Over the years, Mao’s legacy has remained largely intact. At school, Chinese children are still taught to believe that he was one of history’s great thinkers. But public discussion of sensitive historical topics–like the famine that killed at least 20 million people after Mao ordered the collectivization of farms in 1958–has been banned. This didn’t stop a group of academics, writers and dissidents from recently posting a letter on the Internet blaming Mao for a “rule of terror” and suggesting that his body be shipped to his hometown in Hunan province. (The petition outraged officials, who blocked it from Chinese Internet servers.) Signed by more than 50 people, including Wang Dan, a student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen protests, the letter also pointed out the wastefulness of the Mao Zedong Mausoleum Management Bureau, whose sole charge is to keep the chairman’s body preserved. That’s meant at least several million yuan a year spent on fighting decomposition. “Most of the world’s tyrants have been exposed,” Yu Jie, 30, one of the letter’s authors, told NEWSWEEK. “But in China, because the government propagandizes Mao as a great leader, lots of people still respect him. For me this is a tragedy.”
