The Legacy Cult of Chairman Mao in Modern China

(This post was originally published on Mar 11, 2025)

In the heart of an American-style countryside villa, a wooden-framed portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong, the founding father of the People’s Republic of China, stands solo at the center of the focal wall.

My dad built his small retreat a few years ago in our hometown, a renowned “red revolutionary base” in central China. I once suggested hanging our family portrait in the foyer, but he insisted we should display “Grandpa Mao” instead.

Every Chinese New Year’s Eve, as the incense fills the air and the altar table is laden with offerings of pork, spirits, and rice, bowing and kowtowing to “Grandpa Mao” is a long-standing tradition in our family.

Leading the ceremony is my grandma – a devoted Buddhist born in the early 1950s, when chants of “Chairman Mao lives for ten thousand years” already echoed across the country – and my dad, a diehard fan of the founding father.

Under their instruction, each of our family members would bow three times with burning yellow paper money in hand, follow up with three more kowtows, and then join our palms together for another three bows to Mao – all after honoring the Gods of “Heaven” and “Earth.”

As we, the younger generation, half-heartedly participate in the yearly prayer ritual, my dad and grandma murmured prayers for our health, fortune, success in work and studies to Mao – just everything one might ask of a true deity.

The portrait of “Comrade Mao Zedong” takes center stage on the main wall.

I followed the ritual without much thought until 2022, when a deadly fire erupted in Urumqi in China’s far-western Xinjiang region. That sleepless night, I was in a locked-down campus, keeping a close eye on videos circulating online, which seemed to show fire trucks stuck behind lockdown barriers, spraying water from a distance that barely reached the flames.

I watched those clips flood Chinese social media, only to be swept away within minutes, then reappear moments later, vanishing again – over and over.

The blaze claimed at least ten lives, according to local authorities, who blamed the delayed arrival of fire engines on “messy parking of private cars” and partially attributed the tragedy to “some residents’ inability to self-defend and self-rescue” during their live press conference.

The tragedy sparked nationwide anti-lockdown protests that hadn’t seen in decades, and finally burned down something ingrained in me — a young Chinese raised on lullabies like this :

“The East is red; the Sun is on the rise;

Here comes China’s Mao Zedong.

He fights for the people’s happiness;

He’s the great savior of the Chinese!”

or

“Without the Communist Party, there would be no New China.

The Communist Party works hard for the nation.

The Communist Party is devoted to saving China.

It shows the people the path to liberation.

It leads China toward a bright future.”

The past Chinese New Year was the third year that I managed to quietly dodge the ritual that felt increasingly blizzard to me.

Why treat a mortal as a God?

While I get that the "red culture" we grew up in and the official narratives available to them shape their beliefs – just as they shaped my old self – I feel a growing urge to ask the question that I never felt was “a question” before.

So I posed it to my dad, my paternal grandma and my maternal grandpa – each of whose homes features a prominent poster of Mao that practically leaps out at me the moment I walk in.

A painted poster in my grandpa’s cottage displays Chairman Mao at the center, with former Vice President Liu Shaoqi and former Premier Zhou Enlai on his right side. Surrounding the trio are China’s top ten marshals.

“Born to be an Emperor”

My dad was originally named 'Liangang,' which means “steelmaking” – a straightforward nod to his parents' youth spent toiling in local iron factories during the early '60s, when Mao was pushing to rapidly industrialize the new Republic’s peasant economy. This period is known as the “Great Leap Forward” in Chinese history.

Though the fervent steelmaking campaign officially ended in 1962, the obsession lingered for years in the remote village where my grandparents lived.

My dad was born in the late year of Mao’s era, when the leader mobilized massive student-led “Red Guards” to prosecute millions of intellectuals and critics during the Cultural Revolution. At that time, the cult of the Chairman’s personality – which a late Chinese Communist Party(CCP) historian noted effectively began in the early 1940s – soared to an unprecedented height.

While my dad came of age in Deng Xiaoping’s era that features liberating China from Maoist dogmas, the “thought emancipation” feels a world away from the village deeply rooted in “red revolutionary” culture.

“He is a God, second only to the gods of ‘Heaven’ and ‘Land’,” said my dad.

