One of the best places to shop in Bangalore –the city at the heart of  India’s I.T. revolution – is a store called ‘Fabindia’. Located slightly out of the centre of town and built as a villa with an open air courtyard, tiled roof, and cobbled rocks, Fabindia sells a range of products from  home furnishing to organic food, but it’s specialty is handloom textiles. The store was set up by an American entrepreneur who sought to bring the weaves and prints of Indian artisans to an international cliental. In keeping with its aim to market highly localized products, the company supports village based artisans and seeks to preserve traditional crafts. Much of Fabindia’s stock is made from khadi (hand woven, hand spun cloth) which was made famous by Gandhi and became one of the key symbols of India’s independence struggle.

It may seem odd to shop for khadi in the country’s silicon plateau – known more for its women in blue jeans, pubs and cyber-cafés - but despite its support of village based industry, Fabindia is part of a very modern trend. Its ‘ethnic chic’ aesthetic is shifting Gandhian homespun away from its association with musty emporiums and the dowdy clothes worn by revolutionaries of old into garments designed for tourists and for India’s own remarkably cosmopolitan and increasingly ethnicized middle class. As journalists Gaurav Choudhury and Smriti Kak Ramachandran (2004) write, “in the past its [kadhi’s] claim to fame was its status as a symbol of resistance against British rule, it has now become a fashion statement.”

Fabindia is only one example in a much more widespread movement promoting the stylishness of homespun. Everyone from the ‘Khadi and Village Industries Commission’, a government body set up to support the cloth, to some of the countries most famous designers are engaged in transforming the  'fabric of freedom' into the 'fabric of fashion'. The website for Indiamart ‘the global gateway to the Indian marketplace’ states that “khadi, which draped the humble freedom fighters in the days of yore is today flaunted by the coolcats making fashion statements.” This sentiment is echoed in the style pages of The Tribune - one of the nation’s largest selling dailies. “In what should seem a fitting tribute to the Father of the Nation, the humble homespun is finally being elevated to the level of a trendy design statement for the Indian elite. No longer is it associated with weather-beaten social activists, pseudo-intellectuals and politicians. Khadi is hip and happening” (Rathod, 2001).

An expensive boutique on one of the leafy streets of Shanghai’s French concession makes clear that a parallel process is taking place in contemporary China. ‘Madame Mao’s Dowry’ sells mainly upmarket clothing and accessories. What makes the store unique, however, is that – as the name suggests -amidst the exquisitely designed silk jackets and qipaos and elegant vases and bowls is a sizable collection of relics from the Cultural Revolution. At the entrance to the store is a highly weathered giant wood statue of Mao. Step inside and there is a whole range of Mao memorabilia including diaries, photo albums, porcelain statues of the chairman, stills from old propaganda films and the highly stylized block prints of Social Realist art. On the second floor there are boxes of matted pictures for sale - film stills, images of Communist leaders (Mao and Zhou Enlai but also Lenin, Stalin, and Marx) that were released in sets and designed to adorn schoolroom walls, and, in what is perhaps the best piece of nostalgic propoganda, ‘scenes of everyday life’ cut from old newspapers that are complete with such slogans as: ‘The worker prepares for agriculture production’ and ‘A man expresses delight while reading edicts from Chairman Mao’. The pictures are all elegantly matted and sell for RMB 200 (US$24) a piece.

Like Fabindia, Madame Mao’s Dowry is not alone in trading off the nation’s founder. In Shanghai’s antique market, for example, Mao kitsch – posters, buttons, statues and copies of the little red book - are sold by the handful alongside Ming style replicas, abacuses and the ritual masks of Tibet. Elsewhere in the city, trendy restaurants, boutiques and bars use Mao caps, bags and jackets as casual elements of design. The popularity of these relics amongst Westerners was made obvious in a Sotheby’s auction in 2001 where one collector’s set of Mao memorabilia sold for US$50 000.

What is particularly intriguing about both Fabindia and Madame Mao’s Dowry is the intrinsic contradiction that they embody. The stores are extremely stylish and highly cosmopolitan and both are only possible in the globalized India and China of today. Yet, their trendiness is rooted in marketing the extreme anti-cosmopolitanism and anti-commercialism of their nation’s founders.

In the early days of their country’s independence Gandhi and Mao advocated an ideology of national autonomy which was based on economic self-reliance. This ideology was upheld through closed doors and strict protectionism.  Though primarily an economic ideal, self-reliance was also intimately linked to the production of a nationalist culture. Yet, the creation of this nationalistic cultural autonomy required, as we will see,  that the autonomy of culture itself be surpressed in the interest of an identarian, political, or national goal.     

