Burning Mao | Hacker News Reader

Burning Mao

granta.com

64 pointsbookofjoe57 comments

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https://archive.ph/1FQlr

Some examples and background on Warhol’s series of Mao prints here:

https://www.myartbroker.com/artist-andy-warhol/10-facts/10-f...

What a fantastic story.

That was a great read. Thanks

I always wonder the process of deciding which portrait to for famous people. There's much better more photogenic (younger + lushes locks) of Mao and other leaders of when they were politically active.

excellent story

[flagged]

T-shirts of Che...

I think the point is that Mao is in a very small club of individuals deemed responsible for tens of millions of deaths. Che is small fry in comparison.

Hipocrits with air superiority, the best of indentions does fix the idea, though mysteriously implementation after implementation goes sour. Almost as if it were tainted with failure, but that is impossible . The idea is good, the carriers are on the right side of history and everyone else is a monster..

Mao is still considered a great leader in China. His portrait appears on literally all Chinese banknotes in the current series (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_series_of_the_renminbi).

it just underlines GP's point.

Sarah Paine EP 3: How Mao Conquered China (Lecture & Interview) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l3Sa8ImGFQ&t=6325s

I doubt that is much comfort to the 50+ million victims of the failed policies and purges.

> 50+ million victims of the failed policies and purges.

You should't believe everything you read. Especially when it comes from a secret service.

The point of the work is to raise that question, among others. Is it acceptable? Chairman Mao was a "pop star" in China. Is that different than Elvis or Marilyn Monroe in the US? One is promoted by a repressive government while the others are promoted by capitalist media companies, but is the result all that different? Aren't they all "celebrities"?

And does Warhol's treatment celebrate them, or mock them? Is it respectful or does it reduce the person into a cartoon, a caricature, a meme? Does the very act of mass-producing an image elevate the subject's status, regardless of the content?

>> Is that different than Elvis or Marilyn Monroe in the US?

How many millions of people's deaths was Marilyn Monroe responsible for, as a rough estimate?

Little deaths or big deaths?

He is the founder of modern China, who ended the century of humiliation and restored the country's independence. Yes, it was messy. But what the west was doing against the country and the previous situation was not better.

oh no. Pooh, you ate all the propaganda instead of the honey.

> The systemic media control in authoritarian regimes is often inspired by China’s propaganda model. China (178th) remains the world’s largest jail for journalists and reentered the bottom trio of the Index, coming just ahead of North Korea (179th). -- https://rsf.org/en/rsf-world-press-freedom-index-2025-econom...

Is it surprising that the places with more conflicts has poor reporting ranking (according to this model)?

A media control does not need government to act openly. A mind-numbing patriotism can be as effective. Look at US reporting on the aftermath of 9/11. How many papers argued against Iraq or Afghanistan war? How many papers are talking about Gaza now? or even covering hands-off rallies?

Afghanistan is more complicated than that, due to the collective shock of a successful attack on US soil. Bush had to do something or the American people would have lynched him.

Iraq, though? There was tons of opposition to the Iraq War. It was only approved because people were lied to about the "weapons of mass destruction." Once the truth was out, a lot of us felt betrayed.

Iraq is a large part of why that particular segment of the Republican party (the neocons) lost its power. Which is a shame, really, given who replaced them...

> Yes, it was messy, but hardly bloodier than what the West was doing in the country at the time.

Can you expand on this?

The country was completely subjulgated by England, was sacked by several western powers. See the Opium Wars, the unequal treaties, several lands were stolen.

Thanks, but I was looking for an explanation of the "hardly more bloody" comment. I briefly looked up casualties for the things you listed and it's not even remotely close to the deaths attribute to Mao.

I edited the comment. Indeed, by the number of deaths, the last great famines surpass the deaths in war and occupation.

40m 80m. Does it really matter? It doesn’t change the fact he starved his country while he lived like a king all in the name of making China look better and richer than it was. It also doesn’t change the fact that it wasn’t until China opened up and embraced capitalism and rolled back Mao policies that it actually grew.

