Lenin's Kisses

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While still alive, Chairman Mao had insisted that he wished to be cremated after his death, but instead his corpse was embalmed and placed on display in a crystal coffin in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Despite persistent speculation that the corpse currently on display is actually a replica (reinforced by reports by his personal physician that the initial embalming process had been badly botched), the mausoleum remains enormously popular, frequently drawing lines of tourists that extend half a mile or more. Commemorating a man who is credited with founding modern China but is also tacitly blamed for many of its attendant disasters, the Mao Zedong Mausoleum is a curious hybrid — part historical relic, part religious shrine, and part tourist attraction. Emblematic of a broader proliferation of Maoist artifacts that are alternately treated as fetish, kitsch, and good luck charm — a contemporary phenomenon that Geremie Barmé calls “shades of Mao”—Mao’s embalmed corpse literally embodies some of the contradictions that mark the peculiar historical juncture at which China currently finds itself, as it shifts abruptly from communist austerity to what is euphemistically described as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

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