Sunanda K Datta Ray: The Mao effect

WHERE MONEY TALKS

Some might think that the revolution has become too pricey since Nine-Eleven. Others probably know of ways of cutting costs.

That could explain why there were no takers when Bonham's smart auction room in London's Bond Street demanded a minimum of between £2,500 and £3,000 for that handbook of global revolution "" Mao Zedong's Little Red Book "" which once aroused a billion Chinese to patriotic frenzy and provoked the young and the idealistic everywhere to unite and throw off the chains of convention.

But the celebratory bells that tinkled through the corridors of Western power when the "rare first edition" failed to make the reserve price may have been a trifle premature.

Remember Zhou Enlai sagely saying that it was too early to judge the French Revolution? By that yardstick of time, it is also far too early to gloat that the infructuous sale means that the market has rejected Mao.

The laws of supply and demand move mysteriously their wonders to perform and there might well be another, more astute, reason for even ardent votaries refusing to pay Bonham's price.

Like all prophets, Mao is probably least honoured at home where his Two Musts was set to music last year to attract hedonistic princelings of the Chinese revolution, and released with pop versions of old slogans like The East is Red and Serve the People.

But other people are more mindful of hints on nation management by a master of the art. As Mao would have said, his wisdom, distilled in 720 million copies of the Little Red Book, seeded the soil of global power. Many world leaders desperately want a hundred flowers to blossom but with exactly the same shape, colour and scent. They also want a hundred schools of thought to contend with identical words and messages.

Mao's advice on policy, tactics, and the seizure and retention of power must surely be compulsory reading for such luminaries as Zambian President Robert Mugabe and North Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il.

Even our benign Manmohan Singh might learn a thing or two about handling coalition partners. Languishing in confinement, Iraq's fallen dictator Saddam Hussein must certainly reflect bitterly that political power does, indeed, grow out of the barrel of a gun.

That thought no doubt affords considerable satisfaction to the supreme commander of the world's most powerful army who knows, with Mao, that war is the highest form of struggle and that a people without an army amount to nothing.

With Tony Blair anxious to do George W Bush's every bidding, the United States president has now also pushed out Queen Elizabeth as commander-in-chief of the British forces.

Blair secretly allowed the Pentagon to station interceptor missiles in Britain as protection against long-range attack, presumably by Osama bin Laden, and relocated nearly 1,000 British troops to Iraq's "triangle of death" so that American soldiers can again attack Fallujah where their last offensive killed more than 1,000 Iraqi civilians.

Bush's announcement in the shocked aftermath of Nine-Eleven that those who were not with him were against him indicated close perusal of Mao's tenets.

Similarly, his courageous disregard of the most virulent criticism points to the conviction of being always in the right that is the hallmark of any diligent student of the Little Red Book.

Perversely, Islamic militants will not allow Bush to live up to another Mao aphorism by proving that he is not only good at destroying the old world, he is also good at building the new. But come a favourable verdict on Tuesday, and he might take vengeance on Iran for being foiled in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The entire world will, of course, pay the ultimate price if the Americans are saddled with Bush for another five years.

I must confess to some nostalgia for the sixties when Calcutta walls proclaimed that "China's chairman is our chairman".

Coffee house regulars, who could at the drop of a Marxist-Leninist cliche rattle off any of the 33 topics on which the Little Red Book pontificates, fondly believed that Karl Marx had said that the road to world revolution lay through Beijing and Calcutta. Pundits failed to track down the quotation but Bengalis prefer faith to evidence.

Times change. Naxalites are reborn as chief executives. Berkeley and the Sorbonne produce businessmen. Mao-suited diplomats armed with the book don't emerge from the Chinese embassy in London to harangue policemen and anti-Communist demonstrators with quotations.

Today, Little Red Books propagate anything from golf to the gospels. Had Mao been with us in the flesh, he might even have adapted King Edward VII's "We are all socialists nowadays", and declared that everyone is a capitalist, if not a capitalist roader.

The Great Helmsman was also one of the world's Greatest Survivors. Even de-Maofication dared not denounce the man whose exploits allowed the Chinese to stand up. It only nibbled at the myth.

No doubt, his 111th birth anniversary in December will see another surge of kitsch, including medallions, clocks with his waving arms as hands, and "" yes! "" an abundance of first editions of the Little Red Books in brand new shining plastic covers.

Bonhams didn't have a chance since anyone can pick them up for a few dollars in the lane that winds along Xian's Great Mosque or in the vast sprawl of Beijing's fabled Panjiayuan "dirt" market.

Far from feeling rebuffed, Mao is probably chuckling over this triumph of the authentic Asian marketplace over a fashionable London auction.