2014-03-10
Chinese paramilitary police march on Tiananmen Square toward the Mao Zedong mausoleum (R) in Beijing, Dec. 26, 2013.
AFP
A prominent historian and a top human rights lawyer have called on the ruling Chinese Communist Party to cremate the remains of China’s supreme leader Mao Zedong, according to his own expressed wish.
Zhang Lifan, a Communist Party historian, and rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang published an online “motion” as the country’s rubber-stamp parliament met for its annual session in Beijing.
According to the petition, Mao had always requested that his remains be incinerated, and a cremation ceremony would lay China’s former chairman to rest for good.
Citing an article of Mao’s titled “A call to bring in cremation” dated April 27, 1956, Pu and Zhang said Mao himself had initiated the atheist Communist Party’s policy of encouraging cremation of the dead, breaking with the Confucian tradition of burial of remains in family tombs.
“All public employees agreeing to cremation are requested to sign,” Mao’s campaign initiative read.
“All those people with signatures on the initiative agree to allow cremation for themselves after death,” it added.
Mao was the first to sign the initiative, followed by late top communist general Zhu De, and other high-ranking leaders including Peng Dehuai, Deng Xiaoping and others.
The initiative was published as part of a collection of Mao’s manuscripts, and garnered a total of 136 top-level signatures.
‘Uncivilized and inhuman’
Pu and Zhang’s online “motion” said Mao’s wish to be cremated had been violated after his death by China’s leaders, who had taken the decision to embalm him and to build the Mao Zedong Mausoleum on Tiananmen Square to house his remains.
“Either in ancient society or in modern society, to publicly exhibit a dead body for a long time is uncivilized and inhuman,” it said.
Pu told RFA in an interview on Monday that Mao had acted lawlessly as a leader when he was alive.
“A lot of the factors that impede our progress can be traced back to Maoist thought,” he said.
“Mao Zedong thought and Mao’s image are not yet dead and buried in Chinese society,” he said. “They still influence our society and our political thinking.”
“So we wanted to make this point, in the hope of having Mao’s remains cremated, and to reflect on the great disaster and tragedy that Mao Zedong and the communists visited on the Chinese people,” Pu added.
Pu said that one of the reasons China still struggles to throw off the legacy of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), a decade of political violence and social turmoil sanctioned by Mao to remove his political rivals, was a lack of access to genuine historical research methods.
“Ever since the Chinese Communist Party came to power, important historical research has become a forbidden zone,” Pu said. “The Cultural Revolution happened nearly 50 years ago, but it has never been subjected to profound analysis or reflection.”
“The mentality of the Cultural Revolution has never been been truly cured.”
Fighting corruption
Guangdong-based lawyer Deng Shulin said he believed that democracy and constitutional government were the only way to fight rampant official corruption in China.
“Lawyers have a deeper understanding of such things, and can speak out in favor of democracy and constitutional government so as to boost public awareness,” he said.
In the online petition, Pu and Zhang also argued that the housing of Mao’s remains in the mausoleum also ran counter to traditional burial practices for China’s emperors.
It accuses Mao of breaking his original promise of democracy and constitutional politics which was made before he declared the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
According to the petition, Mao ruled the country via class warfare and all sorts of political movements, which resulted in the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine [1958-1960] with the untimely deaths of millions and millions of Chinese people.
Nevertheless, the authorities maintain Mao’s remains and evade historical questioning of the Mao era, inhibiting social progress in China, it added.
“Mao’s body has been put there … and this actually produces a sort of split in the national psyche,” the petition said, adding that Mao’s ashes should be handed to his family for interment in his hometown in the southern province of Hunan.
“To me, Mao Zedong is no better than Hitler,” Pu told New Tang Dynasty Television.
“When we criticize Japanese not wanting to examine history, we tend to say that Germany reflected on the history of Nazis slaughtering Jews. But does China reflect on the history of Mao Zedong?”
Traditional Chinese sayings include “the dead are heavier than the living,” and “the unburied dead will never find peace.”
Reported by Xin Lin for RFA’s Mandarin Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
