan chuanqi’’ [The Romantic Legacy of

Maogongshan], available at http://baoguo.chinafarms.net/luyou.htm (accessed May 27,

2004).

17. Of these rivals, the three most famous are the one near the Three Gorges, the one

in Heilongjiang, and finally one that is just outside Lushan. See Guojia Xingwang,

‘‘Renmin xinzhong de maogongshan’’ [Maogongshan in the People’s Heart], Xinhuanet ,

December 23, 2003, available at http://news.xinhuanet.com/forum/2003–12/23/content

1244323.htm (accessed May 27, 2004).

18. Gu Shihong and Bai Zuxie, ‘‘Tafang shendi: kai Maojia fandian de Tangdama [Visiting

a Sacred Place: The Mao Restaurant Owner Old Lady Tang], China News , June 8, 2001,available at http://www.chinanews.cn/2001–06–08/26/96655.html (accessed June 11,

2004).




increased party sponsorship or the canny business efforts of little old ladies

like Ms. Tang, Mao was back and tapping into a market desire for nostal-

gia, mysticism, and youthful romanticism. In the process, the Sirens’ song

became just another hit single.Like the chairman himself, this ‘‘Siren’’ form of politics, a form in which

millions expressed complete faith in their political leader and were willing to

die for him, was reduced to an ‘‘artless’’ art form that merely entertained.

To borrow a line from Ulrich Beck, we could say that we are currently wit-

nessing in China a very political form of depoliticization.19 In this sense, one

can indeed say that political reform has come to China. It came not in the

form of an officially promoted institutional transformation of the state-based

political system, nor as a revolution that would sweep away the CommunistParty and introduce democracy, but in a far more subtle yet profoundly life-

altering way. Effectively, this political reform has unconsciously transformed

the Chinese lifeworld into one in which money, not politics, dictates desire. In

this new environment, desire itself is commodified, politics is marginalized,

and the populace is effectively depoliticized. No longer enthralled by politics,

the Chinese people are instead bombarded by consumer trends that seem

capable of turning even the most taboo of political topics into an object of

consumer desire. Indeed, there is no better example of this than the once

taboo subject of the Cultural Revolution.

Cultural Revolution as Culture Industry

In 1986, the famous Chinese author and critic Ba Jin called for a Cul-

tural Revolution museum to be built along the lines of the Holocaust Memo-

rial Museum in Washington, D.C. History, he argued, must never be allowed

to repeat itself, and a museum where ‘‘real objects’’ and ‘‘striking scenes’’

would bring forth feelings of discomfort offered the best guarantee of ensur-ing that there would be no return of such extreme politics. ‘‘Masks would

fall, each will search his or her conscience, the true face of each one will be

revealed, large and small debts from the past will be paid,’’ and ‘‘the flowers

that bloom in blood,’’ which appear ‘‘bright and beautiful’’ but are ultimately

poisoned, will never be planted again, he said.20 For years, Ba Jin fought

strident official opposition to his idea. The Communist Party wanted no part

19. Ulrich Beck, Democracy without Enemies , trans. Mark Ritter (Malden, Mass.: Polity

Press, 1998), 5.20. Ba Jin, Suixianglu [Random Thoughts], vol. 5 (Hong Kong: Joint Pushing Co., 1986),

137.




of his museum project, for they did not want the catharsis it would induce to

lead people to question the wisdom of the party. Silence reigned while the

party struggled with the fear that any revival of that memory spelled trouble

for them. By 2004, all such fears were gone. What swept such thoughts fromthe party’s collective mind? Nothing other than the profit motive and the new

mind-set.

In April 2004, entrepreneurs in Dayi County, Sichuan Province, broke

ground on a site that is to become China’s first Cultural Revolution museum

complex. Consisting of a restaurant, a hotel, and a teahouse, this museum,

when completed, will be part of a broader theme-park experiment designed

to create a nostalgia for the memory of revolutionary extremism without the

actual excess and violence. Promoting nostalgia rather than revolution, thismuseum is designed to appeal to the tourist in need of a break from the

capitalist rat race. With suitably attired staff and the accoutrements of the

Cultural Revolution adorning every wall, the buildings will resonate with

the memories of past events. The restaurant will be a perfect simulacrum

of the ‘‘worker-peasant-soldier large canteen’’ (gong-nong-bing dashitang );

the hotel will represent a Red Guard ‘‘reception center’’ (Hongweibing jie-

daizhan ); and the teahouse will be named Spring Cometh (Chunlai ), after

a teahouse made famous in Jiang Qing’s Cultural Revolution model opera,

Shajiabang . Yet the only thing revolutionary about this venture is the busi-

ness concept.

‘‘This venture definitely isn’t just about offering social services, but

about remembering the past, and, most importantly, managing a museum

business,’’ said one of the investors bankrolling the project. As a reporter

from the Qianlong news service cynically noted when he came to cover

the opening of this new museum project, ‘‘It was more than social services

all right, it was all about profit!’’ 21 Perversely, it is the very profit orientation

and theme-park quality of this proposed museum that makes it so politicallypowerful, but always in an antipolitical way.

What might at first appear as little more than a perverse and ironic

parody of Ba Jin’s solemn and heartrending vow to remember the victims

proves to be the very best antidote to the infectious allure of the Sirens’

song. In a rather curious way, his gravity is part of the problem: Ba Jin’s

earnest statements are simply the other side of the anger displayed by

21. Zhu Shengguo, ‘‘Wenge bowuguan zai ‘jingying’ shenme?’’ (What Is Being Managed

at the Cultural Revolution Museum?), Qianlong on the Web , April 22, 2004, availableat http://review.qianlong.com/20060/2004/04/22/[email protected] (accessed May 27,

2004).




the ‘‘responsible cadre’’ who pulled me from the Mao rubbish pile at Bei-

jing University. Like scar literature and its opposite—Mao hagiography—

these forms all continue to reify the ‘‘auric’’ quality of the chairman’s poli-

tics. Whether in reverence or revulsion, the ‘‘aura’’ of the Siren still pervadesthese ‘‘events’’ and genres in a way that future tourists at the Cultural Revo-

lution museum, the crooners of the Mao songs at karaoke bars, and diners

at Old Lady Tang’s Mao restaurant chain can no longer fully understand.

