Volume 36, Number 11 · June 29, 1989
The Incredible Shrinking Man
By Jonathan Mirsky
The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao: From the Hundred Flowers to the Great Leap Forward
edited by Roderick MacFarquhar, by Timothy Cheek, by Eugene Wu, with contributions by Merle Goldman, by Benjamin Schwartz
Council on East Asian Studies/Harvard University Press, 400 pp., $15.00 (paper)
Just before the recent demonstrations in Beijing and other cities, which shook the Party to its foundations, a rumor ran through the capital: Mao Zedong's body, embalmed and mounted in the ugly Memorial Hall which disfigures Tiananmen Square opposite the Forbidden City, was shrinking. The woman doctor who headed the team of experts that performed the taxidermy on the Chairman soon after his death in late 1976, conducted because the Party was afraid to follow the practice of cremating even its greatest heroes, issued reassurances that the body remained precisely the same as it always was. It was in effect well above average height for a Chinese. Perhaps, she suggested, a body lying down appeared less large than one standing.
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