For both countries this ideology ultimately led to crises. Eventually India and China  were convinced to abandon economic self-reliance with its inward looking gaze and open their doors to the world. Yet, as India and China globalize and their power on the world stage increases, both countries continue to insist on the importance of autonomy. The idea of autonomy and the sphere within which it operates, however, has undergone a fundemental transformation.

Rather than allowing the ideal of self-reliance to dictate economic policy,  this ideological ‘spirit’ has now been relegated to the realm of culture, which -- now liberated from Gandhian asceticism and Maoist revolution -- has been granted its own autonomy. Finally freed from the iron hand of politics, culture is itself now – at least relatively -  autonomous. Autonomy, then, has ceased to be tied to national culture. Instead culture itself has gained a degree of autonomy from national politics. This has enabled the cultural sphere to become a vibrant space where individuals (or collectives) are free to enter into many varied cosmopolitan mixings, mutations and hybridizations.  In this environment, ideas of self-reliance have become fashion statements - signposts of something uniquely Chinese or Indian that can be traded on the global marketplace. The concept of autonomy, in both India and China, then, has thus ceased to be based on ideas of protectionism and closure, and become grounded instead in openness, cosmopolitanism and global trade.

In India the notion of autonomy goes by the name swadeshi, a word that can be roughly translated as self-reliance. For Gandhi the idea of swadeshi was of fundamental importance to an independent India and he used the term from the earliest days of the Quit India movement. Swadeshi, Gandhi argued, would bring swaraj. Self-reliance would bring self rule.

Gandhi defined swadeshi as “that spirit in us which restricts us to the use and service of our immediate surroundings to the exclusion of the more remote,” (326) and he insisted that the principle be understood in the widest possible sense. “It does not mean merely the use of what is produced in one’s own country. That meaning is certainly there in swadeshi,” he maintained. “But there is another meaning implied in it which is far greater and much more important. Swadeshi means reliance on our own strength” (325). In accordance with this ideal, Gandhi stressed the value of the “simple home production of basic goods” (Yergin and Stanislaw, 52) and preached that India’s strength depended on the self-sufficiency of her villages.

Despite the emphasis on localized production the concept of swadeshi had strong macro-economic implications. For Gandhi, it was not only India’s villages but the country as a whole that should aim at economic self-reliance. The principle of swadeshi demanded that India close its doors to the ‘imperialism’ of foreign trade. “India cannot live for Lancashire or any other country before she is able to live for herself,” he wrote. “And she can live for herself only if she produces and is helped to produce everything for her requirement within her own borders” (230).

Though Gandhi hoped that the principle of swadeshi would be followed in all aspects of life, he recognized that this was an unattainable ideal and focused instead on convincing his followers to enact full swadeshi only with respect to clothing. “Why should colonial India export cotton to Manchester only to import it back in the form of expensive clothing? Gandhi demanded. “Indians should make their own clothing (Yergin and Stanislaw, 52). “By patronizing foreign cloth,” he wrote “we have committed a great sin” (339). With textiles as his prime example, Gandhi sought to promote a national culture that was autonomous from all outside influences. He urged his supporters to take the ‘swadeshi vow’ the text of which was as follows: “With God as my witness, I solemnly declare that from today I shall confine myself, for my personal requirements, to the use of cloth, manufactured in India from Indian cotton, silk and wool; and I shall altogether abstain from using foreign cloth and I shall destroy all foreign cloth in my possession” (341).

Followers of swadeshi weretomanage with as little clothing as possible, committing themselves to self-denial as well as self-reliance.  Both women and men, young and old were to dedicate a certain percentage of every day to spinning their own cloth. Gandhi’s vision of India thus entailed a ‘spinning wheel in every hut’ and a devotion to khadi that was both spiritual and political. “At the centre of swadeshi is khadi,” said Gandhi “and if khadi goes there is no swadeshi” (377).  Gandhi’s own fervent dedication to homespun was dramatized by the transformation in his own personal attire - from business suit to a single loincloth, which he famously insisted on wearing even in London when meeting the Queen. Khadi thus become a key symbol of India’s independence as evidenced by the fact that the spinning wheel was chosen for the image on the national flag

