A sensational claim caused an uproar. As the great leader of the Chinese nation, Chairman Mao's body naturally attracted great attention from the people of the whole country. However, in the same year, some false rumours began to circulate in Hong Kong and some parts of the country, claiming that the state would have to spend a lot of money every year to preserve the president's body. This statement once attracted widespread attention and doubts. At this juncture, Xu Jing, then director of the Administration Bureau of Chairman Mao's Memorial Hall, stood up and publicly refuted this rumor. But how exactly did Xu Jing respond? What happened to the whole thing? What kind of story is hidden behind the preservation of Chairman Mao's body?
After Chairman Mao's death, the Party Central Committee decided to preserve the body for a long time
On September 9, 1976, a terrible news shocked the whole country and the world spread all over the country and the north and south of the country - Comrade Mao Zedong, chairman of the Communist Party of China and founder and leader of the People's Republic of China, passed away and left us forever. His death is undoubtedly a major loss, leaving hundreds of millions of people immersed in endless mourning.
In the face of this special moment, the Party Central Committee is aware of the importance of the matter. Chairman Mao holds an extraordinary position in the hearts of the Chinese people, representing the spiritual force of the Chinese revolution and being the idol of the Chinese nation. If it is handled in a hasty manner and without due respect, it will inevitably cause greater turmoil in the country and even in the world. So, on that night in early September, the Politburo held an urgent discussion about Chairman Mao's death.
The meeting was at an impasse from the outset. One faction believes that Chairman Mao made it clear before his death that he hoped to choose cremation and simple disposal of his body when the time came. As a Communist, we should respect the will of the chairman. The other faction holds a different view, believing that Chairman Mao is a hero of the Chinese nation, and his historical status and contributions determine that he should be immortalized. Only by preserving the body permanently can future generations admire and draw on the strength of the revolutionary spirit. The two diametrically opposed views are at odds, and neither can convince anyone.
At this critical moment, Comrade Hua Guofeng, who was the top leader of the party and the state at the time, spoke up. He believed that in terms of the domestic situation at that time, if the cremation of the body was carried out in accordance with Chairman Mao's wishes, it would become a trick for hostile elements, and it was very likely to be used to stir up people's hearts and create greater turmoil. In order to maintain the overall stability of the country and avoid irreversible consequences, Hua Guofeng directly ordered that Chairman Mao's body should be permanently preserved and immediately began to prepare for relevant work.
In this way, the Party Central Committee made this epoch-making and important decision through careful consideration. From that moment on, China embarked on an unprecedented journey of protecting the remains of great men, which was unprecedented in the world. Chairman Mao's appearance will forever be fixed in that era, as a spiritual sustenance to stay in the world forever, witnessing the great journey of the Chinese nation towards rejuvenation.
The embalming of Chairman Mao's body is entirely self-reliant, and the state has limited investment
After the Party Central Committee decided to preserve Chairman Mao's body permanently, it was immediately faced with a formidable challenge: how to achieve long-term embalming? At that time, this technology was completely blank in China, and there was no experience to draw on.
At that time, Liu Xiangping, an authoritative figure in the medical and health field, was ordered to serve as the general person in charge of this work. But no one knows where the road of anti-corrosion technology goes. During several months of repeated research, Liu Xiangping and his colleagues consulted a large number of domestic and foreign documents, but found no valuable clues. The only relevant records that can be found are some brief instructions provided by the Soviet Union for embalming Lenin's body. For this reason, they also rushed to Moscow to consult with Soviet people, but the other party did not say a word about this.
In the absence of anything, the anti-corrosion technology can only be self-reliant. Liu Xiangping gathered top talents in the fields of medicine, chemistry, biology and other fields, and set up a special anti-corrosion group to jointly explore the road of anti-corrosion with uncertain prospects.
The group quickly identified the focus of embalming efforts: to preserve the shape and face of the chairman's body while preventing decay and deterioration. Based on the basic principles of corpse preservation, the experts successively proposed and implemented basic measures such as embalming and filling, embalming injections, etc., although they could only barely maintain the state of the body for a while. It wasn't until later that the team finally made a breakthrough in refrigeration, and they made an ultra-low temperature freezer at minus 104 degrees Celsius to put the antiseptic work on the right track.
At the same time, the chairman's crystal coffin was also independently designed and manufactured in China, with a special refrigeration device added to it and a transparent effect to facilitate people to look at it from afar. Since then, Chairman Mao's body has been placed in the coffin, and his dying face has been maintained in an artificially controlled environment.