Read up on the Boxer Rebellion, then, if you're looking for large numbers of casualties.

Always amazing to me how we're all supposed to be outraged for chinese/Russians who suffered under particular rulers, while also being generally hostile to them as nations and people.

Sure you know about the most shameful war of all times, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars?wprov=sfla1

Yes, it was indeed a shameful war. Bloodier though? Not from my understanding. Happy to be corrected, though.

'Yes, it was messy.'

That's one way to describe Mao implementing such incompetent and exploitative policies that it leads to over 40 million Chinese people dying in famines and purges.

Well, Bush is seen as acceptable too. Or any US - or western - leader.

This is satire, surely?

Downplaying the severity of despots like Mao by comparing them to democratically elected leaders is incredibly disrespectful to the 45,000,000 people that died as a direct result of catastrophic and coercive policies.

Why is "democratically elected" so important? Democracies can also kill a lot of people. Hitler was democratically elected, so is Netanyahu.

If you are so inclined, one was had good intentions, but backfired badly while other is explicitly cruel.

care to say which you think is which?

A democratic leader remains democratic throughout their term. W did his time and bowed out at the end of it. Another party stepped in peacefully afterward.

The only way Hitler could have gone out was in a pine box. That's the difference. He may have been democratically elected, but he wasn't a democratic leader.

I assume the reference was to Bush’s foreign wars, which killed _dramatically_ fewer people (under a million even in the most expansive estimates I can find)… although they also brought widespread poverty, rather than mass industrialisation and wealth.

I guess you mean Jr who consumed a lot of coke when young, not his late CIA father who was shielding Jr from jail numerous times.

Middle east is as it is currently largely to his fuckups and made up invasions for reasons barely better than russian invasion of Ukraine, and Afghanistan failure is proper second Vietnam for US to the last details, just less movies about it so far so its largely ignored and people act like it didn't happen.

Republicans still uncritically celebrate him, when I dared to criticize him even here I got downvoted to hell pretty quickly. Yet he is directly responsible for death of millions of innocent civilians and indirectly caused ie Isis, not on Mao or Stalin level but still.

Because the CCP under Mao liberated China from foreign oppression.

Now whether you might argue that it was thanks to or rather despite Mao being in leadership is another matter and believe me I am in the "despite" camp but it still makes sense that he would have strong symbolic importance for the Chinese people.

People that will argue "oh he killed millions of people" need to get their head out of the cold war propaganda. I do believe his economic policy was criminal and was done against the advice of Soviet advisors but it is still not murder. His policy was idiotic, he was neglectful maybe but he did not purposefully cause a famine.

Saying it is the same or even worse are the purposeful, planned industrial scale mass murder that Hitler was responsible for under the Nazi regime is pure holocaust apologia. Plain and simple.

Criticizing Mao is "Holocaust apologia" because killing 45,000,000 of his citizenry was just an accident?

More people died then than during the Holocaust. More people dying is objectively worse, no matter how you slice it.

If I plan out how to kill someone, get the right weapon and execute on my plan, yeah that is murder.

If I see a donation stand for children in Africa and decide to rather buy a video game from that money, well some children are going to starve because of my decision but I haven't exactly killed them.

Blaming Mao for a famine is completely insane if you are not super brainwashed. He was a human not a god.

But considering you took the highest death toll estimation you could find already shows you are not interested in facts but in pushing a narrative.

If only Mao had been aware that he was human and not a god. He didn't allow any criticism of his ideas, and that makes him entirely culpable for the results.

The 5 - 10 million Congolese who died under Belgian rule is probably much higher as a percentage of the population than the great leap forward.

Great leap forward killed 4% of Chinese population. Vietnam war killed 10% - 12% of people in Vietnam. I do not see condemnation of US here..Rather, I see the celebration that US has a democracy.

The Vietnam War caused a lot of changes politically and militarily in the US because the US is a democracy. We make a lot more effort not to go around slaughtering civilians these days. Nobody wants to be a babykiller.

