COLUMN ONE : Another Great Leap With Mao : The late Chairman’s appeal is enjoying a comeback among Chinese. The buttons, photos and songs are partly fad and symbolism, with a touch of nostalgia for old times.

The small portrait of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, prominently displayed in the taxi windshield, branded the driver as a convert to a new kind of Maoism that is sweeping China.

“Of course Chairman Mao was a great man,” the driver told a visitor to the southern city of Changsha, near Mao’s birthplace. “But he’s also a god who can drive away evil spirits.”

Mao--the towering figure who led vast peasant armies to victory, the revolutionary who killed landlords, persecuted intellectuals and attacked religion, the dreamer who launched ill-fated schemes of communes, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution--this same Mao is now being raised into a god, or, one might say, being reduced to a good-luck charm.

The new cult of Mao is a fiercely complicated matter. It reflects political maneuverings within China’s top leadership as well as the deepest longings of a society that has largely lost its moorings. The phenomenon lacks any strong connection with what Mao actually said and did when he ruled China, but that may simply boost its potential as a unifying force for the nation.

A few years ago, as huge Mao statues were toppled in cities across China, it seemed only a matter of time before Mao’s portrait might also come down from its famous place of honor on Tian An Men--the Gate of Heavenly Peace--in downtown Beijing. But now, with Mao being reincarnated as a kind of mildly deified George Washington figure, the need for such a symbolic rejection is fading.

In the quasi-capitalistic southern city of Canton, elderly women selling coupons for the state-run lottery also peddle plastic-laminated good-luck Mao photos. Private entrepreneurs post his portrait in their shops. Few seem bothered by the fact that, intellectually and politically, Mao stood opposed to everything they are doing today. “He’s become a god” is somehow supposed to explain it all.

A craze for placing Mao photos in car windows gathered strength in southern provinces last year and now has reached Beijing. Especially popular among taxi drivers, the fad is accompanied by various versions of traffic-accident stories where Mao saved those who sought his protection.

The Changsha driver said that as he understood it, the protective power of Mao portraits first became widely recognized after an eight-vehicle pileup in Canton two years ago. A single driver escaped without injury--and he had a Mao picture in his windshield.

While such beliefs provide an important part of its driving force, the new Maoism encompasses much more than just superstition. For those who tend to nostalgia, Mao, who led China from 1949 until his death in 1976, stood for an era of stable prices, official egalitarianism, revolutionary fervor and Chinese pride. Never mind that it also was a time of fearsome political controls and unending poverty.

The June 4, 1989, massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing gave a powerful boost to the memory of Mao. However brutal Mao’s methods may have been, few people believe he would have used the army to shoot down citizens in the streets of the capital.

The unusual history of China’s current ruling elite gives the memory of Mao a double-edged role in today’s politics. The 1989 crackdown was ordered by a group of aging revolutionaries, led by senior leader Deng Xiaoping, who first came to power as Mao’s comrades-in-arms in 1949. Virtually all were struck down by Mao during the chaotic Cultural Revolution, but they rebounded after his death to take supreme power a few years later. Mao, as leader of the Communist revolution, symbolizes their most fundamental claim to legitimacy. Yet at the same time he remains the one person who ever succeeded in throwing them from power.

Against this background, shifting attitudes toward Mao reflect a multifaceted struggle to define the heritage of “the Great Helmsman.”

Hard-liners within the top leadership have sought to shape his legacy to their benefit by ordering the production of films, books and newspaper commentaries that glorify the memory of Mao in ways that justify Communist rule.

But when college students hang Mao posters on their dormitory walls, no one really believes they are praising communism.

“People cannot directly say that they are dissatisfied with the present leaders, so they use Mao as a symbol to represent their feelings,” explained a fourth-year woman student from a Beijing campus, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Especially after June 4 (1989), people began to talk about Mao again. Students began wearing Mao buttons to show that they were sick of the present leaders.”

Some people whose families were attacked during the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution still feel uncomfortable at the sight of a Mao poster. But to a large degree, the people of China seem prepared to forgive Mao for what are usually viewed as his “excesses” and “mistakes.”

Mao was “a great man” who must be credited with establishing “New China,” even though “most people now believe that after 1958 he went crazy and became very strange,” said a student from Beijing’s Qinghua University. Mao is like a grandfather who has passed away, and who must be revered regardless of the errors committed during his lifetime, she explained.

“Mao gave everyone a common goal to work for,” a woman in her early 40s, whose father spent the entire Cultural Revolution in prison, said with a touch of cynicism but no apparent bitterness. “He said we would do things together for everyone’s benefit.”

For many Chinese, Mao represents “an innocent time, an idealistic time, a simple time,” this woman explained. “That’s why people feel nostalgic about him.”

China’s situation today, where people enjoy more freedom but also face more competition and anxiety, “is like the case of a little girl who stays at home all the time,” she added. “Finally one day, she wakes up in bed with her new husband. She cannot go back to her old life.”

