Part 1. Paper Tigers and yes the part titles will be taken from quotations of Mao's Little Red Book.

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Lee Waters
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1 La Trobe Asia Asia Rising Chairman Mao's Little Red Book Welcome to Asia Rising the podcast from La Trobe Asia where we discuss news, views and general happenings from Asian states and societies. I'm your host and today we'll be hearing something a little different. In 1964 the Communist Party of China released a collection of Mao's speeches and statements titled "Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong" a small easily carried and bound in bright red it became commonly known as "The Little Red Book" and went on to become the most important tool of propaganda during the cultural revolution. Here to tell me about Mao's Little Red Book is, he's an Associate Professor in Politics and Philosophy at La Trobe University and he's a collector. Part 1. Paper Tigers and yes the part titles will be taken from quotations of Mao's Little Red Book. Doctor I guess my first experience with the Red Book came when I first visited China as a 22 year old college student from America in 1988 and I was studying at the time in Nanjing. I've always had a fascination with the cultural revolution, the Maoist period and a kind of obsession about collecting old books and I was at an old market and there is this old bookseller and there I saw on the ground; because he had all his wares out on the ground, this red covered book and I asked to have a look at it, didn't really know much about it. It wasn't like the classic quotes of Chairman Mao but it was a selection of his works and I asked if I could buy it and he said, "yes sure, 10 kuai" which is probably about $1.5 and that set me on the way of collecting these things. I went back to the old man on subsequent weekends and he always had another couple of copies. I bought up everything he had and I told my friends about it, and my friends went back and more appeared and were kind of coming out of the woodwork. But then when I went back to China in 1997 and studied for another year in Nanjing, it was far more commercialised, there were all these curio markets where you could buy Little Red Books, but the price of course had gone through the roof. I mean now you were talking 100 kuai = $20 or so dollars. Now it's filled with fakes, there are so many counterfeits now. People swindling, largely foreigners who come along and say, "I'll get a work of Chairman Mao" and will be charged up to $400 or $500 for something that's completely fake. So when you look at the Little Red Book it's important to recognise the power of the printed word. By distributing it in large quantities the Communist Party could put the thoughts of Mao into every pocket. The Party has always, I guess, collected and published the works of its leaders. And it was really only in the 1970's when Lin Biao the Head of the People's Liberation Army, got involved in creating this cult of personality around Mao, that his very words became something to guide everybody in their daily life and in order to do that you need to have a convenient way to carry around, you know the select works of Chairman Mao is 5 volumes, each of several hundred pages. He needed something that was more compact and so hence these Little Red Books; red being the

2 revolutionary colour, and in them there were select quotations of Chairman Mao. One of the myths about the so called Little Red Book is it's not a single book, in other words there is a whole range of genre's, you know they had books that were the anthologies that were the works of Mao and Lenin, Marx. Ones that pitched at different age groups, so you had versions for little kids, versions for people where were going senile; a whole variety of Little Red Books. You know it went global, I mean they were published in English and they were distributed globally in different countries, so there's not a single version of it but as they've become commodified people have got into the game of reproducing them and creating fake ones. I've seen numerous fakes ones, mainly the English ones. You can tell when you look at some of them, they look newer but it's hard to know, some of them were well used; others weren't. I mean one of the stats that just blows my mind away every time I think about it and tell my students about it, by the time of Mao's death in 1976 there were 40 billion copies of Chairman Mao's works. So that's the equivalent of 15 volumes for every man, woman and child in China at the time. So the sheer number of these things is quite phenomenal but I've had students come back and say, "Look what I've got when I was in Shanghai" and I took one look at it and I could tell it was counterfeit, it was fake. I hope I don't come back with a counterfeit copy. [laughter] I'll tell you the good place to go, Panjiayuan that's where I've gotten a lot of mine. When you think about the book it's actually just one aspect of this cult of personality, so you had life size and bigger than life size statues, you had little figurines, clocks, watches, buttons; buttons became very popular and are still collected today. I've got back home a red phone, I really don't know the origin, I don't know if it was an important red phone to ring, but there it has at the centre of the dial a picture of Mao and his left hand man, Lin Biao. And just in households as well, a picture on the wall of Mao. Yes, of course I left out probably the most ubiquitous form of iconography of Mao, the portraits of him. During the Cultural Revolution they would be in every room; every classroom, every household; of course the most famous one is that one that sits over the Gate of Heavenly Peace looking into Tiananmen Square where it's taken down every couple of months in the middle of the night and refreshed. I mean that stood there from the moment that the Chinese Communist Party seized power in Beijing in 1949 and there it stands today. I mean another think to keep an eye out, I always say to my students, 'if you find one come right to me and I will give you a fair price for it', so this is the classic quotations from Chairman Mao. Originally they were produced by the Head of the People's Liberation Army Lin Biao and Lin Biao was involved in really creating the cult of personality around Mao and producing these books. And so after the photo of Chairman Mao which appears in all the Little Red Books, you had a photo.

