Mao Zedong and the Populist Art of Mourning

• In Event: Democracy Theory and Chinese Political Thought

Abstract

Mourning has been an essential but underexplored component of political thought since Antigone. Mourning is important to political theory because the act of mourning itself is a way of relating an individual or a community to its past. Members of a political community interpret the past as they situate themselves in a temporality through mourning. Through mourning, interpretations of the past become incorporated into collective subjectivity, thus demonstrating different political possibilities for the future.

Recent political theory literature on mourning tends to emphasize how mourning connects grief to anger and rage, thus enabling a radical, resistant, counterpolitical subjectivity. In particular, the tension between mourning's public-oriented dimensions and the ruling power's vested interests in maintaining order, which can be traced back to the tension between Antigone and Creon, has been explored by agnostic democratic theorists. In this literature, mourning is largely seen as a moment of creation for extraordinary radical politics that breeds potential challenges to the status quo.

In this paper, I draw on Mao Zedong's speeches on mourning to explore the ordinary aspects of mourning in radical politics. In the midst of an ongoing revolution in which deaths were almost a regular part of the revolutionaries' lives, Mao made several speeches addressing the issue of mourning and mourning rituals to cadres in the Communist Party of China. In these speeches, Mao proposed another way of dealing with losses that implies making mourning an ordinary component of life. Mao's theory of mourning demonstrates another reason why mourning is an essential part of radical politics--it enables a way of thinking about sacrifices and losses that does not destroy the radical subjectivity's capacity to act when confronted by excessive deaths.

The paper will be divided into three sections. First, I examine discussions of mourning in the history of political thought and contemporary political theory. I discuss why the tension between Antigone and Creon constantly returns to contemporary political activism. Public mourning has the potential to disrupt the status quo of the mnemonic sphere. It challenges the ideological foundation of the ruling power by making usually invisible losses visible and contesting its interpretations of the past. This is why mourning is often considered a moment of transition from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Second, I read Mao's speeches and discuss why it was crucial for Mao to contemplate a way of making sense of deaths that emphasizes routinizing mourning rituals. Revolutions are often characterized by excessive death. By proposing simplified mourning rituals for all involved in the revolution, Mao envisages the possibility of uniting the people, thus creating a populist understanding of revolutionary subjectivity that has the potential to challenge the hierarchal chains of responsibility in a centralized revolutionary party.

Finally, I discuss the theoretical implications of the difference in mourning between Mao and radical democrats. I argue that arguments from both sides make our understanding of radical actions more comprehensive. Initiation is critical for radical action, as demonstrated by radical democratic arguments about mourning. Mao's proposal, on the other hand, signifies how mourning is important for confronting death in revolutions and creating a concept of subjectivity crucial for sustainable revolutionary action.

Author

• Simon Sihang Luo, Nanyang Technological University