Mao and Zili Gengsheng

The concept of self-reliance, which Mao termed zili gengsheng - literally one’s own strength –was as crucial for China’s ‘liberation’ as it was for India’s. Zili gengsheng is recognized as one of the key pillars of Mao Zedong Thought and the famous ‘little red book’ devotes an entire section to the topic. The quotes are assembled under the title “Self-reliance and Arduous Struggle” and include the following: “On what basis should our policy rest? It should rest on our own strength [zili gengsheng], and that means regeneration through one's own efforts. We are not alone; all the countries and people in the world opposed to imperialism are our friends. Nevertheless, we stress regeneration through our own efforts. Relying on the forces we ourselves organize, we can defeat all Chinese and foreign reactionaries” (365). And: “We stand for self-reliance [zili gengsheng]. We hope for foreign aid but cannot be dependent on it; we depend on our own efforts, on the creative power of the whole army and the entire people” (365).

The Maoist notion of self-reliance was developed in Yan’an a small town in Shaanxi province, which served as the headquarters of the Chinese communist party between 1936 and 1947. The party sought haven there after the perils of the Long March and spent the decade in Yan’an living simply in traditional cave dwellings, experimenting with a socialist way of life and consolidating their power. The Yan’an period, as it has come to be called, was a decisive one for the Chinese revolution. It was in Yan’an that Mao was confirmed as the leader of the party and it was also during this time that he condensed what were to become the basic elements of Mao Zedong Thought. These were formed in a general environment of blockade and war,  which ensured that Maoism put great emphasis on self-sufficiency and self-reliance, qualities that have come to define the ‘Yan’an spirit’ or ‘Yan’an way,’ which lie at the very foundation of Chinese communism.

In its initial conception, the notion of zili gengsheng was, like the Gandhian idea of swadeshi, not only focused on building inward strength but also on blocking out foreigners. If in India this was primarily aimed at the British, for the Chinese communists, self-reliance meant breaking away from the political authority of Moscow. Not content to mimic or import ‘foreign methods (Meisner, 210) Mao’s goal in Yan’an was to create an explicitly Chinese form of communism that was rooted in indigenous experience. For Mao, like Gandhi economic self-reliance was closely linked to the nationalist goal of producing cultural autonomy. This required that China's break with the Soviet Union be not only ideological but socio-economic as well. One of the principles behind the great leap forward, for example, was to abandon the Soviet model and become technologically self-reliant. This trend, coupled with Mao’s anger at Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin, led to worsening relations between the two communist powers.  By 1959 the strained Sino-Soviet relationship had deteriorated to such an extent that the Soviets started to restrict the flow of scientific and technological information to China. This reached its height in the summer of 1960 when Kruschev recalled the 1,400 Soviet scientists and industrial specialists that were working in some 250 Chinese enterprises. (Meisner, 235) In response to this technological and economic isolation Mao renewed his calls for the Chinese people to develop their country in accordance with the principle of zili gengsheng.

The insulation of Maoist China reached its apex with the Cultural Revolution when the country was almost completely blocked off from the rest of the world. In this decade of upheaval, China experimented with an extreme form of self-reliance which would rid the country of all outside influences and establish in its place an indigenous, proletarian, revolutionary culture. Throughout this period the cultural sphere lost all autonomy and was made, instead, brutally subservient to the dictates of political ideology. Chinese people were unable to speak freely to foreigners. All books, films, music, art and fashion that were not in keeping with the revolutionary spirit were banned, and there was no outside news. The only imported films came from North Korea and Albania. All there was to read in English was the government’s official magazine The Peking Review and The Official Quotes of Chairman Mao.  There was nothing to listen to but revolutionary songs and there was nothing to wear but the blue or grey uniform of the time known in the West as the ‘Mao suit.’

