Propoganda art depicts former Chinese dictator in favourable light
PM - Monday, 13 June , 2005 18:35:00
Reporter: Brendan Trembath
MARK COLVIN: China's Chairman Mao died almost three decades ago, but there's still an enduring fascination with propaganda art depicting the dictator in a favourable light.
From Shanghai to Sydney there's a booming trade in paintings, posters, busts and badges.
Dealers say that even though millions of items were produced during Mao's rule, original pieces are harder to come by, and that's pushed up prices.
But the latest highly researched biography of Mao calculates that even excluding war the man was responsible for the deaths of 70 million Chinese people.
If true that would exceed even the monstrous tallies racked up by other tyrants of the 20th Century, such as Hitler and Stalin.
So how can "Mao chic" be justified?
Brendan Trembath reports.
(sound of Chinese music)
BRENDAN TREMBATH: Chairman Mao dominates this Sydney gallery with his beaming face in hundreds of pieces of propaganda art. There's Chairman Mao with workers, Chairman Mao with children and Chairman Mao playing ping-pong. The owner John Williams started the collection many years ago in Melbourne.
He was a Hare Krishna then. The Krishna centre was next to a Communist bookshop.
JOHN WILLIAMS: And they sold all this Chinese propaganda, and it was out and out propaganda.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: It's the cartoon-like qualities of the art which John Williams likes most, the same qualities American pop artist Andy Warhol mirrored so successfully in giant Mao portraits painted in the 1970s.
JOHN WILLIAMS: It's that Liechtenstein/Warhol kind of comical realism.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: The trade in Mao memorabilia thrives almost 30 years after he was entombed in a mausoleum in Tiananmen Square.
John Williams, who visits China often, says prices have soared in the last few years because more Chinese now know selling original pieces of propaganda art can be profitable.
JOHN WILLIAMS: You can travel to northern China to Xa Binh or to Gang Xu or to the big factory areas, Chengdu, and if you can find an original poster, still in the factory or in a house, you won't pay any less than US$100 a piece. They know the value of this stuff now.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: While John Williams says he collects Mao memorabilia for art's sake, he accepts some may find his collection disturbing. What's sometimes known as dictator kitsch worries Dr David McKnight, a lecturer at Sydney's University of Technology who's written two books on Cold War history.
DAVID MCKNIGHT: Obviously there's something a little bit sick, I think in some ways, of people using symbols that have been used to represent very oppressive regimes. But in a way what I think has happened is that those symbols, be it the hammer and sickle, or Mao memorabilia, they've been emptied of their content.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: Even though David McKnight was a member of the Communist Party of Australia in the 1970s, he's in no way sentimental about an old Communist warrior like Chairman Mao.
DAVID MCKNIGHT: I guess memorabilia about Mao Tse-tung or even about the Soviet Union is seen as funny and kitsch and so on, but of course that's from people living in one far, distant corner of the world who've never really experienced something as terrible as being in a prison camp.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: Gerard Henderson, the Executive Director of the Sydney Institute, is a scathing critic of the Chinese leader and those who wear Mao propaganda art as a fashion statement.
GERARD HENDERSON: The brutal truth is that many people who wear Mao badges today supported Mao right through the period. There was wide-scale support in Australia for the Communist regime in China during the Cultural Revolution for example, when 100 million Chinese were incarcerated, or purged. There was support for Mao during the Great Leap Forward in the late 50s, early 60s where 40 million Chinese starved to death in a forced famine.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: The Sydney gallery owned by John Williams honours other dead communist rulers like Russian leaders Stalin and Lenin and Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh.
It raises another ethical issue: why it's possibly more acceptable to publicly display dictator propaganda from the left of politics but not the right. Gerard Henderson again.
GERARD HENDERSON: The fact is that the Communists murdered more of their own citizens than the Nazis did. Now I'm not defending the Nazis, probably the worst regimes of all time, but the Communists were better at killing their own than the Nazis were.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: David McKnight from the University of Technology says perhaps Australians know more about the brutality of the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini because Australia went to war against Germany and Italy.
DAVID MCKNIGHT: That may be one reason why you don't see people touting Nazi symbols and when they do a lot of people, even young people who never fought but who know what it means, get very angry, understandably so.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: Gerard Henderson blames some people's selective memory
GERARD HENDERSON: There's a very clear recollection of Nazi Germany, of Fascist Italy, even of Franco's Spain but there's not much memory for Lenin's Soviet Union or for Mao's China.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: Mao's notoriety inspired international investor Mark Faber to build up what's believed to be the world's biggest collection of Mao memorabilia.
The globetrotting capitalist has a home in northern Thailand where he keeps thousands of posters and hundreds of thousands of badges.
MARK FABER: All major historical figures are controversial whether it's Napoleon or Caesar or Alexander the Great, and his role in Chinese history is very significant because he unified the country, and so I think that over time he will be perceived as a remarkable personality, naturally as you say controversial because he butchered quite numerous people in the cause of his empire.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: Mark Faber is known in financial markets as Doctor Doom because he's forecast several stock market crashes.
And he likes to spot a trend before many others do.
When he moved to Hong Kong in 1973 he predicted Mao memorabilia would one day be worth a lot of money.
MARK FABER: At the time I bought the posters you could buy them for let's say, 20 cents US and now they go for between US$100 and US$200, and the badges we used to buy them by the bucket load or kilo, and now you have catalogues like for stamps where each badge has a value and has become a collector's item.
I mean, my view at the time was if people are so stupid and collect telephone cards then obviously in China there will be numerous people that will eventually collect these badges of Mao.
MARK COLVIN: International investor Mark Faber ending that report from Brendan Trembath.
