Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

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Mao is still considered a great leader in China. His portrait appears on literally all Chinese banknotes in the current series (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_series_of_the_renminbi).

Because the CCP under Mao liberated China from foreign oppression.

Now whether you might argue that it was thanks to or rather despite Mao being in leadership is another matter and believe me I am in the "despite" camp but it still makes sense that he would have strong symbolic importance for the Chinese people.

People that will argue "oh he killed millions of people" need to get their head out of the cold war propaganda. I do believe his economic policy was criminal and was done against the advice of Soviet advisors but it is still not murder. His policy was idiotic, he was neglectful maybe but he did not purposefully cause a famine.

Saying it is the same or even worse are the purposeful, planned industrial scale mass murder that Hitler was responsible for under the Nazi regime is pure holocaust apologia. Plain and simple.

Agreed

The article was a good story. Strange though that people cherish these Mao pictures and put them on display. I like Andy Warhol but putting Mao up seems like putting a picture of Hitler on your wall. And no, this isn't Godwin's Law. The comparison seems to fit given he's one of the top 3 mass murders of all time

https://www.heritage.org/china/commentary/the-legacy-mao-zed...

https://www.chinafile.com/library/nyrb-china-archive/who-kil...

Mao was broadly successful. Trading 5% of abundant population for superstructure of modern Chinese state that subsequent leadership snowballed into what PRC is today is frankly a bargin. You don't get modern PRC state capacity without Mao speedrunning industrialization and cultural heterogeneity. Nation building on scale of PRC from the shit state post war China is hard. He didn't ace it, but vs developing peers post war that spluttered, or the other billion+ country with more favourable starting conditions, grading on a curve, Mao gets top marks, especially when PRC was playing on extra hard mode with US containment.

Well, Bush is seen as acceptable too. Or any US - or western - leader.

He is the founder of modern China, who ended the century of humiliation and restored the country's independence. Yes, it was messy. But what the west was doing against the country and the previous situation was not better.

The point of the work is to raise that question, among others. Is it acceptable? Chairman Mao was a "pop star" in China. Is that different than Elvis or Marilyn Monroe in the US? One is promoted by a repressive government while the others are promoted by capitalist media companies, but is the result all that different? Aren't they all "celebrities"?

And does Warhol's treatment celebrate them, or mock them? Is it respectful or does it reduce the person into a cartoon, a caricature, a meme? Does the very act of mass-producing an image elevate the subject's status, regardless of the content?

And many Christian churches prominently display art featuring Satan. It's always less about what is actually in the picture and more about the message the picture is supposed to send and how people actually interpret it.

Hitler and Nazis have been used as comic reliefs in Western popular culture. You can supposedly make anything more funny in an absurd way by adding some gratuitous Nazis. Communist leaders such as Stalin and Mao are often used ironically. Sometimes because people find the socialist realism art style aesthetically pleasing, and sometimes due to the irony of turning a communist leader into commercial art.

Hipocrits with air superiority, the best of indentions does fix the idea, though mysteriously implementation after implementation goes sour. Almost as if it were tainted with failure, but that is impossible . The idea is good, the carriers are on the right side of history and everyone else is a monster..

T-shirts of Che...