While Ba Jin would still pick at the scars of Siren politics and call for

a new Sirens’ song, the politics of the commercial museum lead consumers

to a place where they can relax in sites that sit at the crossroads of distrac-

tion and nostalgia. Fear and enchantment are both replaced at this point by

fetishization, as the distractions that Adorno calls the culture industry growin importance. These forms do not just attract paying customers; they pro-

duce a consumer reality, and this, in turn, produces a mentality that proves

to be a far more effective and life-changing antidote to the Cultural Revolu-

tion than Ba Jin’s solemnity or the cadre’s anger ever was. In speaking to

an everyday ‘‘antipolitics’’ of fashion and fad, such solemnity and serious-

ness is always caught off guard. It is, literally, caught on the hop. Yet there

is a high price to pay for such antipolitical subversion. It comes only with the

reification of the commodity form, which it relies on and cannot break from.

It is this paradoxical effect, I would argue, that offers the commodity

form the ability to transform even an event such as the Cultural Revolution

into an item that can be enjoyed. And it is in this ability to transform even the

greatest expressions of political commitment and terror into items of enjoy-

ment and distraction that one can see the power of the culture industry. This

power to diminish our capacity to be thrown by the Sirens’ song of politics

lies precisely in the culture industry’s ability to make even the most horren-

dous political event seem, in the eyes of we moderns, not only unrepeatable,

but unthinkable.This commodified simulacrum of the Cultural Revolution museum

makes the past unthinkable as a horrendous event by remembering it nos-

talgically and by offering it to moderns as a light-hearted form of distraction.

To attempt to correct the record and remember ‘‘Truth,’’ as Ba Jin wants to

do, simply opens the way for disputation. Truth, after all, can be countered

and contradicted. It points back to a potential politics of friend and enemy.

The commodity form seduces rather than challenges. One can challenge a

claim to truth, but how does one challenge a theme park? How does onereverse the trend that makes the remnant shell of Siren politics a vehicle

of the fashionable and ‘‘cool’’ without itself being rendered unfashionable




and uncool? In transforming events such as the Cultural Revolution and fig-

ures such as Mao Zedong into forms of consumer distraction and nostal-

gia, the commodity form robs them of their original transformative ability.

In making everything into a commodity, those things that are commodifiedare themselves transformed. No longer is every event the basis of a politi-

cal question as it was when the Sirens sung of Mao. On the contrary, now

every event is a question of market opportunity. As the cash registers ring

up sales, our ears become plugged to the music of the political, precisely

because we are deafened by the hip-hop or disco versions of the revolu-

tionary song. Increasingly, even when we desire change, we become tied

to the very logic that stops it from taking place. It is this political reform that

the Mao industry has brought to China. It is this industry that has helpedsolidify the reform process and, as a result, has become the central politi-

cal legacy of economic reform, even if it is only as allegory. What makes

it significant, theoretically, is the light it shines on the politics of the culture

industry. Mao as industry, as culture industry, helps us rethink Adorno and

Horkheimer and appreciate them anew. In this revision of their argument, we

humans are weakened, not because we have lost our foothold on Enlight-

enment Reason, but because we are losing touch with that force within us

that can produce political enchantment.

Conclusion

In 1992, Deng Xiaoping undertook his now famous southern tour,

launching what became a new consumer revolution in China. With this in

mind, the dates of the Mao craze suddenly take on added significance.

Arguably, the Mao craze constitutes the first postliberation consumer fad

to take place in China. The leader who once made the Sirens’ call to poli-

tics and then directed it against capitalism was now the image form lead-ing the counterrevolution. In this new consumer counterrevolution, forms of

enchantment remain. Nevertheless, like migrant workers with nowhere to

go, they have left the tightly knit village of commitment politics and moved to

the ‘‘polymorphous’’ consumer capitals of the eastern coastal cities. These

are the places of seduction which offer forms of enchantment that do not

confront the political. Instead, they ‘‘morph’’ politics into a safer form of

dreaming. They do this by ‘‘bleaching away’’ the ‘‘primordial’’ power of the

political and replacing it with the ‘‘afterlife’’ power of the simulacra. The auraremains, but the passion is drained away. In each and every domain, and

irrespective of their own particular localized distinctions, the practices once




undertaken out of a passionate commitment to a political program are for-

gotten. Instead of political distinction, we now have economic distraction;

instead of being uplifted, we are now stupefied. Caught between the Scylla

of passion and excess and the Charybdis of alienation and order, China isdrawn to the latter, and, as it is, it increasingly faces the dilemma that con-

fronts all liberal democracies, disenchantment. It is the Mao industry that

puts this all into focus, for it is the Mao industry that has led the charge. In this

new, passionless world of the commodity, the life-affirming/life-threatening

exhilaration of revolution gives way to the artificial excitement of manufac-

tured desire. The political excesses of the past have gone, but so too have

the life-affirming victories of the revolutionary line. Perhaps this is the cost

of any ethic of limit. Life-threatening intensity can only be limited by limitinglife itself, but it takes the reason of Adorno and Horkheimer, and the ‘‘phan-

tasmagoria’’ of the Chinese Mao industry, to show us this in such a clear

fashion.

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Michael Dutton, From Culture Industry to Mao Industry- A Greek Tragedy

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