THE ROAD to Chairman Mao’s birthplace in Shaoshan City is lined with stalls selling statues and busts of the “Great Helmsman” at various stages in his career, some bearing an amazing likeness while others look nothing like the man, or the icon.
In a country where quality control is a major political issue, where shoddily made medicine kills hundreds every year and badly fashioned goods tarnish China’s reputation abroad, something had to be done.
Enter the Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervision in Hunan province. They have drawn up a list of rules and regulations about how exactly the statues of the founder of the modern Communist nation are to be made.
“The move is expected to curtail the production and sale of low-quality Mao statues that harm the tourism market and people’s feeling for the great man,” the bureau’s chief engineer, Jiang Tao, said.
Despite the ravages of the cultural revolution and the disastrous social agricultural reform known as the Great Leap Forward, Mao is still an icon in China, considered by the ruling Communist Party to be “70 per cent good, 30 per cent bad”. His portrait still gazes out fondly over Tiananmen Square in central Beijing, and his hometown is a place of pilgrimage.
Some of the statues accentuate the head, making the leader look strangely deformed, while others simply break too easily. The lack of quality control has been causing some distress.
“Many statues don’t look like the man himself. Some have a weird appearance and others have obvious quality defects,” 67-year-old Shaoshan resident Mao Anping, a relative of the “Great Helmsman”, said.
From July 1st, mass-produced statues must pass a strict examination by at least five experts to ensure the facial expression, hairstyle, body-features, costume and posture reflect Mao’s real appearance, the regulations say.
Those not meeting the new standards can be seized and destroyed. This is a big business. According to the city’s tourism bureau, the souvenir market reported sales income of nearly €100 million last year, 70 per cent of which was from Mao statues.
“The establishment of the standards reflects people’s respect and love for my grandfather . . . It will have significant bearing on the promotion of China’s revolutionary traditions and patriotism,” said Mao’s 40-year-old grandson, Mao Xinyu.