But still, why does he deify someone he clearly knows is responsible for tens of millions of deaths?

“Grandpa Mao isn’t a perfect person; history views him 70% right and 30% wrong.” He paused, and then added, “But he’s truly a spiritual leader…Maoism is our (Chinese people’s) faith.”

“If it weren’t for Maoism and Grandpa Mao, China would still be in deep water.” He was referring to Mao’ role in leading the CCP to defeat the Kuomintang and establish the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, 1949.

Ten days before this historic moment of PRC, Mao delivered a rousing inauguration speech at the very first Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). Speaking in his hometown accent, the Party leader declared:

“Our work will be written into human’s history. It will signify that the Chinese people, one-fourth of humanity, have since stood up!”

My Chinese history textbooks, echoing this sentiment, read that under the CCP’s leadership, the founding of the PRC marked the “overthrow of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism.” Since then, the Chinese people have “taken hold of state power,” becoming “the masters of their nation.”

From what I can tell, my dad, who’s had his fair share of ups and downs in the Party-led public system, doesn’t seem to buy into all of this. Yet, as a middle-aged man raised on the legendary stories of Mao, he never hides his admiration for the founding father:

Before our conversation ended, he fluently recited a Chinese poem by Mao, where the then 16-year-old youth compared himself to a frog and wrote:

“If I don’t announce the arrival of the spring, which bug dares to make a sound?”

And my dad applauded this youthful ambition:

“He was born to be an emperor.”

“Ward off Evil”

The Mao’s posters in my grandma’s and grandpa’s houses are much older.The vibrant red and shimmering golden sunlight has already faded over time.

A faded poster of Mao in my grandma’s house, entitled “Red Sun”.

My grandma recalled buying the poster eight years ago when her husband was critically ill and showing no signs of recovery. She walked about 5 kilometers to the local fair to get it, sticking it high on the entrance wall for “good luck.”

“He is blessed,” the lifelong Buddhist said.

All my grandma could recall from her early years is being “poor and always hungry.” During that time, she unknowingly lived through the three-year Great Famine since 1959.

In May 1961, as hunger was still gripping the nation, Liu Shaoqi – then the elected successor of Mao yet later persecuted during the Cultural Revolution – echoed peasants' complaints about the famine, attributing it to “30% natural disasters and 70% man-made calamities.”

The “man-made” part pointed to Mao’s radical “Great Leap Forward” campaign, as recorded in the Historical Materials of the CCP.

Unaware of the link between her childhood hardships and the leader’s broader policies, my grandma sees Mao as a “God” and told me it’s perfectly fine to hang his portrait in my dad’s house instead of our family‘s.

She also told me there used to be factories making bronze statues of Mao (I found one still wrapped in plastic in my grandpa’s room) and many of her neighbours would go out of their way to make pilgrimages to Shaoshan – the Chairman’s birthplace – to worship him and pray for whatever they sought from their gods.

The bronze statue of Mao I found in my grandpa’s room.

And yes, my dad once took our whole family on this “pilgrimage” to Shaoshan too.

The same poster of Mao at my grandpa’s cottage was even older than my grandma’s. He couldn’t recall how long it’s been there.

“At that time, we respected Chairman Mao,” said the man in his 70s, whose family was once classified as “rich farmers.” Along with “landlords,” “counter-revolutionaries,” “bad influencers” and “rightists,” these five classes were all labelled as “enemies” during the Cultural Revolution.

“Besides, some said it could ward off evil,” he added.

To my surprise, even while living on the least informed outskirts of rural China, my grandpa was actually aware of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests through bits and pieces of hearsay. I had never heard him mention this nearly erased chapter of history, which I myself only learned about three years ago.

“Those were all university students; none of them were bad... Those things definitely didn’t make it into history... (Otherwise) it would be called ‘reactionary propaganda’,” he said. “It doesn’t look good.”

While he also said Mao improved life for ordinary folks, he deemed him “an emperor-like Chairman.”

Yet, all the political issues felt far too distant to rural folks like my grandpa.

“This political stuff is hard to tell. Not knowing is better than knowing – better not to ask at all.”

(Editor’s Note: Sage is the alias for Elephant Room’s authors who prefer to stay anonymous. )