Chinese government scraps massive Mao statue

A gargantuan gold-painted statue of Communist China's founding father Mao Zedong has suddenly been demolished, apparently for lacking government approval, state media said Friday, days after images of the statue circulated widely online. 

Images of the statue of a seated Mao towering 121 feet over empty fields in the central province of Henan made worldwide headlines this week.

But the three million yuan ($460,000) structure has been destroyed, the People's Net news portal cited local officials as saying, adding the reason was "unclear".

The website is linked to the People's Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party.

It cited reports from unspecified media as saying the likeness of the man who ruled China with an iron grip for nearly three decades until his death in 1976 "was not registered or approved" by the local government.

Pictures circulating online — which could not be immediately verified by AFP — showed a gaping hole in the rear of Mao's massive golden torso, and his head shrouded in black. Local officials could not immediately be reached.

Construction was reportedly funded by several local entrepreneurs and finished in December after nine months of labor, the HMR.cn portal said this week.

Mao, despite being blamed for millions of deaths, is still widely revered in China and is credited with uniting the country after a civil war between nationalist and communist parties. Defeated, the nationalists fled in 1949 to Taiwan where they established a government. 

The Communist leadership tightly controls public discussion of history and seeks to use his legacy to shore up its support.

China's current President Xi Jinping has praised Mao as a "great figure" and revived some of his rhetoric and his centralization of power, while at the same time following the party's 1980s conclusion that Mao also made "mistakes".

Some Internet users criticized the statue, pointing out its location in Henan, the center of a famine in the late 1950s resulting from Mao's economic policies estimated to have killed as many as 40 million people.

“I heard it was destroyed yesterday. I heard it was because it had occupied a farmer’s land," a local delivery driver told the Guardian. 

In a push to modernize in the late 1960s, Communists took farmers from their fields and charged them with smelting scrap metal and other industrial tasks. Their crops went unharvested and millions starved. 

"Have you forgotten about the Great Famine, building that?" asked one poster on Sina Weibo, a Chinese equivalent of Twitter.

Others questioned the statue's resemblance to the leader known as the "Great Helmsman," who also launched the decade-long Cultural Revolution that saw violence and destruction nationwide, with public denounciations and executions for those accused by neighbors or officials of disloyalty to Mao's regime. 

“Why not use the 3 million [yuan] to improve local education?” another Sina Weibo user wrote, according to the Guardian report, which said that other emblems of Mao worship had cropped up in rural China, citing state media. 

Agence-France Presse and Al Jazeera