            As their parallel ideas of autonomy make clear, the ideology of Mao and Gandhi was, in many ways, remarkably similar. Despite the fact that one was an ascetic who sought to base a revolution on the power of nonviolent struggle and the other was a guerrilla fighter who taught that ‘power grows out of the barrel of a gun’, both  Mao and Gandhi identified strongly with the peasant masses, were suspicious of foreigners and assumed that their country’s independence should be based on policies of economic and cultural autonomy – swadeshi and zili gengsheng. Moreover, as the zealous promotion of khadi in India and - much more dramatically - the extremity of the Cultural Revolution in China shows, both leaders believed that to achieve the goal of self-reliance it was necessary to sacrifice the autonomy of the cultural sphere. Both leaders insisted that culture serve a national goal. In asserting this nationalist culture, however,  the autonomy of culture itself was – strictly and sometimes violently – abandoned.   Gandhi’s willingness to stifle cultural freedom was evident in his attitude to fashion. In the name of swadeshi, he encouraged Indians to stop using foreign cloth and practice self-denial. “It is not enough that we manage if necessary with as little clothing as possible,” he wrote “but for a full observance it is further necessary to destroy all foreign clothes in our possession” (340). When faced with the objection that there was not enough indigenous material to clothe the country’s vast population, Gandhi replied that “the general climate of India is such that we need little clothing” and urged the householder to “learn to use cloth as a miser uses his hoard” (358). For Gandhi the struggle for self-reliance required that even personal style conform to ideology. Swadeshi thus reduced the autonomy of culture by making it subservient to politics. In the name of a national cultural autonomy, individuals, he insisted, should adapt their taste and desire for aestheitic expression.  “The householder,” lectured Gandhi, “has to revise his or her ideas of fashion.”  He should “suspend the use of fine garments” and “should train himself to see art and beauty in the spotlessly white khaddar and to appreciate its soft unevenness”.

Though Gandhi’s campaign to subordinate culture to the dictates of swadeshi was mainly restricted to the realm of fashion, it involved a much wider rejection of modernity, cosmopolitanism and urbanization. He idealized the simple life of the village and wanted the countries elite to do the same. “I venture to suggest to the students all over India to suspend their normal studies for one year and devote their time to the manufacture of yarn by hand spinning” (358).  Unlike Mao, however, Gandhi was unwilling, or unable, to forcefully impose his vision of intellectuals learning from the art and culture of village life.

With Mao, of course, the suppression of the autonomy of culture reached far greater heights. Long before the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, Mao preached that in Communist China culture should serve the masses. In a famous lecture series given in Yan’an, Mao taught that literature and art should serve the proletarian cause and “fit into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part. (565-567)” "There is no such thing as art for art’s sake,” (563) Mao directly proclaimed, “art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics…All our literature and art are for the masses of the people, and in the first place for the workers, peasants and soldiers” (565)

The Maoist ideal that all but ‘revolutionary’ art be rejected was put into practice during China’s decade long Cultural Revolution. The aim was to create a culture that was ideological pure, stripped of both its own traditional elements and of the influence of outsiders. ”Everything from ancient Confucian texts to modern recordings of Beethoven were sought out and thrown into the dustbin. New revolutionary names were pasted on street signs and buildings along with portraits of the Chairman and his sayings. Hapless citizens wearing Western style clothes or Hong Kong-style haircuts were attacked and humiliated as were those possessing old Buddhist and Daoist relics“ (Meisner, 322). 

Though it was taken to almost unimaginable extremes, this experiment in cultural re-engineering was in many ways the logical culmination of the much more widespread idea that a nationalist culture should be subordinated to socio-economic ideals. Attacks on art and literature were meant to revitalize the spirit of the revolution and cleanse the country of its ideological and cultural decay. While its focus was culture, the revolution had a political –and ultimately an economic - aim. Turned inwards at “those people within the party who were taking the capitalist road” (Meisner, 313) it was, in Mao’s view part of a “‘life and death struggle between socialism and capitalism” (Meisner, 315). The attempt to spiritually transform the people and renew proletarian ideology was thus necessarily intertwined with an ever-intensifying hunt for ‘capitalist roaders’. The Cultural Revolution, it can be argued, was an inevitable -- if horribly dramatic -- culmination to the goal of creating a nationalistic culture bound to the ideal of economic self-reliance

Turning of the Tide

Historically, then, Gandhian clothing and the art of the Cultural Revolution are the mark of a culture subordinated to the nationalist politics. The fact that they are now being sold as cosmopolitan fashion accessories in stores such as Fabindia and Madame Mao’s Dowry shows just how much India and China have changed in the past few decades.  Yet, both countries insist that despite this transformation, the notion of autonomy has not been abandoned. Rather, the ideal of swadeshi or of zili gengsheng has shifted from the economic to the cultural sphere, which has itself become autonomous from the means in which it is produced and consumed. Instead of producing a national culture that is autonomous from foreign cultures, culture as a whole has developed a degree of autonomy from national politics. In India and China, at least, autonomy has thus ceased to be identified with closed door independence and is, instead, capable of coexisting with the interdependent flows of globalization.

