You may have heard they called Chairman Mao the Great Helmsman. The epithet is exceedingly apt, if one extends it to a mental image of a massive, ragged ship. Yawing in a maelstrom of historic chaos, the ship is packed to the poop deck with desperate crew and passengers. Too many to count are lost in the storm. Somehow, the Helmsman guides the craft to placid waters, albeit in unfamiliar territory. He wants his brand of ship's order at any cost, to get to the golden shore. The shipmates' trials are just beginning.

Too exculpatory? OK. How would you have gone about steering a broken people through all their internecine squabbling and external threats to a re-unified country, with nothing more than a dog-eared copy of Das Kapital and some like-minded buddies? Sure, you can get back to us.

Wait - hear that? It's an Asian Studies major huffing, "Where do you get the effrontery to defend a man who all but eradicated China's cultural heritage during the.... Lord knows how many people perished in the....." Whoa, whoa, whoa. Please understand that Chairman Mao is not for China Expat to defend, or prosecute. When China is invited to host a retrospective tribunal for the massacre of Native Americans or the Boer Wars, we'll throw our hat in the ring and flail our verdicts about.

For now, we'd like to do what we're here for, to explore Chinese culture in its infinite aspects. A recent news item concerning the Great Helmsman seems a milestone in terms of where the Chinese have been and where they're going. A new twenty-meter statue of Mao at Chongqing Medical University is rocking China's collective boat. Many criticize the statue as extravagantly wasteful, at an estimated cost of five million RMB. Some are scandalized that people dare speak out against a commemoration of Mao.

It's a safe bet the scandalized are among the older generations, the ones who can remember a time when Mao enjoyed a cult-of-personality mojo unfathomable to a westerner, a celebrity/deity aura equal to '89 Jordan + '84 Jackson x Winston Churchill¹⁰. Wherever their quiet, gated socialist apartment communities, a statue of Mao still dominates the public square, smiling distantly over their morning exercises and evening strolls.

These elder Chinese can also likely recall the Mao-statue contests of the Cultural Revolution. University students across China strove to build the biggest statue in the most difficult pose. A waving Mao garnered more revolutionary points than one with hands behind the back. A hat in the waving hand entitled the students to a victory dance of the type still practiced by vigorous Chinese seniors on warm summer evenings, the one with the martial drumbeat.

But a dip in Q-rating can play havoc with even the greatest legacy. After the '78 reforms, many of those statues, so fervently built, were furtively dismantled. Some were even blown up in acts of pent-up aggression released two years too late. So what does a shiny, costly new stainless-steel tribute to a man so ideologically at odds with China's current direction indicate? Oops, far be it from us to editorialize. Instead, we'll take some quotes directly from Mao's writings and speeches, quotes that pertain to the flap at hand.

On spending five million RMB for a statue:

"Wherever we happen to be, we must treasure our manpower and material resources, and must not take a short view and indulge in wastefulness and extravagance."

On the necessity of medical students loitering about campus looking at a big statue:

 

"Medical education should be reformed. There's no need to read so many books... It will be enough to give three years to graduates from higher primary schools. They would then study and raise their standards mainly through practice. The more books one reads the more stupid one gets."

On what medical students should be planning for their futures:

"We should leave behind in the city a few of the less able doctors who graduated one or two years ago, and the others should all go into the countryside."

And on the positive nature of this statue wrangle in general:

"Opposition and struggle between ideas of different kinds constantly occur within the Party, contradictions between classes and between the new and the old in society. If there were no contradictions in the Party and no ideological struggles to resolve them, the Party life would come to an end."

Of course, we'd hardly be giving Mao his due if we didn't allow the masses to rise up and speak. Here are some representative comments floating around the People's Message Boards:

• - Whoever spent five million RMB erecting this more than ten-story statue would definitely be chided by Chairman Mao as a "black sheep".

• - The greatest monument stays in the people's hearts. It's nonsense building a statue. Officials had better invest funds in and devote themselves to the people's welfare.

• - It's unquestionably worth it, building a statue of the great leader. We should pay homage to him forever.

• - The statue only cost five million. No reason to blame the builders and call them "black sheep".

• - The medical university abuses financial funding by building this huge Mao statue, which reflects mishandling of limited educational resources in China.

• - Creating gods in the 21^st century is ridiculous.

• - Better to spend the five million on a Mao statue than on beer and snacks for the officials.

• - There are still earthquake damaged schools that need rebuilding. Due to lack of money? Nah, a new giant joss has just been erected. Well done!

• - Let's make sure generation-after-generation remember Chairman Mao's great achievements, and do not forget our roots. It's well worth the cost.