But the anti-embalming efforts are far from stopping. In 1977, the inauguration of the President's Memorial Hall marked the beginning of large-scale tribute activities, which would inevitably bring more pressure to the anti-corrosion work. This was carefully assessed by all parties in advance. Due to the demand for continuous power supply, if traditional diesel power generation is still used, in addition to high costs, toxic exhaust gases and dust will be generated, polluting the indoor environment.
For this reason, after repeated study, the central leading comrades made a major decision: Starting from 1984, the use of state financial funds for the embalming of the chairman's body should be suspended. While this difficult decision has caused further difficulties for staff, it has helped to avoid excessive criticism in the future. Since then, the anti-corrosion work has been maintained entirely by a dedicated team at its own expense, marking the beginning of a path full of hardships and self-reliance.
The memorial hall has successively adopted an electric and solar power supply system, and a large-scale protective project has been built on the ground, making strenuous efforts to ensure the permanent preservation of the chairman's remains. It is precisely with the unremitting struggle of this team that Chairman Mao's body has always remained in its original appearance for many years, becoming an outstanding achievement that has attracted the attention of the world.
Xu Jing and her team have been dedicated to their duties and have been protecting the body for decades
In this unprecedented anti-embalming and protection work, a special team stands at the forefront of safeguarding Chairman Mao's remains. They are the work team led by Xu Jing herself.
On September 17, 1976, Xu Jing stood next to Chairman Mao's body for the first time. At that time, she was only 23 years old and had just graduated from Peking Union Medical College Hospital. After the condolence ceremony that made the whole country mourn, Xu Jing was appointed to serve as one of the core members of the embalming work.
As a key member of the working group, Xu Jing personally participated in and witnessed the whole process of embalming the chairman's body. From the initial ignorance, to the gradual mastery of basic technology; From a single means to the use of a variety of advanced protective measures, she remembers them all.
With her extraordinary perseverance and professionalism, Xu Jing quickly became the mainstay of the group. Due to the needs of special types of work, she and her colleagues have been working in a closed special environment for a long time, maintaining a 24-hour shift system, checking monitoring data at any time and adjusting parameters in time to ensure that the chairman's body is in the best state of embalming.
In the long years, Xu Jing and her team have encountered various difficulties and obstacles many times. For example, on one occasion, they accidentally caused a short circuit during a circuit maintenance, causing the temperature of the space where the chairman's body was located to drop rapidly. If not dealt with in a timely manner, the consequences can be unimaginable. At that time, Xu Jing responded calmly and calmly, quickly deployed manpower to troubleshoot the fault, and quickly repaired the fault.
Similar dangers happen from time to time, but as soon as there is a disturbance, Xu Jing and her colleagues will rush to the scene at any time, day and night to try to eliminate hidden dangers, even at great personal costs.
It is worth mentioning that in order to ensure the smooth operation of the anti-corrosion system, Xu Jing also independently undertook the management and maintenance work. With self-taught basic knowledge, she led the workers to overhaul all kinds of equipment by themselves, which not only saved maintenance costs, but also did not affect their work by revealing secrets.
In this way, this special team, under the leadership of Xu Jing, silently guarded Chairman Mao's body, rain or shine, unswervingly. As time went on, the antiseptic technology continued to upgrade, and they learned to use new preservatives and create an ultra-low-temperature, oxygen-free, sterile and other environments in a confined space, which was very different from the beginning.
In 1997, Xu Jing was appointed as the director of the Administration Bureau of the President's Memorial Hall due to her outstanding performance. Since then, she has completely borne the burden of anti-corrosion work on herself, and still does it herself, and forged ahead, innovated, and introduced more advanced anti-corrosion means and equipment.
In this way, generations of staff members have relayed forward, using their youth to interpret the supreme respect for national heroes to the world. And Xu Jing and her colleagues have written a singing and crying chapter with practical actions, vividly demonstrating the unwavering patriotic spirit of the Chinese people.
The great success of the preservation work has aroused some suspicion
After decades of unremitting efforts, Xu Jing and her team have made remarkable achievements in the long-term preservation of the President's remains. On the one hand, they kept the shape and face of Chairman Mao's body vivid, and even the tilt angle of Chairman Mao's hair when he was dying was completely restored, showing the exquisite skills of embalming work; On the other hand, this unprecedented work is a rare masterpiece in itself, writing a strong stroke for mankind in the long-term preservation of corpses.
But such an achievement, which was admired by the world, was met with some suspicion and criticism in 1989.
That year, a rumor about the extremely high annual cost of embalming the chairman's body began to circulate in Hong Kong and some parts of China. There has been speculation that the reason why the cost of maintaining the remains of the President is so high is that high-tech measures must be taken to keep it intact. For example, the use of a large number of expensive preservatives, the hiring of professionals in day and night shifts, etc., will cost the state a lot of money every year.