This shift has not been smooth. In both India and China, the pursuit of economic self-reliance led, ultimately, to crisis. In China this took the form of the Cultural Revolution, a period known inside the country simply as ‘the ten year disaster’ and considered a lost decade by almost all of those who experienced it. In India the crisis was slower in coming and in many ways less severe. Nevertheless, the ideology of self-reliance which encouraged closed door protectionist policies,  resulted in the stifling effects of what former foreign minister Jaswant Singh recently called an “enormous and impenetrable barrier reef of bureaucracy” along with pervasive corruption, widespread poverty and - by the summer of 1991 - the almost complete bankruptcy of the State.
The solution to both of these crises was liberalization and economic reform –- in other words globalization.

China’s reforms began in December 1978 at the pivotal 11th Party Congress meeting of the Central Committee when Deng Xiaoping, who was himself persecuted during the Cultural Revolution as ‘the number one capitalist roader’, took charge of the party and began to reverse three decades of Maoist policy opening the ‘Middle Kingdom’ to the outside world. For Deng this shift in direction was unambiguously a response to the lessons learnt from the “left mistakes which culminated in the decade of the Cultural Revolution” (Deng, 266). According to Deng, China’s ability to achieve a unanimous consensus on “pursuing policies of reform and opening up was attributable to the ten year disaster” (259). “We are carrying out thorough and extensive reform, Why? Because we have learnt from the Cultural Revolution.” (Deng, 267)

A little over a decade later India followed in the footsteps of its giant neighbour. In June 1991 the government of Narasimha Rao –one of the few elected leaders of the Congress Party outside the Nehru dynasty – inherited a completely cash strapped state. In desperation Rao called together a late night meeting of his newly formed cabinet. Faced with a catastrophic economic situation, the new government responded with immediate and far reaching steps. In a single night they dismantled what had come to be known as the ‘Permit Raj’ and opened the country to the flows of global trade.

In contrast to what their national founders believed, it was by abandoning notions of economic autonomy and seeking deeper connections with the outside that India and China started to rise. Today these two ancient civilizations are the fastest growing economies in the world and, with over a third of the planet’s population between them, the cutting edge of the international economy. This is made glaringly apparent by recent trends in the global textile industry. Despite their status as fashion statements, India and China have left the era of khadi and the Mao suit far behind.

Austrian economist J. A. Schumpeter once observed that “the ascendance of England can almost be resolved into the history of [this] single industry” (Wehrfritz and Seno). In contemporary globalization, textiles are once again key - this time in powering the ascent of Asia. Both Gandhi and Mao demanded austerity in order to deal with a scarcity of material relative even to meager indigenous needs. Yet, less than 50 years later, with the end of quotas on January 1 2005, the world is being flooded with clothing made in the workshops and factories of China and India.

At the forefront of this ‘export surge’ is the Chinese mainland. “Nearly all analysts believe China will come out on top in a battle for control of the US$ 350 billion industry,” writes George Wehrfritz and Alexandra A. Seno (2005) in a special Newsweek report entitled Succeeding at Sewing.

China now turns out more than 20 billion finished garments a year, roughly four pieces of clothing for every person on Earth—the largest output by a single country ever recorded… The mainland's garment industry has grown 500 percent since 1990, from US$10 billion to US$50 billion, and now has 40,000 clothing manufacturers that employ some 15 million workers. In a recent Goldman Sachs poll of large American retailers, most expected China's share of the US clothing market to double from 20 percent to 40 percent by 2007 and to peak at about 60 percent.

Though China is clearly in a dominant position, India is following closely behind ready to take up the slack. As India’s Businessworld magazine writes “no buyer would like to put all his eggs in one basket. In other words, China might get the bulk of the order, but a portion will always come India's way as the next best source!” (Jishnu, 2004). A recent WTO report concurs with this assessment forecasting “that India's share of the US clothing market is expected to rise to 15 per cent from the 4 per cent of 2002, while in the European Union it will grow from 6 per cent to 9 per cent” (Jishnu, 2004).  In fact after getting China to agree to slow some textile exports, Western countries are now  “targeting India as the next biggest threat” (Von Reppert-Bismark, 2005).  Faced with this outpouring of Asian exports it is now the developed world that is closing its doors - through extended quotas and so-called ‘safeguard measures’ – to try and protect its own industry from this advancing tide.

