Why Did He Do It?

The logic of necessity, especially economic necessity, is remorseless and often cruel. Well, at least it is if China is the test case. Not so long ago, for example, China was one of the world’s poorer countries under the autocratic rule of a brilliant but capricious revolutionary leader named Mao Tse-tung, whose final years in vindictive near-senility set a world standard for mayhem. He and communist China were easy fodder for right-wing ideologues and right-thinking capitalists trying to show the evil of a particularly virulent brand of fascistic socialism. This was balanced on the Left by the “useful idiots” who saw in Mao’s revolution and rule some sort of paradigm for humankind’s inevitable community-based future.

Now, in the wake of China’s phenomenal economic emergence as the motor of western consumerism and capitalist expansion, things have changed. Now China holds the whole world in its thrall as its greatest single liability—a massive population—has been transformed into its greatest single asset. Cheap labour has also managed, and not so subtly, to transform western capitalism’s view of the Chinese dictatorship and has also brought about a change in thinking about human rights and their relative role in the relations between states. The Left and the Right in the West have do-si-doed with such enthusiasm that they have switched partners and entered another dance altogether.

Which is why Denise Chong’s extraordinary new book, Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship, is such a useful, timely and devastating corrective. Subtitles usually give you a context, but Egg on Mao has a subtitle that tells the whole story and suggests the context is in the actual tale. It is indeed the story of an ordinary man—named Lu Decheng—who defaced an icon and unmasked a dictatorship. The time was 1989 during the great anti-government student protests in Beijing centred on the “take-over” of Tiananmen Square. Lu and two close friends from the sleepy town of Liuyang in Hunan province had managed to save enough money to travel to Beijing during the demonstrations, determined to leave their own mark on the rising discontent. What they, in fact, managed to do was throw ink on the iconic image of Chairman Mao that surmounts the entrance to the Forbidden City. The portrait hangs below the rostrum Chairman Mao mounted in 1949 to declare China was “forever” to be under communist control. It is as close to a sacred shrine as communist China has. This act of “vandalism” got Lu and his chums arrested, tried and sentenced to long prison sentences. The story has extra poignancy because it was the student rebels who arrested Lu, fearful that he might have been a police provocateur. Eventually, Lu got out of prison and, through allies and western agencies, managed to get to Canada, where he met the author of this book.

This does not, on such a skeletal outline, sound like much. The rebel literature of China is already rich with far more amazing stories than this dramatically naive and ostensibly minor tale. What makes it such a deeply moving and important book is the research Denise Chong has done to root out Lu Decheng’s prior life, set it in the context of the emerging China and relate the young man’s extraordinary breakthrough in thinking that led him to see that the route to China’s human rights emancipation was directly blocked by the record of Chairman Mao and the continuing veneration for his revolutionary achievements.

Apologists on all sides of contemporary China will tell you that “of course” Chairman Mao made mistakes, some of them even, possibly, maybe even probably, catastrophic, but we must never forget that he set China on a course that lifted the great mass of the Chinese people out of a morass of deprivation and despair. It was Lu’s insight that the exact opposite was true, that if it was true that Chairman Mao raised hopes very high, it was equally true that no leader in recent Chinese history—and that includes both Chiang Kai-shek and the Dowager Empress—led more Chinese into misery than the Great Helmsman.

In defacing the picture of Mao, which was shown around the world, Lu Decheng hit at the core of the communist deceit: that at its root the Maoist revolution was “a good thing.” For with this shocking assault—done by filling empty egg shells full of ink and hurling them with remarkable vigour and accuracy at the picture—he was, as the subtitle reports, unmasking the true face of the dictatorship.

Lu and his friends paid a terrible price and basically gave up their youth to make their point. The real point of the book is to find out why. Why bother, in the first place? Why not just let things be? Lu’s often cruel and mostly pig-stupid father spoke for the majority—inside and outside China!—when he thrashed and berated his son for naiveté and ingratitude and insubordination. Why did Lu do it?

Denise Chong discovered the answer and it turned out to be the same as Martin Luther’s and the same as all the other great rebels of history: because he could do no other. With the intensity of his understanding of the inherent evil of the regime, not to have done something would have struck Lu Decheng as a parallel evil. The account Chong has researched of his troubled youth is as insightful about everyday China as anything I have read. You feel as if you are with this young guy all the way, experiencing his defeats and triumphs, shaking your head over first the differences and then the similarities between your own life and those of the Chinese.

In two earlier and well-acclaimed books, The Concubine’s Children (a family memoir built around her maternal grandmother) and The Girl in the Picture: The Story of Kim Phuc (about the girl who was napalmed during the Vietnam War and caught in another iconic image), Chong displayed her ability to handle complex human issues with skillful juxtapositioning. In Egg on Mao, the interplay is between the central incident in Tiananmen Square and the account of Lu Decheng’s youth and his subsequent incarceration inside the vast Chinese penal system, so what we end up getting is a coming-of-age memoir, a suspenseful action tale and a prison documentary—all of them handled with astonishing adroitness.

For myself, the most moving part of the book was the account of Lu Decheng’s relationship with his grandmother. If we are lucky in life, there will be someone who becomes our champion or our touchstone, from whom we draw both inspiration and strength. Lu’s mother died young and miserably; his father was a jerk of the first order; in school Lu was a misfit; but his grandmother Lu, it turned out, was his shield and buckler. It helped that she was the widow of a “revolutionary hero,” as it gave her, and to some extent her grandson, a little more leeway in China’s stifling society, although certainly not enough to save Lu from the consequences of his astonishing act of rebellion.

But the grandmother understood the fraud of Mao’s premises even better than Lu Decheng. She had seen the “misery” of pre-revolutionary China and was a direct beneficiary of the Maoist experiment, but her own experience led her to understand there was a net diminution of life in her country under the communists. What Lu Decheng got from the stark polarities of his early life—the fragile love of his mother, the brutality of his father, the unstinting loyalty of his granny, the arbitrary ruthlessness of official China—ended up hugely informing his broad conviction that Maoist China was a morally fraudulent regime, lingering on to prop up the post-Maoist governance of China.

The lessons of his childhood also helped to sustain his courage and fuel his hopes during his gruesome imprisonment. Egg on Mao can be added to a growing literature delineating communist China’s grotesque prison rituals, where it is never enough merely to eke out one’s grim sentence, but it must be done with cruel and hardly unusual punishment: thought reform, mental abasement, peer betrayal and gradual cretinization. That Lu emerged mentally shaken and physically weakened was not surprising; that his moral universe and spirit survived intact was a kind of miracle.

This is not a book to be given to anyone who thinks it is great the way China keeps labour costs down and holds the key to western prosperity. At least not immediately. Better to give them Das Kapital first—Marx will be less taxing on their conscience.