War has never been nice, but peace is supposed to be. It wasn't some foreign invader that killed that 4% of China's population, it was their own government - the organization whose primary purpose is to look out for their welfare.

Not exactly. It’s just that much more effort is put into making crimes acceptable to the general public. Embedded 'independent' journalists, collateral damage, precission weapons, 'mistakes’ everywhere, and the usual ‘but we are a democracy' - along with a bunch of similar justifications. It still results in over a million deaths, but now it’s perfectly acceptable to the majority of people.

Well, I suppose we should start killing our own civilians then, since that seems to be what people approve of these days. "Only 4%" should be about right, yes?

Are you sure? The US still killed a lot of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the unconditional support for Israel's intentional murder of civilians and children.

Yep. It's an order of magnitude difference. Civilian casualties happen with any non-trivial war, but the US set policies and added training for military members to try to minimize it. You can thank the hippies for that.

Israel is a different matter, and it's all a political mess.

But bear in mind that these are foreign deaths. A government is responsible for its own people, not those of other countries. I realize hating on US is the popular thing these days, but at least we don't let large percentages of our own people starve.

Sounds to me like the US still doesn't care enough about civilians yet. More than in Vietnam, but still less than many other countries, who also don't let their own people starve, but also don't let them die from preventable disease or school shootings.

"Better than China" is too low a bar for a democracy.

> We make a lot more effort not to go around slaughtering civilians these days. Nobody wants to be a babykiller.

Citation needed. The only effort US is making, is for hiding its crimes. Killing all people at a wedding because there is a "terrorist" (which was earlier trained by US) present there, is no excuse.

I will always condemn the Vietnam War, as well as Leopold 2's murderous regime in Congo Free State. Those do not excuse Mao's murderous policies, no matter how necessary it was to repair China after the destructive Opium Wars. It was under Deng Xiao Ping that China's recovery began.

Everything is a matter of perspective, ... and propaganda.

Mao was broadly successful. Trading 5% of abundant population for superstructure of modern Chinese state that subsequent leadership snowballed into what PRC is today is frankly a bargin. You don't get modern PRC state capacity without Mao speedrunning industrialization and cultural heterogeneity. Nation building on scale of PRC from the shit state post war China is hard. He didn't ace it, but vs developing peers post war that spluttered, or the other billion+ country with more favourable starting conditions, grading on a curve, Mao gets top marks, especially when PRC was playing on extra hard mode with US containment.

And many Christian churches prominently display art featuring Satan. It's always less about what is actually in the picture and more about the message the picture is supposed to send and how people actually interpret it.

Hitler and Nazis have been used as comic reliefs in Western popular culture. You can supposedly make anything more funny in an absurd way by adding some gratuitous Nazis. Communist leaders such as Stalin and Mao are often used ironically. Sometimes because people find the socialist realism art style aesthetically pleasing, and sometimes due to the irony of turning a communist leader into commercial art.

Mao portraits are not posted as comic relief, nor are they posted a warnings of what not to be like picture of Satan.

Do you know the motivations of those who hanged Mao portraits, or are you just guessing? I wouldn't know, as I'm not even sure I had seen Warhol's Mao portraits before today. But I've known plenty of people who went to a current or former commmunist country and brought back ironic communist kitsch.

Bringing back communist kitsch is not the same as posting a picture of a mass murderer. I have communist kitsch, in particular from China. The graphic design is amazing. I still don't get what you don't get. I think most people get why most people wouldn't hang picture so Hitler. If anyone deserves to be considered just as bad and just as worthy of not being displayed as decoration it certainly seems to be Mao

Agreed

The article was a good story. Strange though that people cherish these Mao pictures and put them on display. I like Andy Warhol but putting Mao up seems like putting a picture of Hitler on your wall. And no, this isn't Godwin's Law. The comparison seems to fit given he's one of the top 3 mass murders of all time

https://www.heritage.org/china/commentary/the-legacy-mao-zed...

https://www.chinafile.com/library/nyrb-china-archive/who-kil...

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