Soon, this speculation became obvious under the hype of some people, and began to whisper in some crowds, and even caused an uproar. Some have questioned whether it is really necessary for the government to spend so much money to preserve a corpse in the current situation of the country's economic situation.
All of a sudden, suspicion and criticism spread out of nothing, and almost turned into a scene of public opinion that was even more serious. The fuse was precisely the great effort and effort made by Xu Jing and her colleagues for the preservation of the chairman's body and achieved fruitful results.
In fact, these speculations are completely unfounded. Despite the impressive achievements in embalming, the entire process is not expensive. As has already been stated, since 1984, the cost of maintaining the President's remains has been entirely financed by the staff and the President's Memorial and has not been funded by the State. Therefore, the so-called "huge cost every year" argument is pure nonsense.
However, there were far more rumors circulating at the time. Some people with ulterior motives have spread even more exaggerated and bizarre remarks in Hong Kong and some parts of the country, such as Xu Jing, who has completely changed the body of the chairman in order to prevent embalming, leaving only an empty shell. Others say they use high-tech means to manipulate bodies so that they can look at anyone who comes and so on.
As soon as these remarks came out, they immediately caused a great shock in some areas. As a heroic leader of a generation, Chairman Mao's body should have been respected, but it was so suspicious and desecrated that many people were haunted. For a time, public opinion was in an uproar, and widespread attention and discussion about this incident began to be set off across the country.
In the face of stormy public opinion pressure, although Xu Jing and others in it felt aggrieved, they were helpless. As witnesses, they certainly knew that those statements were nonsense, but to set the record straight would be to the point of view unless the whole work was demystified, something they had never done before.
Just when public opinion was gradually getting out of control, the incident finally attracted the attention of the top level of the central government. The relevant departments quickly intervened in the investigation and verification, and personally contacted Xu Jing and others to understand the true situation of the incident......
After the incident subsided, the secrecy of the work continued to this day
In the face of that unprecedented storm of public opinion, the top level of the central government took swift action and dispatched a working group to conduct an on-the-spot investigation. After some investigation, the working group quickly found out the truth: Xu Jing and her team were indeed working tirelessly to protect Chairman Mao's body, and there was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.
In order to prevent the rumors from spreading further and causing a greater turmoil, the central government quickly issued clear instructions to all localities, asking the media and all sectors of society to stop excessive speculation and comments on the matter, and reiterated the policy stance of protecting the body of the chairman.
Soon, with the clear attitude of the central government, the incident quickly subsided across the country. Some places that had been yelling at Xu Jing and others have also begun to regain calm.
However, although the turmoil has subsided, the mystery of the protection of the chairman's remains remains unresolved. The central government has made it clear that it will not publicly disclose relevant details in the short term due to some special considerations.
In this regard, although Xu Jing and others regretted it, they also expressed their understanding. As witnesses, they know that once this mystery is revealed, it will inevitably lead to more suspicion and criticism. Therefore, under the unified deployment of the central government, they decided to continue to stick to their posts incognito and obscurity.
In this way, this unprecedented work of preserving the body continued to operate behind the scenes after the turmoil was quelled. Xu Jing led the team to stick to the forefront of embalming work day after day, year after year, and maintained the eternal posture of the chairman's body.
With the passage of time, there has been a turnover of personnel, but the level of hardship and rigor of the work has never been lessened. Every newcomer who takes over this work must go through long-term special training, and under the guidance of old employees, be proficient in various anti-corrosion means and operating procedures in order to be competent for the job.
After the newcomers join, they must receive a rigorous ideological education and have a full understanding of the great significance of the work. At the same time, they must also accept special disciplinary requirements, and do not disclose too much work content outside. To this end, everyone must sign no less than dozens of confidentiality clauses when they join the company.
While ensuring the secrecy of embalming, the staff is also racing against time to dig new technologies and continuously improve the quality of preservation. For example, in the mid-90s of the 20th century, they introduced the "5M" technology of embalming, that is, by controlling temperature, humidity, pressure, ventilation and gas, to achieve the purpose of long-term preservation of remains.
Later, they introduced more advanced equipment, such as the purchase of an ultra-low temperature embalming system worth millions of yuan from Japan, so that the preservation environment of the chairman's body was more optimized.
Every new development is the result of the efforts of countless staff. Sometimes, they have to work tirelessly for months to solve a new problem until they finally find a solution. The introduction of new technologies then requires further training and proficiency. It's a never-ending process.
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In this way, groups of unknown workers took over, guarded a room in the chairman's memorial hall that was never open to the public, and used their sweat and experience to protect this great project all the way to this day. Although there was a brief period of turmoil, this hidden team finally stood behind the scenes and continued to move forward silently.