Chairman Mao died twenty five years ago this month. Or did he? His name is still evoked with reverence in such revolutionary backwaters as Peru and Nepal. In China he has become a pop icon to a young urban elite with no memories of him.
Mao's legacy remains a sore point to the current Party leadership, who have betrayed almost everything the Chairman once espoused. At the same time, however, Mao has become a folk deity. His image, often encased in gold, dangles from the rear-view mirrors of many Chinese taxis, especially in his native province of Hunan. In the village of Shaoshan, where Mao was born, amulets bearing his face are sold alongside amulets with Buddhist or Taoist images, each offering the promise of prosperity and good health.

Even Chinese less prone to religious superstition and aware of Mao's murderous deeds acknowledge his greatness. Mao, they say, was weida-a great leader. To be weida is to transcend good and evil. For the Great Leader is like a god, whose wrath is as terrifying as his goodness is bountiful. Non-Chinese are often surprised and not a little outraged to find out that Hitler still inspires a type of fascinated awe in places such as Taiwan. Hitler, like Mao, was weida.

The scale of violence unleashed by Mao, far from diminishing him, adds to his god-like stature. A vengeful god, who comes to purge the world of corruption, cannot take half-measures. Like a giant storm, he must rage, and the destruction and death left in the wake of his wrath is a testimony to the Great Leader's superhuman powers. Mao followed other awesome gods into the Chinese pantheon. Like the God of War, his power to unleash violence is seen by some as a necessary force to keep demons at bay.

The fascination for great, destructive leaders is not a uniquely Chinese phenomenon. Neither is the affinity of rural folk to deify powerful men. It is true, perhaps, that people in polytheistic societies create new gods from secular clay more easily than those who worship one god. In east Asia, anything-a great leader, a mountain, even a rock-can be imbued with a sacred spirit. One irony of modern Chinese history is that despite attempts by the Chinese Communist Party to stamp out superstitious practices with "scientific socialism," their cult of Mao only helped to perpetuate them.

There is, however, a deeper problem underlying the Maoist cult, posthumous and during his lifetime. It is rooted in the historical lack of separation in China between church and state. Emperors in pre-modern China were intermediaries between Heaven and Earth, not unlike popes or high priests of a state religion.

The Chinese state, like ancient states in the western world, was based on a cosmic notion. Harmony would persist in the world only if the rulers were virtuous, did their ceremonial priestly duties, and kept Earth in harmony with Heaven.

Corruption and immoral practices in government would invite the wrath of Heaven, and the right to rule would fall into more virtuous hands. It was the role of Confucian mandarins to protect the Mandate of Heaven and see to it that rulers remained virtuous.

This means that any political revolution is a moral, or even quasi-religious revolution. It is not only institutions which must be put right; order in the cosmos must be restored by purging the world of moral corruption. Historians of new dynasties must rewrite history to extol the virtue of the new rulers, while painting the ancient regime as beyond redemption.

In this respect, though by no means in all respects, Mao's revolution was no different from past upheavals. Like many peasant messiahs in ancient and not-so-ancient China, Mao set out to restore order in the cosmos by destroying the corrupt old regime and establishing a glorious, new one that was virtuous and pure. This is what Mao's scribes would have us believe, just as court historians justified their emperors' right to rule in the past. Mao had not been elected. He had wrested Heaven's mandate from the wicked old order by sheer force of virtue.
It is interesting to contemplate how this virtue might once again play itself out if China ever gives rise to another great political upheaval. The vicious circle of violent rebellions, followed by periods of autocratic order, is likely to continue as long as China is ruled by Great Leaders, with claims to moral and philosophical rectitude, instead of laws and democratic institutions. Heroic authority-such as Mao's-is naturally beyond the checks of legitimate opposition or criticism. For how can anybody be a loyal critic of perfect virtue?

When the source of truth is also the source of power, as it was to some extent in imperial China, and to a greater extent in Mao's China, there can be no loyal opposition, for that would defy the system's logic. Indeed, China's Leninist political structure handed down from Stalin in the 1950s and still largely intact, continues to militate against open political dialogue.

As long as this is so, Mao lives on. As long as the Chinese are not ruled by their chosen representatives, but by supposedly virtuous men blessed by Heaven, and as long as the state is not seen as a set of institutions, but as a cosmic order which is also the guardian of morality and ethics, Mao will live forever. That is to say, there will be another Mao, and another, and another. t (Project Syndicate)

Ian Buruma is the author of Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels From Los Angeles to Beijing, to be published in November.