Badge of honor
By Yi Ling (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-12-10 09:00
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The best one was "as thin as paper, white as jade, bright as a mirror, and produced a musical sound when flicked", Wen recalls.
"Our work was a serious political task," says Guo. "We didn't say 'make' badges, but 'produced badges with full respect'; and people didn't 'get a badge', but 'greeted a badge'."
After he had passed on what he learned in Hunan to colleagues, Wen was fired from the team. This came as no surprise, given his business-family background. The fist batch of 40,000 badges was released in September, 1968, but more than 80 percent had defects.
Sand from the workplace had worked its way into the clay, causing pinhole-sized pores on the surface of the badges, recalls Guo. "I was dumbfounded, and some women colleagues began to cry, not out of fear but in regret. It was a sin to distort the leader's image."
But a corrected lot was produced in 10 days and the best ones were stuck on a wooden board, forming the character "zhong" (loyalty).
Guo led a team to the Leshan county government to show off their work.
"It created a sensation. Everyone across the county began to talk about it," Guo says.
He was selected as a delegate from Sichuan province for the National Day celebrations in Beijing in 1968. There, he had a chance to see Mao in person.
Guo remembers clearly the moment he saw Mao at the Great Hall of the People.
"He was much taller than I thought and his hands were very soft," Guo recalls. "I was so nervous that I couldn't stop trembling when shaking hands with him, as if I was sick."
The demand for the Leshan plant's badges soared and the number of workers it employed grew from 300 to more than 500. More than 30 kinds of Mao badges were made in 1969. The leader's images and quotations also began to appear on other products.
"Even the jars for pickles were painted with slogans like 'With the Helmsman, we sail on the seas; with Mao Zedong Thought, we undertake the revolution'," Guo says.
The badges were not meant for sale, but mainly for honoring "heroes from different fields". A special office under the local government, known as "Mao's Office", was put in charge of badge distribution.
But the factory's prosperity came to an abrupt end with an order from the central government in June 1969 to stop producing the Mao badges to avoid wasting materials, especially metal.
By then, the Leshan Qinghua Porcelain Factory had churned out more than 100,000 badges. The number nationwide exceeded 8 billion.
Guo now had to figure out how to store the badges, including the defective ones.
"Mao's portrait was on them, we couldn't bury or abandon the badges. That would be a political mistake," he says.
The "Mao's Office" was also not much help. A desperate Guo eventually ordered a few workers to put all the defective badges in several big bamboo baskets and load them on a small boat.
"They dumped the badges into the Dadu River at night. Only a few factory officials knew about it. That's the best solution we could figure out," says Guo.
But an end to making Mao badges did not signal an end to those tumultuous times.
Both Guo and Wen were jailed twice before 1972 in fights among Red Guard cliques. They were both tired of the endless political struggles.
"It was dangerous. You could be in heaven one moment, and hell in the next," says Guo.
In 1974, Guo abandoned politics and enrolled at the Sichuan Academy of Arts.
"My family didn't understand, but I realized that only those with skills would survive," he says.
Four years later, Guo returned to the factory, and began working with Wen as a painter.
The next few years marked a turning point in China: Mao's successor Deng Xiaoping began to steer the country toward reform and greater openness in the late 1970s. This gave Guo an opportunity to change his fate.
"Intellectuals regained their respect in the 1980s and talents were sought out. My college diploma changed my life," says Guo.
He held his first painting exhibition in Luoyang, Henan province, in 1983 and three years later, became the first dean of the art department at Luoyang University. He moved his whole family there.
"I didn't change the world. It changed me," says Guo, whose landscape paintings have been selected as gifts by China's Foreign Ministry for foreign guests.
In 2004, Guo returned to Leshan, and busied himself with painting, calligraphy and writing. Few know about his association with Mao badges.
"Thirty years ago, I thought my value lay in making Mao badges. Now, I have found it in helping others and being useful to society. That is enough."
Guo's old friend, Wen, has had a simpler life. He didn't leave Qinghua except for a three-year training stint in Chinese language at a local college in the 1980s. He retired from the factory as a general manager in 2002.
Wen plans to write a book on the modern history of Leshan, which begins with the Mao badges.
"History needs be recorded, the past should not be forgotten," says Wen, whose cherished possession is the bottle of sand from Mao's birthplace, though its rusted cap can no longer be opened.
He also has a "memory box" that contains a few of the Mao badges he once wore.
The badges became popular in China once again in the 1990s -- as a collector's item. It is estimated that some 300 million badges have survived and that there are more than 2 million badge collectors on the Chinese mainland.
"People today are more practical. The badge may mean money for some, but for us, it represented a belief," says Wen.