3 . can I see that? of Lin Biao, it was the second page after Chairman Mao and so Lin Biao became Mao's chosen successor in the 1960's during the Cultural Revolution. But unfortunately he ran afoul of Mao, there are claims that he plotted a coup d'etat and he was caught or at least his plane was shot down trying to escape over Outer Mongolia. He was declared a huge traitor and everyone was told to go to your Little Red Books and to rip out that page of Lin Biao and so I've never seen one but if you ever see one of Lin Biao in it! And you can actually see if you look at it carefully you can see the page has been torn out. Oh yeah, down the spine there was a page there, so somebody's ripped that page out. Yeah yeah So if you got it with that in there? You're sitting on a gold mine, come and see me [laughter] Part 2. To read too many books is harmful. Tell me about your collection of it, how many different sorts of copies and audiences? What do you have? I probably have about 30 or 40 maybe. I mean I've got things like, essentially sort versions of the Select Works of Chairman Mao, so there would be full on speeches; these are the iconic quotations of Chairman Mao. Probably the one that was most popular during the Cultural Revolution and it's just got very short quotes from speeches or written works of Chairman Mao, organised around certain themes. One here that was written for small children so the grammar and condensed version of some of Mao's ideas written in a simple form for young kids to be able to read. Get them young? Yeah. Get them young. You know, everyone was expected to carry around a copy in their breast pocket, it didn't matter if you were an adolescent or senior citizen: whether you were an ethnic minority or member of the Han majority, everyone was expected to carry those works and to study them. In fact there are several versions, and I don't have this one that actually ask really practical questions like, "What to do if I have a disagreement with one of my colleagues at work?" and it would then point you to pages in the Quotations of Chairman Mao where you'd get insight into

4 how to handle daily problems. Like, "What if I find my working conditions aren't up to my satisfaction?" and there would be a quote from Mao about the importance of austerity, and avoiding pleasure seeking in an attempt to provide a guide, an ideological guide for people in their daily lives. And not to question I guess, the authority of Mao or the authority of the Chinese Communist Party, rather to live by the dictates of the Great Sun in the East Chairman Mao. You know the only thing they share in common is the red cover of this plastic protective cover. When we think about the Little Red Book, well red is the common colour, they're not necessarily little, they do vary in size but what they have in common is that they do relate back to the works of Chairman Mao, they have a red cover and they were generally smaller than a full size book. That cover: its waterproof to some extent? It will stand the test of time, definitely. Part 3. In waking a tiger, use a long stick. Another tiger analogy, someone's got a preoccupation. Anyway the Chinese Communist Party had a big problem following the death of Mao. What do you do with his legacy? You know Mao is kind of like both Lenin and Stalin to the Chinese Communist Party. They couldn't turf one without damaging the other and so The Party was in a difficult position, so what they did was, they began to quietly halt the works of Chairman Mao, so you had the Xinhua Newsagency that literally would grind up the unsold copies slowly as new developments went out. You know statues would be removed or portraits would be put down as renovation work went along. Officially though the Party couldn't completely get rid of Mao, their legitimacy was really tied to his legacy and so they came up with a so called Thirty-Seventy equation in the 1981 Party Resolution on some questions on CCP history where they said, "Mao - it seems he did more good than he did harm". They never quantified it in terms of Seventy-Thirty, but the idea was, 'Yes he made some mistakes in the Cultural Revolution but overall his contribution to the Chinese Revolution was far greater" and as a result his portrait stays over Tiananmen Square, his body is embalmed in Tiananmen Square and his legacy is still remembered by many people quite fondly in China today. I feel that there's some kind of attempt to establish a 'this man was bigger than his axe' kind of status to Mao. You see lots of people with, say Che Guevara on their shirt having absolutely no concept of what he means or what he stood for, and then you've got Chairman Mao being idolised to some point but nobody realising, especially outside of China, nobody outside of China really remembering the impact that he had on the Chinese people and the Cultural Revolution. Essentially Mao and Mao's image has become a free floating signifier of sorts and so different people read different things into it. There's the 'global Mao' that is so disembodied from China, the Mao of Andy Warhol, you know the playing of his image and putting it on T-shirts and Mike

