Mao meets Louis

Opinion: July 13, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

By Daniel K. GARDNER

Los Angeles Times

Mao Tse-tung, Confucius and Louis Vuitton have been mixing it up lately on China’s most-renowned stage: Tiananmen Square.

For decades, Mao’s portrait has hung over the Tiananmen Gate at the far north of the square, at the entrance to the Forbidden City, even as his embalmed body has lain in the mausoleum built immediately after his death in the center of the square. Chairman Mao, the Great Helmsman, founder of the People’s Republic of China, looms mightily over the square, reminding the Chinese people of the Communist Party’s achievement in raising the country out of its “feudal” and impoverished past and restoring it to prosperity and global influence.

Confucius

On Jan. 13, Mao was joined in the square by a figure of at least equal repute in China: Confucius. Born in 551 BC, the sage, as he is known, left behind a set of teachings as influential as any the world has known. These teachings became the basis of state ideology by the 2nd century BC, and remained so, with some ups and downs, for more than two millenniums. But with the opening decades of the 20th century, prominent intellectuals and political figures attacked Confucian teachings as largely responsible for China’s backwardness and weakness relative to the West.

Mao in particular disliked what he believed to be the enduring effects of Confucius’ “feudal” practices on the people and, during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, called on the Red Guards to destroy texts, temples, sites and statues associated with Confucius.

No small irony then that, suddenly, in early January, a 17-ton statue of the sage appeared in front of the north gate of the newly renovated National Museum of China — facing Mao’s 15-by-20-foot visage hanging above the Tiananmen Gate.

Now, if Mao himself wasn’t agitated, his loyal supporters apparently were. Confucius, after all, was an affront to all that Mao had stood — and fought — for. Consequently, Confucius disappeared on April 20, as suddenly and mysteriously as he had appeared three months earlier. No one has yet to explain the statue’s comings and goings, but pundits assume, no doubt rightly, that Confucius’ appearance and disappearance represent behind-the-scenes political jockeying between different camps within the leadership.

Louis Vuitton

So, Confucius has exited the square. Enter Louis Vuitton. The French luxury goods company has taken up a perch almost exactly where the bronze Confucius had been set down. But rather than outside the north entrance of the National Museum, Louis Vuitton is inside the National Museum. Next to rare porcelain vases and bronze vessels, in a four-room exhibition, are LV luggage and handbags dating to the 1860s, reminding museum-goers of all the luxury the Chinese missed out on after the country’s fall from power in the mid-19th century. It’s clever marketing in a country where the world’s high-end brands are competing in a newly consumerist culture.

Confucius has been chased from Mao’s square, but can Louis Vuitton, the representative of capitalist luxury and wasteful consumption, be any more palatable to the chairman?

Daniel K. Gardner is a professor of history and the director of the program in East Asian studies at Smith College and the author of ChinaMusings.com. He wrote this for the Los Angeles Times. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune.