<p>City Life</p>

Clear blue skies and shiny shopping malls, but Mao’s corpulent corpse still presides

I went to visit Mao Tse-tung the other day. The embalmed body of the Father of communist China lies in a mausoleum in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. There he rests in his trademark grey suit — the same grey as Beijing’s toxic 21st-century skies.

I expected to find a long queue of people waiting to see the still corpulent but very pasty-faced Mao, who lies mostly hidden under a red flag, but there were only a few. Mao is no longer Tiananmen Square’s star attraction. Instead, a giant digital clock counting down the days to the Beijing Olympics Games now draws more attention. Hundreds of squealing, excited Chinese, including many teenagers wearing tracksuits with the word ‘sport’ stitched on the back, had gathered around the clock to get their photo taken. Perhaps I should not have been surprised that Mao’s red star has faded.