Reddest Red Sun
Shades of Mao | MaoSpeak
By Wang Shuo
Introduction by Geremie Barmé
Many selections in this volume [Shades of Mao] reek of MaoSpeak, or NewChina NewSpeak (Xinhua wenti), popularised on Mainland China as the political and social lingua franca from the 1940s. The Beijing novelist Wang Shuo utilized this language from the late 1980s in his satirical studies of life under socialism in its terminal phase.1
In the works of Wang Shuo the play on Maoist language was part of a sincere at the same time as ironic revival of Mao and, in the early 1990s, Wang's work created a fad of its own which encouraged a tongue-in-cheek recycling of Party language in the Chinese media, in particular TV. MaoSpeak did indeed repeat itself, first as tragedy then as farce.
Wang's nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution is real and vital. For him and many of his generation what was officially dubbed the "ten years of chaos" (shinian dongluan) had offered opportunities for sexual liberation, playing truant and the joys of gang warfare.2 In 1990s' China, with the help of Deng's Reform policies, Wang and his fellows helped turn the rowdy youth culture of the Cultural Revolution into a pseudo-ethos of the Reform Age. Many of them also made a lot of money out of China's further social and cultural degradation. The anti-intellectualism evident in much of Wang's work--he consistently lambasts Chinese intellectuals--has also antagonized some readers who see in it a disturbing streak of chip-on-the-shoulder Maoist hooliganism. He has defended himself by quoting Mao Zedong: "The lowly are the most intelligent; the Žlite are quite ignorant", and he claims that only by overthrowing the intellectuals can people like him enjoy true freedom (fanshen).3Although one may appreciate Wang's dim view of intellectuals, to use satire, a weapon traditionally best employed against the powerful, to consistently denegrate the weak and powerless is not so much funny as vulgar.