Red Capital

India and China have grown increasingly cosmopolitan as the socio-economic influence of Gandhi and of Mao have waned. The two leaders are now primarily regarded as cultural figures,  elements of a rising soft power that function like yoga and kung-fu films, masala and Peking duck to represent that which is authentically ‘Indian’ or ‘Chinese’. Mementos of Gandhi and Mao make good souvenirs and are popular with tourists. But locals are also buying the stylishly remade reminders of their former leaders. As one marketer notes: “The success of making khadi, the humble Gandhian yarn, commercially viable to a retail consumer,” rests on the “belief that 'India' can be sold to 'Indians'” (Indiamart). As cultural icons traded on the global market place, Mao and Gandhi have thus become depoliticized. To quote travel writer Susi O'Neill (2002) “Mao mania has more in common with capitalism than communism, street traders know that Mao means money.” Yet, it is not only the street traders that are cashing in.  Entrepreneurs from the West –as stores such as Fabindia and Madame Mao’s Dowry show - are also eager to profit from the Mao and Gandhi cultural craze.

One of the most jarring high profile examples is an advertizing campaign featuring huge billboards and full page newspaper ads which show a black and white photograph of Gandhi seated at his spinning wheel. In the corner of the photo is the colour logo of Apple computers. Beneath it is the campaign’s slogan ‘Think Different’. Writing in Salon Bill McKibben (1997) expresses the predictable outrage at the idea that Gandhi should be used to sell computers:

Gandhi really is different far more different than the copywriter seems to have understood... He was the eruption in this century, and in some ways this millennium, of a venerable idea, an idea that stretches back at least to the Buddha -- the idea that by leaving yourself behind you find yourself, that by renunciation you conquer. So it is bizarre to use him to sell products. When he died, all his belongings -- toothbrush, Bhagavad-Gita, loincloth -- fit inside a couple of shoe boxes.

The ad is indeed based on an absurd contradiction – Gandhi, as Salman Rushdie writes, was “a passionate opponent of modernity and technology, preferring the pencil to the typewriter, the loincloth to the business suit, and the plowed field to the belching manufactory. Had the word processor been invented in his lifetime, he would almost certainly found it abhorrent.” Nevertheless, the ‘Think Different’ marketing campaign was amongst the most successful ever to have run.

An even starker, if less well known illustration of trade in intense anti-commercialism is a company called ‘Red Capital.’ Described by freelance journalist Ron Gluckman (2002) as “the utmost in Cultural Revolution kitsch,” the company, is run by a well connected American lawyer and consultant Laurence Brahm who “is best known for self-published books praising business in China; his most recent, ‘China's Century, The Awakening of the Next Economic Powerhouse,’ has a forward by Premier Zhu Rongji” (Gluckman 2002)

Situated in and around Beijing, Red Capital consists of a club, hotel, lodge, and studio and also runs limousine based tours of the capital, all of which are based on an aesthetic Brahm calls ‘Mao chic.’ The Red Capital Club specializes in serving up communist delicacies, favorites of Mao, Deng, and Zhu Rongji “together with some of the best in imperial dining reserved for emperors and empresses.” Housed in an “immaculately restored” courtyard compound, the club “captures the mood of the 1950s when China was driven by idealism. The lounge cigar divan,” boasts the website, “is like stepping into Mao’s private meeting room. The furnishings are originals used by the central government in the 1950s. Two chairs were actually used by Marshal Lin Biao (Mao’s fated successor who lost out in an attempted coup). A poem of Mao’s adorns one wall and a photograph of Deng, taken by his daughter and presented to the club another.”

After dinner, writes Gluckman, (2002) you can prolong the Red Capital experience by retiring “to the Chairman's Suite at the nearby Red Capital Guesthouse or puff Cuban cigars in an underground bar, once a bomb shelter, while classic Cultural Revolution propaganda films are projected on the brick walls.” An even more bizarre and extravagant option is to take Red Capital’s hour long tour of Beijing. The US$ 225 tour takes place in a “vintage Red Flag limo” which is said to have once belonged to Madame Mao and offers all the extravagant luxuries of privilege including “a bottle of Moet & Chandon champagne, Russian Caviar, and a member of the Red Detachment of Women to share the journey with. (Gluckman 2002)”

Having had the “audacity to brand the Cultural Revolution” (Gluckman 2002), Red Capital seems to delight in its own schizophrenic existence. Much of its attraction, as Gluckman notes, stems from the titillation in a club, lodging and tour “that would have been unthinkable just a couple years ago, perhaps even a capital offense during the period it mockingly celebrates.” Its website further flaunts its intensely paradoxical nature with statements such as “At Red Capital red capitalists of the world unite!”  Or:  “When Mao said ‘the east is red’ he may have been referring to Bordeaux’s ultimate victory over Chardonnay.”

