Chinese censors have banned a steamy political satire in which an army officer’s wife and her lover smash up images of Mao Zedong to take them to new heights of sexual ecstasy.
The novella, Serve the People, named after Mao’s most famous slogan, has been rejected for publication and a magazine that had been serialising the contents has been removed from the shelves.
Although the book was written by Yan Lianke, one of China’s most distinguished authors, Propaganda Ministry officials are reported to have been apoplectic when they first read the tale of sexual revolution in the People’s Liberation Army.
Set in 1967 — at the peak of the Mao cult during the Cultural Revolution — the novel tells the story of the bored wife of a military commander who takes advantage of her husband’s absence to seduce a young peasant soldier.
She leaves the slogan: ”Serve the people” on the kitchen table as a signal that the orderly’s services are desired in the bedroom. Whenever the passion flags, they smash her husband’s beloved Mao icons, rip up his copy of Mao’s Little Red Book or urinate on the Great Helmsman’s epigrams.
During the Cultural Revolution, defacing an image of Mao was punishable by death. Even today his face remains a near-sacred object. A giant portrait stares out over Tiananmen Square, his face appears on every banknote, and many Beijing taxi drivers dangle it as a lucky charm for their cabs.
”This novella slanders Mao Zedong, the army, and is overflowing with sex,” said the propaganda department edict, quoted in the South China Morning Post: ”Do not distribute, pass around, comment on, excerpt from or report on it.”
Although the entire print run of the literary magazine Huacheng has been confiscated, Serve the People has become a hit on the internet.
Commentators have praised it as a subversive critique of official corruption, leadership hypocrisy and the insanity of the Cultural Revolution.
Mao’s large sexual appetite has been well known since the publication of a biography by his doctor, Zhisui Li, who revealed that he bedded thousands of peasant women because he believed in the healing power of intercourse.
Yan said he had not been given any reason why his latest novella was rejected. ”I didn’t expect this would happen, but I am not very surprised either,” he said. — Â