Historical Tales

China’s Imperial tradition? Certainly, under Mao it was severely tested and ended up nearly shattered, at least superficially, but tradition goes back a long way in China and reports of its death have almost always greatly been exaggerated. Chairman Mao in a remark to Edgar Snow, said it was difficult for 800 million citizens of China, ” to overcome the habits of 3,000 years of emperor-worshiping tradition.” It is equally hard, for the political leaders, then and now of the People’s Republic to disregard the patterns and practices of imperial rule.

Mao may have been fudging the figures a bit, but the Chinese Empire, one of the world’s most underestimated triumphs, is usually dated from 221 B.C. to A.D 1912, a span of 2,123 years. Still impressive. It was founded by the king of Chin, who conquered the five kingdoms that made up China and proclaimed himself emperor under the name Chin Shih Huang Ti-literally, the First Supreme and Absolute One of China. It ended in the February chill of Peking, 1912, when the boy emperor Pu Yi formally abdicated the Dragon Throne and yielded to Sun Yat-sen, the first president of the new republic. Pu Yi formally attempted a comeback under Chinese sponsorship, but ended his days as a lowly gardener for the Communist regime.

The empire had apparently been swept away , like the debris of a gorgeous feast that lasted too long. Yet in some way its disappearance was deceptive, and for many Chinese the reality of the empire still stubbornly lingers, not completely vanished, but merely transmuted into new forms. The Chinese ship of state has always been powered by bureaucracy, the emperor sometimes its helmsman, sometimes a mere figurehead. But the greatest Chinese leaders have united both functions in their person. Such a unity is essential to the basic concept of the Chinese imperial tradition: that of the Mandate of heaven, an idea predating even Confucius.

The emperor is both king and high priest, and so bad government, or bad conduct on his part, is doubly damaging and leads to withdrawal of the mandate. A rebellion against an unjust or oppressive emperor has only to be successful to be justified in the eyes of heaven. In this sense, Sun Tat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao Tse-tung each adhered to the tradition of legitimizing their usurpation of authority; and moreover, each of them had acted, at various times, within the imperial terms of reference. Mao especially, adapted the ways of the old imperial tradition to the needs of the new Communist state. Shunning extravagance in his personal life, he nonetheless allowed the pageantry of spectacular parades and celebrations, took it upon himself to guarantee the growth and prosperity of the nation, encouraged something akin to the old emperor-worship, and promoted the formation of a new religion with himself as high priest.

Much of course changed. The ostentation of former times disappeared. Twelve centuries ago an imperial concubine was waited on by hundreds of musicians, dancers and acrobats. Seven hundred women attended her wardrobe, and chains and horsemen rode night and day in continuous shifts to bring fresh litchi nuts fifteen hundred miles from south China to the capital, Chang-an. The luxury of the Court was described by the great poet Tu Fu, who for a time held office as a censor in 755 under the Tang Dynasty. Corruptions of court life or merely how how government is run and a necessary hierarchy between ruled and ruler?

( see link sat end) …In the central halls there are fair goddesses; An air of perfume moves with each charming figure. They clothe their guests with warm furs of sable, Entertain them with the finest music and pipe and string, Feed them with the broth of camel’s pad, With pungent tangerines, and oranges ripened in frost. Behind the red-lacquered gates, wine is left to sour, meat to rot. Outside these gates lie the bones of the frozen and the starved. The flourishing and the withered are just a foot apart—It rends my heart to ponder on it.

Twelve hundred, and four years later, on December 26, 1959, far from Peking in Zhejiang province, Mao Zedong celebrated his sixty-sixth birthday. At a banquet he did not attend there were eighty guests, eating what Mao

doctor, Li Zhisui, described as “the finest, most expensive delicacies Chinese cuisine can offer.” These included bird’s-nest soup with baby doves, and shark’s fin soup. The commander of Mao’s security guards, Wang Jingxian, said to Dr. Li, “It’s shameful for us to be consuming such a feast…. So many people are starving to death.”

The doctor recalls that outside the gates of Mao’s villa, beyond the special privileges of the country’s leaders, the peasants of China were starving…. The deaths were now in the millions, and before the famine was over tens of millions would die. And as so many of my countrymen starved, I sat…celebrating the sixty-sixth birthday of the absent emperor Mao…. I lived in a world apart. We in Group One had no rules. There was no law. It was a paradise, free from restraint, subject only to the whim of Mao and the guilt that gnawed those of us whose consciences remained intact. Read More:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1994/nov/17/unmasking-the-monster/?pagination=false

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