The new Maoist wave is reflected in an upsurge of visitors to the chairman’s birthplace in the Hunan province village of Shaoshan. In 1980, when China’s economic reforms were just getting started and much of Mao’s still-fresh legacy was being repudiated, about 210,000 people visited his childhood home--only about one-fifth the average number of visitors during the Cultural Revolution. Last year, the number of visitors was back above 1 million, according to the New China News Agency.

Mao’s mausoleum in Beijing’s Tian An Men Square also saw an increase in visitors last year, with more than 8 million people filing through to view his embalmed body, the official news agency reported.

During the last few months, updated new tapes of Cultural Revolution-era songs praising Mao--with the music transformed into a rock ‘n’ roll style--have taken China by storm. “Red Sun,” the first of these tapes to hit the market, sold 1 million copies during the first six weeks of this year, the New China News Agency said.

The Mao phenomenon is rich with irony, if not outright schizophrenia. One of the trendiest stores in Beijing, for example, is a new outlet for Benetton, the fashionable Italian clothing chain. And sure enough, one recent afternoon, the modern rock beat of “Red Sun” blared from the store’s music system.

“The sun is most red, Chairman Mao is most beloved, your radiant thought will forever light up my heart . . . (and) forever guide our voyage,” the song declared.

The young clerk handling the stereo equipment, when asked why she chose this tape, replied cheerfully: “I like the words and the music.”

Aging hard-liners, some of whom may be rather badly out of touch with reality, seem to believe that the Mao craze marks a turn toward values they endorse--or at least that it can be used to promote their political goals.

Deng Liqun, 76, China’s most influential leftist ideologue, a man feared and despised by liberal intellectuals in Beijing, heaped enthusiastic praise on the Mao fad in an interview printed in the official Guangming Daily late last year.

“This ‘craze’ is not somebody’s groundless imagination, nor is it a ‘mirage,’ ” he said. “It is something real that everyone can feel. A few years ago, the tide of bourgeois liberal thought was rampant. It negated, downgraded, uglified and attacked Comrade Mao Tse-tung and his thought, and then attacked and vilified Comrade Deng Xiaoping and other proletarian revolutionaries of the older generation.”

Then came the political turmoil that hit Beijing in the spring of 1989, the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and an international upsurge of anti-communism, he noted.

“Under conditions when some people declared ‘communism is dead,’ there appeared in China the ‘Mao Tse-tung craze,’ ” he said. “This ‘craze’ is still rising. This really is a ‘miracle’ in the history of socialist China or even the entire Communist movement. . . . It is a pity that so far our ideological, political and propaganda work has not caught up with this process.”

Deng Liqun described the Mao craze as “a healthy, progressive and promising phenomenon” that is a factor for unity and stability. It also makes “a powerful reply,” he said, to those who have predicted that Chinese youth will someday adopt “American modes of thinking.”

Hard-liners in the provinces have also portrayed the new Maoism as an expression of support for the status quo, rather than a form of protest.

When the wave of Mao nostalgia first began gathering steam in Hunan province two years ago, Weng Hui, a high-ranking party official, was quoted by the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post as declaring: “People (in the countryside) were wearing Chairman Mao buttons, and they said it was because they were glad to see a government acting the way it did in Mao’s time. People love the Communist Party as they loved Mao. They see clearly that only the Communist Party will lead them forward.”

Weng also linked the new Maoism with criticism of economic reform. “The market will not work,” he declared. “It’s too chaotic. People want stability, not chaos.”

More liberal commentators, fearful that Mao worship could have dangerous political effects, have recently begun issuing warnings against forgetting the chaos and destruction that Mao inflicted on China during the final decade of his life.

Songs from the “Red Sun” tape are “suddenly being heard in the streets and alleys, in concert halls and ballrooms, in private shops and karaoke halls,” noted a columnist for Shanghai’s Liberation Daily.

“These days there’s no need to interfere with what people sing,” he continued. “But some critics are praising this ‘Red Sun phenomenon,’ and I wish to differ on a couple of points. Some say that the ‘Red Sun phenomenon’ shows that ‘the people deeply cherish the memory of that period.’ Is that so?”

Everyone can remember, the commentator said with implied bitterness, what the situation of the nation was like back when tens of thousands of people would sing out “Long life!” in a single voice.

“To say that people cherish the memory of that period is to say that today, when they can speak without fear, they miss that time when words became crimes at every turn,” he declared. “It is to say that today, when the common people can buy what they want, that they miss the era when a family was rationed to just 10 eggs for Spring Festival.”

The truth is more subtle, the columnist insisted. The popularity of humming tunes from “Red Sun,” he said, actually reflects something much more positive: a nation “that is becoming mature enough to mock itself for the absurd and preposterous past it has endured.”

Times researcher Nick Driver contributed to this article.