The success of Red Capital, Madame Mao’s Dowry, Fabindia and the use of Gandhi’s image in Apple’s ‘Think Different’ campaign  all seem to point to the collapse of the Maoist and Gandhian ideal of autonomous development.  Yet, while it is true that in the age of globalization, India and China have abandoned protectionist policies once associated with economic self-reliance, both countries insist that they still deeply value the principle of autonomy. To survive in a time of increasing openness and cosmopolitanism, however, the notions of swadeshi and zili gengsheng had to be revolutionized. The concept of autonomy thus ceased to be tied to economic self-reliance and the production of a nationalist culture and entered instead a globalized cultural sphere.
From the earliest days of reform, Chinese leaders sought to redefine the idea of zili gengsheng, shifting it away from it’s association with aclosed door defensive mentality towards a competitive ‘spirit’ and general feeling of national pride. They insisted that there was no contradiction between the new economic direction and this key principle of Mao Zedong thought. As one Chinese official put it: “our process of opening up and reform is being done on the basis of zili gengsheng.”  Deng Xiaoping himself stressed this repeatedly. “We must integrate the universal truth of Marxism with the concrete realities of China, blaze a path of our own and build a socialism with Chinese characteristics,” he said in his opening speech to the twelfth national congress of the Communist Party. ”China’s affairs should be run according to China’s specific conditions and by the Chinese people themselves. Independence and self reliance have always been and will always be their basic stand” (Deng, 14).

Similarly, in India the idea of swadeshi has drifted away from its straightforward identification with protectionist policies. The repositioning of the concept has been a deliberate strategy used  by both main parties in response to internal pressure from the antiglobalization tendencies of their most radical supporters. Leaders of the BJP and Congress have repeatedly sought to reinterpret swadeshi  as a feeling of patriotism rather than as an expression of strict Gandhian ideology.   This was made explicit in the BJP’s election manifesto which stated: "Swadeshi simply means `India First'.“  When Atal Vajpayee, former leader of the  BJP became prime minister he elaborated on this theme in an interview: "First, I would like to affirm that the interest of the nation and the interest of the common man are the defining principles of our Government’s economic policies. Swadeshi in today’s context is anything that promotes this national goal."  Jaswant Singh former finance and foreign minister was even more explicit in tying swadeshi to India’s recent embrace of globalization:

Look at what is happening in the knowledge industry. You will see the classical example of meeting the demand for asserting ourselves and reaching out to the world and registering our presence through globalization. Today the Indian entrepreneur is celebrated. Look at Tata buying Daewoo... Reliance buying Flag...Pharma is moving out. Research is moving out. This is swadeshi. Indian companies are moving out and getting globalised. (qtd in Choudhury 2004)

This sentiment is shared by Congress member Manmohan Singh, one of the principal architects of the country’s economic reforms and the current prime minister of India who has bluntly stated that ‘swadeshi means trade.’

This attempt to harmonize the principle of autonomy with globalization can appear as an emptying out of Maoist and Gandhian ideals, especially when it is compounded with the commercialization of Indian homespun and Cultural Revolution kitsch. Global capitalism, which is just as happy trading in khadi as Coca-Cola and can see no difference in marketing images of Michael Jackson or Mao, is in this sense intrinsically nonideological. Capable of commodifying all competing ideologies, it has an almost complete disregard for contradicting dogmas and beliefs.

The Situationists – a left wing political and artistic movement of the 1960’s -  described this tendency within capitalism as the power of ‘recuperation,’ by which they meant that “each time something seems to escape the system it gets reabsorbed” (Deleuze 1971). Yet, global capitalism’s  borg-like capacity for assimilation is just as troubling to the right, who are offended by the glorification of idols such as Mao and disturbed by the anti-capitalist, anti-globalization messages that their images are meant to convey.

