... Mao's hometown of Shaoshan sold 124 million yuan (£12.4 million) worth of trinkets last year, of which almost three-quarters were Mao statuettes. But buyers have complained that some Mao statues do not even resemble the founder of modern China and that substandard statues have melted in the heat or chipped easily.If they really cared about standards, they wouldn't revere Mao, but who's buying these things? Tourists?
"The new guidelines include a ban on plastic and plaster because plastic deforms and plaster is easy to break," said the head of the Standardisation department at Hunan province's Quality Supervision Bureau, who declined to give his name.
"We will have a team of art and craft experts working with factories to determine the likeness of the statues, based on photographs of Chairman Mao in historic moments, in order to decide which ones are authentically Mao," he added.
I ran across that article yesterday while looking for a photograph of the statuette I saw in a house in Madison that was staged for sale.
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12 comments:
But if you go carrying Plaster Statuettes of Chairman Mao
You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow
....and when they excavated the terra cotta soldiers, they were all standing in formation.
Betamax you beat me to it, you bastard!
Our future global overlords are even bigger regulatory assholes then we are. See, it can and will be worse.
I would like a Mao garden hose holder for the backyard. Plastic or ceramic, I don't care.
I had a Chairman Mao umbrella from Shanghai Tang. I loved it and thought it was funny, to reduce Mao to an umbrella decoration.
When I was in China for National Day several years ago, they were arresting street vendors for selling unlicensed Chinese flags for waving. It made me like non-reverential Mao knick knacks even more.
It somehow seems entirely fitting for Mao statues to be made of most shoddy material available.
Chairman Mao as a spokesperson for Dominoes Pizza.
Will I still be able to buy Obama themed merchandise long after he's ceased to be president?
Well of course the answer is yes, But shouldn't we be doing something now to insure his statues don't face the same quality problems that have befallen Chairman Mao.
That's a cult of personality that doesn't want to let go.
Is there really a market for Chairman Mao memorabilia?
In the great leap forward Mao's policies killed more than 20 million people. And all I got was this lousy t shirt.
Anybody here
Seen my old friend Zedong,
Can you tell me where he's gone?
Well I think I saw him walking
Over the hill
With Vladimir and Fidel and Josef...
George Washington's image was used to sell whiskey and other products throughout the 1800s. You can buy Abe Lincoln commemorative plates at truck stops in Illinois.
OTOH, I don't think Billy Beer is available anymore.
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