By Helen Wang and Paul Crook
In his new book, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History 1962-1976, historian Frank Dikötter devotes almost two pages to Mao badges. “By 1968, the national output stood at more than 50 million badges per month,” he writes, but even that “was not enough, and a thriving black market emerged to compete with the state.” He notes that there were “illegal markets” that were in reality “hardly hidden from view, a few of them attracting crowds of over 10,000 punters, spilling over on to the streets and blocking the traffic.” Even though “(l)ocal officials decried these capitalist activities as ‘extremely disrespectful towards our great leader’… there was not much that they could do, since Red Guards and other revolutionary organisations policed the markets.”
I’m grateful to Dikötter for reminding readers of the importance of Mao badges and drawing attention to the economic activity associated with them. They are objects I’ve thought about a lot, especially since the early 2000s, when the British Museum was offered a donation of over 200 Mao badges (duplicates from a private collection in China) and my Head of Department, after agreeing to accept the gift, told me to write a catalogue. At the time, the most relevant English-language sources were Bill Bishop’s 1995 M.A. thesis “Badges of Chairman Mao Zedong (毛主席像章),” the first in-depth analysis of Mao badges ever written in English; and Melissa Schrift’s book, Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge (2001), an anthropological account of collecting Mao badges. I consulted various other sources, including catalogues of Chinese collections of Mao badges, but these tended to take a huge amount of background knowledge for granted. My catalogue, Chairman Mao Badges. Symbols and Slogans of the Cultural Revolution (2008), was designed along the lines of a traditional British Museum coin catalogue, i.e. an object-based work that could be used as a reference guide. When I sent a copy to a Mao badge expert in Beijing, he wrote back, confused as to why the British Museum collected such material, and why it would go to the trouble of producing a catalogue of a collection that was, frankly, not very impressive. I explained that the British Museum was a museum of history, that these were historical relics of the 20th century, and that the catalogue was written so that non-specialist English readers could access the history behind the objects.
The British Museum collection of Mao badges currently stands at about 350 pieces. It’s part of the UK’s national collection of badges from all over the world. Since the catalogue of Mao badges was published, every so often I receive emails from people who have their own Mao badge collections, often numbering in the hundreds or thousands. One such person is Clint Twist, who, with only a little encouragement a couple of years ago, set up what is probably the first English language website devoted to Mao badges — and tweets a Mao badge almost every day @clinttwist.
More recently, I discovered that one of the British Museum volunteers, Paul Crook, had been a teenage Mao badge dealer in Beijing in the 1960s! Paul — who was recently interviewed by the BBC for a segment on posters from the Mao era — kindly agreed to talk about that time, vividly confirming Dikötter’s statement that “badges were the most hotly traded pieces of private property during the first years of the Cultural Revolution, open to every form of capitalist speculation.”
— Helen Wang
My parents were teachers at the Foreign Languages Institute in Beijing, and when the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, and all the schools were closed, they thought it would be a good idea to take us on a trip to England until it blew over. If nothing else, it would give my brothers and myself a chance to brush up on our English. But when we returned, the situation was even more chaotic than before.
I had just finished primary school and had yet to start middle school, so was “between schools.” Although drawn in to various activities, including a month’s work experience at the No 2 Machine Tool Plant (at the age of 13), I was often at a loose end for over a year, until schools started again for me at the beginning of 1968. So I just kind of hung around. I discovered a Mao badge market that was open a few afternoons a week. It was near the zoo, and the Russian Exhibition Centre — it may even have been in the taxi yard opposite the zoo. There were about three or four places in Beijing which I frequented to trade Mao badges: there, Qianmen, and a couple of other places. Mostly I used to go the one near the zoo, and take my badges pinned to a piece of cloth. Some traders had their badges pinned to the insides of their Mao jackets, and would open out their jackets so people could see the badges.
The value of badges at these markets was never to my knowledge measured in money, but always in Xiao Maotou (literally: Little Mao Heads); a fairly plain larger badge might be worth 3 or 4, but at the top end some newly designed ones of good quality could easily go up to 20 or 30. The valuation fluctuated daily, so the shrewd dealer who could anticipate trends in the market could make quite a killing.
I never excelled in this, but engaged in a bit of “insider dealing” which brought advantage because, as a foreigner, I had access to the Friendship Store, which always had a supply of rather elegant badges that weren’t generally available. It began when a friend wanted me to buy some of those badges for him. I started out doing it as a good turn, but then got the idea of taking some advantage by asking a premium: to be given one badge I did not already have for every 10 badges I bought for people from the Friendship Store. This seemed a neat way to get round the handicap of my communist education, which had taught me I should not charge more for anything than I had paid myself. Still, when my father found out about my stealthy capitalist tendencies sometime in the summer of 1967, I had a stern lecture, and eased up. In any case, schools were starting up again soon after that, and the badge markets were clamped down on in ’68 or ’69.
The Friendship Store had a good stock of Mao badges, but here I had to pay for them in cash (7 to 8 fen for the plain Xiao Maotou; and 10 to 20 fen for fancier badges). My clients had a keen eye: they would distinguish between Beijing Maotou (Beijing-style Mao’s head, with softer lines) and Shanghai Maotou (Shanghai-style Mao’s head, with sharper lines). But what people really wanted to collect were the series of badges, and gather a full set, just like collecting sets of stamps. When young people set off to travel the country in search of new experiences and see places associated with Mao’s rise, they would collect badges wherever they went. Badges from the revolutionary sites of Yan’an, Gutian or Zunyi, had extra value, as they came from further away. It was a kind of revolutionary pilgrimage.
There were the army sets — the basic one being the five-pointed-star badge above a bar badge reading Wei renmin fuwu (Serve the People). These were made in four batches, and it was desirable to get one from each batch. You could tell the batch by the number on the back of the badge.
Then the army, navy, and air force started issuing their own badges. And new stylistic variations crept in. And there were fakes of some of the particularly prized issues around that time too, in ’67-68, because of the margin they traded at: where one issue might trade at a mere 15 “small Mao heads,” another might fetch 20 or 30, or even more.
Then the ministries started competing on the badge front. And you got the nuclear works badges as well.
Sourcing was the key thing — the geographical and political significance – things like the launch of the satellite in 1970, when they played the first lines of the music of the Maoist anthem Dongfang Hong (The East is Red).
The really big Mao badges I have are from 1969, and the time of the 9th Congress, when everyone made sure to wear nine badges. I think it was some time around then when Mao made his famous comment “Huan wo feiji!”(Give us back my airplanes!), having calculated that the amount of aluminum used to make badges could have made three planes!
I’ve still got about 400-500 badges, including a hundred from a US collector who wanted to swap his entire collection of badges for a chunky Korean War medal I had somehow acquired. He wanted it badly — it may have been a precious metal one, and he may have got a good deal, but I can’t remember now.
—Paul Crook