Both the left and the right, then, are distressed by the perversity of a system so paradoxical that it is capable of trading in its own antithesis. Yet these ironies are necessarily inherent to global capitalism, a ‘system’ so abstract and decoded that it is oblivious to the content of the commodities it promotes. This is why philosophers  Deleuze and Guattari describe global capitalism as “ the age of cynicism.” (p. 225-266)

China’s current rise, arguably the most important event in contemporary globalization, brings this ‘cynicism’ to the fore in an unprecedented fashion. Much to the world’s bemusement, China’s Communist Party calls its embrace of the market economy “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and insists that “there is no fundamental contradiction between socialism and market principles.” (Deng, 151) China’s reforms are resolutely nonideological. “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, Deng Xiaoping famously said “so long as it catches the mouse.” This quote, which is frequently used to justify the government’s policies of economic liberalization, is precisely meant to signal China’s new pragmatic, rather than dogmatic, approach.  Deng himself was apparently not blind to the irony of this position. “In a dinner with Henry Kissinger, Deng joked with him that the pig being served (Kissinger is Jewish) was not really pig at all, but ‘Chinese Duck’, so it was O.K. for him to eat it. So, too, Deng called his new system Socialism with Chinese characteristics so it wouldn't really be capitalism and would be O.K. for China to adopt.”

This split between material reality and how it is described is made possible by the fundamental rift between culture and the socio-economic sphere that coincides with capitalist modernity. Liberated from the realm of politics, culture in the era of globalization has, under the cynical direction of commodity production and thus, paradoxically, no longer subordinate to ideology of any kind --  asserted its own autonomy. What is now being produced in India and China is not the autonomy of a culture (i.e. national autonomy) but the autonomy of the cultural sphere from nationalist goals and ideology. It is thus no longer a country that has cultural autonomy but culture itself that is acheiving autonomy from any given country.   It is this autonomy, aligned with the spirit of ‘Art for art’s sake’ - rather than economic autarky - that has consumed the icons of protectionist resistance to international commerce. Globalization has now digested the slogans and symbols of Mao and Gandhi, on its own terms and without evidencing any need, or even desire, to erase them

Postscript: The Mao Suit

Though Mao sculptures, posters and buttons have become increasingly fashionable the Mao suit itself has not. Trying to locate one in Shanghai is not easy. When asked most people respond by laughing self consciously and admitting that though they have one stored away in the closet they wouldn’t think of wearing it. The idea of buying a new one - when for ten years this was all one could buy - strikes most locals as absurd.

It thus took connections (what the Chinese call guanxi) to find one in the city. Eventually, however, a highly placed government official, after asking his staff, was able to give me a name of a shop that had some in stock. The address was in the old part of town. Not the reconstructed “old town” which consists of Ming style replicas, Chinese gardens and tea houses but the real old town where Starbucks and Calvin Klein ads are harder to find. Here, where there are boarded up stores, crumbling buildings and the shops are filled with light fixtures, buttons and other unglamourous things, the city is alien, unfamiliar, and much more homogenously Chinese.

I was expecting something antiquated but instead of a dusty old shop what I found was a bargain basement type mall selling dowdy
dresses and discount washing machines. Upstairs amongst the old-fashioned jackets and drab outfits the Mao suits were on display.

I didn’t buy one but I am saving the address of the store. Since I have come to Shanghai more than one foreigner has asked how to get hold of the once ubiquitous suits. Perhaps, sometime soon, they will once again be seen on the streets of the metropolis. This time, however, the trend will not be determined by  political necessity, but rather by the contradictions, paradoxes and ironies that feed an irrepressibly autonomous culture.

Works Cited

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Choudhury, Ranabir Ray. 2004. Evolution of swadeshi idea. The Hindu Business Line. 05, April. http://www.blonnet.com/2004/04/05/stories/2004040500100800.htm (Accessed July 05, 2005)

Deleuze, Gilles. (1971)  Capitalism, flows, the decoding of flows. Cours Vincennes.16, November. WebDeleuze. http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=116&groupe=Anti%20Oedipe%20et%20Mille%20Plateaux&langue=2 (Accessed July 12)

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1983.  AntiOedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

Deng Xiaoping. 1994. Selected works of Deng Xiaoping: Volume 3 (1982-1992). Eds. Editorial Committee for Party Literature. Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

Dinesh Rathod. 2001. Khadi turns hip. Tribune. 27, October  http://www.tribuneindia.com/2001/20011027/windows/fashion.htm (Accessed July 11 2005)

Gandhi, Mohandas. 1987. The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi: Volume 3. Ed. Raghavan Iyer. Oxford: Clarendon Press

Gluckman, Ron. 2002 Driving Mrs. Mao’s car. Ron Gluckman in cyberspace. http://www.gluckman.com/RedCapital.html (Accessed July 11 2005)

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Jishnu, Latha. 2004. Too little, too late. Businessworld. 15, November http://www.businessworldindia.com/nov1504/coverstory01.asp (Accessed July 11 2005)