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Abstract: What does it mean when Mao Zedong is called 'Father Mao' and when ordinary people in central China put a poster of Mao in the place of their ancestors and the emperor? This article analyzes ordinary affection for the Chinese state and explores changing ideas of the leader as a father and the country as a family. The first part deals with the historical transformation of these metaphors from the late Qing dynasty to the Communist Revolution and Maoism, describing the vernacularization and sentimentalization of the 'Confucian order of the father/son' in twentieth-century China. Against this historical background and based on fieldwork material from central China, the second part deals with the 'mixed feelings' that people in the present day now have for fathers at home, for local officials, and for national leaders.
Keywords: affect, China, emotions, governance, Mao Zedong, parental authority, the state
To avoid therefore the evils of inconstancy and versatility, ten thousand times worse than those of obstinacy and the blindest prejudice, we have consecrated the state, that no man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions but with due caution; that he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion; that he should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude. By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country, who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces, and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds, and wild incantations, they may regenerate the paternal constitution, and renovate their father's life. (Burke 1906: 206-207)
In farmhouses in the Enshi region of Hubei province, the clearly defined center of the house is the back wall of the central room. This is the place of the house altar or shrine (E. jiashen, P. shenkan),1 which is now often replaced by a poster of Mao Zedong. In the past, people in villages of the township of Bashan2 placed a scroll in the house altar with Chinese characters saying "The position of Heaven, Earth, Ruler, Kin, and Teachers" (tian di jun qin shi wei). This scroll neatly embodies some core...