5 Tyson has a tattoo of Chairman Mao on his arm. Inside China though it's slightly different in the sense that it's tied up with all kinds of misplaced nostalgia; consumption as well. So Mao is very much alive in many regards and as a result he has to be dealt with very carefully by Chinese political leaders, they're always stepping around Mao and trying not to offend people who still see him as a great revolutionary leader, but at the same time trying to admit that there are some serious problems that occurred during the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. I'll tell you - Panjiayuan I told you, that is the place to go, there's no shortage of stuff. I'll go there and I'll see if I can pass The Little Red Book test. [laughter] I can't wait to see what you bring back. Part 4. I am a lone monk, walking the world with a leaky umbrella. James' challenge accepted. On a subsequent trip to China I travelled to Panjiayuan in Beijing. It was a sprawling open air market of statues, food, jade, trinkets and here and there old copies of the little red book. Market Stall owner Mao Zedong Price negotiation was done through the time honoured tradition of using a calculator app on the phone and I soon learned the art of walking away if I didn't like the price. No it's ok I'm not happy about it. Market stall owner Ok I returned to Melbourne with 3 Little Red Books and I got Jim Leibold back in the interview chair so that he could assess them. [Laughter] I can't wait to see them, they look a little well-thumbed so that's a good sign. Some of these merchants will actually dirty-up some of the books and magazines or Oh don't tell me that. I don't know, I should be able to have a look Ok, so in the proud tradition of a fool and his money soon parted, this cost me 50.

6 50, that's quite expensive, so 50 is about $10 Australian dollars, a little bit more. This is the first one I bought it was from an established shop inside and the person who ran it was selling a lot of; it looked like stuff that was salvaged from war. It was a lot of old American stuff like typewriters and sewing machines and what have you and she had a stack of Little Red Books there. This one looked old and well used. It's got some paint on the back. A date, which is quite handy. Mmm 1968 right? 1968, 31 st May. I assume somebody's name and when you look through it, oh look they've underlined handy passages which they think are quite appropriate, so I'll hand that over to you for your expert eye. What is that? The title is Chairman Mao Discusses Historiography, so it's a particular collection of essays from Mao on history. Who's the name in the front? Ja Fu Lin. On face value it looks pretty authentic. There's pages that are well faded, dirty, a bit sullied, the paper quality is what you'd expect from that. The underlining is quite a common practice amongst Chinese readers of intellectual works. This is one of many books that fit under the broad banner of what we call 'The Little Red Books', but more specialised books. So there's a preface here by someone, and his name has been crossed out and I can't make out the name, but that's quite common as well, as people fell out of favour in the Cultural Revolution, they would then be kind of expunged either by having a page ripped out or in this case the blacking out of this individuals name. Right. Most of the essays I'm just looking at are quotations from not only Mao but also people like Lin Biao and others discussing the science of history or historiography. I think we can definitely conclude this one's legit, so I think you did quite well Matt. 50 kuai for this, what was the starting price may I ask?

