The Mao Mango Cult of 1968 and the Rise of China's Working Class

There is a story of when people are given from "above" an item without an explanation, they imbue all kinds of meanings to it. Perhaps like in the past when a meteorite fell from the sky, all kinds of religious meanings and explanations for it followed.

The second aspect is that Mao recognized this and quickly capitalized on it. The lesson is, if you see a hype starting, regardless if it is irrational or not, it can be taken advantage of easily.

Then there is a third aspect, and that is the "middle managers" if you wish who also took this to a heart and punished and killed people over being irreverent to the "mango". It might have never been about the mango but it was a pretext who punish someone as a scapegoat to keep control and fear going, if it wasn't the mango it could have been another thing (joke about the party for ex).

As I read that I wondered what if you took one of the mango worshipers and ask them why they are respecting this mango object so much? I wonder what they would have said. You might get a different answer depending if they were afraid of repercussion if they seemed irreverent and didn't say "It is a symbol of Chairman Mao's Love or something.

One can draw a parallel here with cargo cult followers of technologies (frameworks, langauges, api, operation systems, products) and so on. When someone decides to pick a technology and you ask them "why did you pick this framework?" or "what made you want to learn that language?" you can learn quite bit by how they answer. Quite often you'll find they don't understand how basics work and you find out they picked it because it a cargo cult. They start repeating "canned" phrases they heard like "it is webscale" or "it is non-blocking so it is better". Or they say "this is slow" and "this is fast". And you ask "have you measured, how did you measure?". And they haven't, they just repeat something a friend with a cool shoes and haircut told them.

Cargo cult and hype following is not always black and white. I can see some validity at least on saying "a big company is sponsoring this toolkit, so I'll pick it because it will probably have enough ecosystem support to move forward". They might not understand the advantages or trade-offs so they use a heuristic. It is not bad, but it tells you something about the person, too.

It talks about how the mango went to some backwoods provinces of China - probably not electrified, where a farmer would be considered well-off if they owned a single animal - and how some had superstitious thoughts about it. How is that any different than the uproar we see in the rural US about biology and Darwin being taught in schools, since it contradicts some bizarre superstitions they have out there? In 2009 one of these rural religious types shot dead Dr. George Tiller in Kansas, as Bill O'Reilly and others were on the radio and television talking about how Tiller was the tool of the Devil. 1960s China is played up as being all crazy in this article, in contrast to what I assume would be a sane, modern US. The reality is rural idiocy, class resentments and so forth exist in both places at both times.

I also think the point about the mangoes is missed. It would be like saying an American flag displayed in a political demonstration was worshipped, or some doves let free during a peace demonstration were worshipped, or the CND peace symbol displayed during an anti-war demonstration was worshipped. The mangoes represented an end to much of the strife of the Cultural Revolution, and were understood as such. Most of the militant students were sent off to live in the countryside for a year or two, to cool them down and get them acquainted with the realities of the country. The mangoes represented peace, an end of strife, most people in Beijing understood it in this way, and did see them as a positive symbol. This either escaped the writer, or they are writing the same kind of propaganda they're accusing the Chinese of writing.