China, Guangdong, Beitou. Village houses. In Beitou, a tiny, forgotten rural village in the Chinese province of Guangdong, more and more people are going to visit an unusual, little temple. Here, the most improbable of the deities is worshipped: Mao Zedong, the leader of the 1949 communist revolution, the founder of the People's Republic of China. The small temple contains two Mao statues and is still a work in progress. The first statue was bought by an old lady, whose wish was to teach the...
more »China, Guangdong, Beitou. Village houses. In Beitou, a tiny, forgotten rural village in the Chinese province of Guangdong, more and more people are going to visit an unusual, little temple. Here, the most improbable of the deities is worshipped: Mao Zedong, the leader of the 1949 communist revolution, the founder of the People's Republic of China. The small temple contains two Mao statues and is still a work in progress. The first statue was bought by an old lady, whose wish was to teach the 'old values' to the new generation. The villagers collected the money to buy the second, and much bigger, statue. "We built this temple to suppress the evil influence. When chairman Mao was alive bad things did not happen''. The small village and the temple are in the heart of the New China: Guangdong, the first province to embrace three decades ago the 'capitalism with Chinese characteristics'. The province, bordering the ultra-capitalist enclave of Hong Kong, is home to many of the export-oriented factories where most of the goods sold in supermarkets all over the world are made. The villagers are wary of the new society, in which young people have lost all ideals and are fighting mercilessly for every single yuan, while corrupt officials are ruling the roost. In the years of the fast and chaotic industrialization also the small village of Beitou has been hit by plagues like drugs and robberies. Guangdong accounts for 15,5% of the Chinese drug addict and in one single year 77 addicts were arrested in Qi Pu, a small township not far from Beitou. As Li Jinqian, the temple's keeper, puts it: ''the more government officials we have, the poorer security is''. ''We collected ten thousand Yuan (around one thousand Euros) to buy the land and start the construction'', he says, ''and then, slowly, more donations kept coming. Now many people are coming here, to ask our Great Helmsman help in this difficult time''. The villagers, as a growing number of Chinese citizens, see the Mao years
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