Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [13]
In the end, the horror of that age only really came to a close with Mao’s death in 1976. Roughly 70 million people are believed to have perished under his reign, a feat that allows him to seriously compete with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin for the title Baddest Person Ever. But what makes contemporary China just a little odd is that even today one can’t escape his porcine face. I think it is fair to say that on the day Hitler killed himself in his bunker, surrounded by a shattered country and a million Soviet troops, most Germans were probably quite ready to move on, to take their leave of Adolf, and indeed that is what they did. Of course, they really didn’t have any say in the matter, but thirty years after his death, there couldn’t have been more than a handful of cretinous skinheads who could muster a Heil Hitler with any enthusiasm. When Joseph Stalin, born Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (say it fast), died on a gloomy night in 1953, it wasn’t long before he was denounced by Nikita Khrushchev, who proceeded to undertake an intense program of de-Stalinization. Communism lingered on for nearly another forty years, but one would have been hard-pressed to find a statue or portrait of Uncle Joe.
Contrast this with China. Whenever I opened my wallet, I was greeted by Mao Zedong, looking serene and confident as his visage graced every paper yuan. Nearly every city of consequence has a Renmin Guangchang, or People’s Square, and the vast majority are still dominated by a colossal statue of Mao, looking proud and heroic. An enormous portrait of the Great Helmsman dominates Tiananmen Square, and more creepy still, his gaze is directed toward his mausoleum, where even today he accepts visitors. This pleased me, because it’s not every day that one gets to meet one of history’s greatest villains. And so early one morning, I set off to have a look.
But first I had to get there. My hotel, which appeared to be very popular with package tourists from Eastern Europe, was located within walking distance of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. I stepped out and watched the doorman do his morning ritual, which consisted of purging an immense, glutinous loogie from somewhere deep within his innards, followed by the expulsion of a dribble of snot from first one nostril and then the other, and then, apparently satisfied with this ousting of liquids, lighting up a cigarette. And good morning to you, I thought, as I made my way through the acrid smoke, delicately stepping around a millpond of phlegm and mucus that had gathered at the hotel’s entrance. I couldn’t decide what was more disturbing—the splattering loogie or the dribbling snot—but as I wandered through the early-morning haze toward the mausoleum, it soon became apparent that somehow I’d have to come to terms with the interesting methods the Chinese use for expelling the contents of their noses and lungs. The Chinese have invented many things, but the handkerchief is not among them. I walked on and watched the residents of Beijing, young and old, male and even a few elderly women, greet the new day with an immense hawk and a resonant splatter, and then, just as I thought the streets of Beijing could not be further befouled, I came across a man who squatted beside the curb.