7 Well no, see me being so thrilled to find something to look authentic said 'yes' as soon as she said the price. Oh you paid way too much mate. I was eager, I betrayed my eagerness. But after that I went searching further around the market, I will now show you the second book that I got. This guy was selling a bunch of stuff on the ground and he had unfortunately, old coins and old paraphernalia and that kind of stuff and I bought this Little Red Book from him, maybe a bit more standard, it's got a lot more pictures, which considering what you said last time we talked: Lin Biao. And it's in colour which immediately concerns me because you don't see too many coloured photographs in books around that time. Oh dear. Well that kind of dates it as a late Cultural Revolution and there should be a date in here. Yeah, so the date here is 1966, October Is that a printed date? Yeah, it's a printed date and originally it cost under 1 kuai, it was 60 cents, and how much did you pay for this one? I paid 40 for this one. So you paid a little bit over the actual price, which you should next time show to the merchant just to show them that you know how much this thing is worth. It looks significantly old in terms of the colour and quality of paper but it also looks; you can see where some of the pages, the printing on the page doesn't quite match up, it varies from page to page. So it does like it's some type of reproduction. You know, here you go, I'll tell you why it's dodgy - I just nailed it. Oh, ok. The photos do not match with the text because the text in the back says it's clearly 1966 okay?

8 Now if you're looking at the photos, this one here with Mao ad Lin Biao is dated Ok Right, ok. Alright. So these photos do not match the date of the text in the back, so what I suspect is, somebody's reproduced the back and then combined it with photos, because photos are great particularly for foreigners like you who can't read Chinese, that this is a perfect thing to get a young foreign boy whose come buying. Now that I'm looking at it I'd say it's definitely very dodgy, and in fact the content seems a little bit different as well, but definitely a fake. [laughter] Alright, so 1 from 2, ok. So that was my suspect one. This one? It's got a little slip case. It's got a nice little case, certainly the case is a bit battered and bruised and it's got that little red book marker which usually comes from good quality books of that era. This is the Select Works of Chairman Mao, so it's different from the Quotations of Chairman Mao, that iconic Little Red Book. This is more a collection of Mao's full oeuvre of works. I thought it would be something a bit different because it's quite a chunky volume, it's not something you'd want to put in your back pocket or anything. Yeah, and what it says is it's combined in a single volume, so I think the Party got together and selected out the most representative or the most influential writings of Chairman Mao and they published them together as a series. I think today the standard version, at least in English, is a 5 volume set of Chairman Mao's Works. It beings with his analysis on class divisions in Chinese society and then his report on the Hunan Peasant Movement, which from memory seems to correspond quite clearly with the standard collective works of Chairman Mao. So this looks very legit and it says it's published in 1968, I have no suspicions that this is a forgery. Well, if you're going to make a forgery why bother with a slip case? Yeah and so what did you pay for this one? Well he had 2 copies of that. By that time I had 2 copies of The Little Red Book and I was there going, this is quite a nice one, it's

9 got a slip case and everything but I'm quite happy to walk away from it. I'll give you 30. And he didn't like that price at all, so I walked away and he bought me back over and he said, 'I'll give you this other one for $30' which looked a lot like that but it had this picture of Mao but it didn't have the writing below it, the other one. That's interesting, they're almost exactly the same, but he's willing to sell you this and not that one which kind of meant something or one was at least less dear in his eyes than the other one. So 30, I got it for 30. I reckon that's a bargain, a good price. Yeah I was pretty happy with that one. Another sign of its authenticity is it's got a name of the individual who owned it at some stage, Ma Biau or something. Oh I didn't notice that. Also it's interesting, it says it's an 'Internal Military Publication' Ok. I'm not sure, maybe it means that the individual who bought it and owned it initially was part of the military quite possibly. So you did well there Matt, 30 kuai, that's a fantastic purchase. That's an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and Philosophy at La Trobe University. And you've been listening to Asia Rising, you can subscribe to this podcast on itunes and Sound Cloud. If you like it please leave a review as feedback is always appreciated. You can follow both myself and on Twitter. James and I'm and thanks for listening.

THE MEDIATOR REVEALED

THE MEDIATOR REVEALED This writing has been taken from a spoken word given at the Third Day Fellowship. It has been transcribed from that word and will be in that form throughout. The entire chapter is