One of China's hottest-selling pop music albums has a cheerful disco beat and lyrics from the violent Cultural Revolution, glorifying Mao Tse-tung as China's "reddest sun."
"Red Sun: Songs of Mao Tse-tung" has sold 1.7 million copies since its release in December, and it has sparked considerable controversy in the process.Reasons for the album's popularity are varied, alternately alarming and amusing many Chinese. Both reformists and hard-liners are invoking Communist China's founder to back their agendas, though many young people treat Mao-mania as a joke. Others just like the music.
The cassette has 30 songs from the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when Mao rallied millions of youths to smash temples, burn books and imprison bureaucrats and intellectuals in his name. Tens of thousands of people were killed and millions of others uprooted.
Zhou Jianchao, manager of the China Record Co.'s Shanghai branch, which produced the cassette, said it's popular because the songs are adaptations of familiar tunes.
"When young and middle-aged people listen to it, they feel these are their songs," he said in a telephone interview.
To increase the commercial appeal, the songs have been set to a disco beat that fits oddly with the Mao-cult lyrics:
"The golden sun rises in the east,
Its radiance is endless.
Great teacher, brilliant leader,
Respected and beloved Chairman Mao,
Red sun in our hearts,
Long live Chairman Mao."
Zhou said sales of 100,000 copies qualify an album as a "hit." But it is impossible to gauge this album's genuine popularity because purchases by schools and work units usually inflate the sales of political tapes and books.
He said his company decided to "dig up old songs" as a change from the Taiwanese and Hong Kong pop songs that dominate China's music industry.
The switch is not for the better, Shanghai's Liberation Daily newspaper said recently in an acidic commentary.
"We cannot again create a god and a personality cult," said the commentary. It was signed with a pen name, Shang Que, and the newspaper refused to disclose anything about him.
"To say that the public is using `Red Sun' to cherish the memory of that time, is tantamount to saying that people who now can say anything they want are nostalgic for an era when they could be criticized for every word; that people who can shop at ease today are nostalgic for a time when each family was rationed."
"Our society is complicated and people's motives are subtle," he added, hinting but not directly charging that the tape was made for political motives.
Mao's memory has already become a pawn in a complicated power struggle between reformists and conservatives in the current leadership. Over the past year, both groups have taken to quoting Mao to bolster their positions.
The conservatives also have tried to create a "Mao fever" by releasing movies and books about him and allowing production of Mao posters, which vanished in China during the reformist 1980s.
Many young people ridicule the "Mao fever." Some students wear Mao T-shirts with the words, "Study hard and get ahead," to express cynicism about forced political study.
Some older workers have begun wearing Mao pins to show dissatisfaction with the current leaders.
Senior leader Deng Xiaoping, 87, who clashed with Mao during his life and undid Mao's policies after his death, might enjoy the last song on the tape: "Revolutionaries are always young."