Chinese Capitalists Celebrate Communist Leader With Giant Gold Statue

History is fickle. In many ways, it is a fiction created during modern times. China provides a prime example of how this fiction is written and gains a wide following. 2015 was filled with numerous creations, especially leading up to the military parade in September, which was patrolled by monkeys and falcons.

 As part of the celebration to commemorate the Chinese victory over Japan in World War II, a film titled The Cairo Declaration was released. It stressed how critical of a role Mao Zedong played in this victory and how he persuaded Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to give China control over Asia. The most glaring problem of this interpretation is that Mao wasn’t in Egypt and didn’t meet with Roosevelt or Churchill. Instead, Mao’s enemy, Chiang Kai-shek, discussed policy with the allied leaders.

So why the history lesson? Because as 2016 dawns, the legacy of Mao is once again being misappropriated. The irony this time around is that rather than his great political rival being whitewashed out of history, it is Mao himself getting the runaround from a group of Chinese businessmen. In a village within Tongxu County, located in the Henan Province, these individuals, many of whom made their money by engaging in capitalist business practices, decided to acknowledge Mao’s legacy on their economic achievements, even though he would deem their actions criminal.

In this central province, which has little more than forests and plains, the golden statue is in stark contrast to its surroundings. Towering over everything, the statue to The Great Helmsman stands 121 feet tall. The golden paint on the outside of the ‘Chairman in His Chair’ statue compliments the silver chair upon which the statue rests. In a bizarre design scheme, there is actually a second Mao head sitting on the ground at the base of the memorial. The statue, including the second head, cost over $460,000.

Many people in China have taken to Weibo to criticize the wasteful spending of so much money on a remote statue, which is not even located near accessible roads, when that money could better be spent helping the poor in the nation, as Mao would have wanted. There’s also the sticky issue that the former Communist leader’s Great Leap Forward policy led to a Great Famine in Henan Province that resulted in over one million of the area’s residents starving to death in the 1950s. Despite this failure, Mao’s legacy is continually being trumpeted under China’s current president, Xi Jinping, For instance, the former Chairman’s favorite revolutionary opera was recently turned into a movie, while students at the top tier of Chinese universities can take an online course titled ‘Mao Zedong Thought.’ Wonder if it covers the difference between communism and capitalism, since there seems to be some confusion on that subject in the country at the moment.

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