The Ghosts Haunting The China Dream
In Beijing, history often consists in the destruction of history
I very nearly didn’t make it to Beijing. It was July 2021, and my last days in Shanghai had seen the arrival of typhoon In-fa, swelling the canals with rain and battering the trees with wind. On the morning of my departure I was standing in a car park, clutching my wet bundle of travel authorisation documents, when the water burst into my shoes.
The train station in Shanghai was closed, so I had to take a taxi south to Hangzhou, inching along the highway in a chaotic blur of lights. Soon after crossing the Qiantang river, I stepped out of the car and found the vast form of the railway terminal towering over me, its walls inclining outwards like the sides of some monstrous ocean liner stranded in the middle of the city.
But it was only after I arrived in Beijing that I realised how lucky I had been. Due to a Covid outbreak in Jiangsu province (“outbreak” here meaning a few dozen cases, rather than the several-thousand being recorded daily in the UK), travel into the city would soon be all but impossible.
This extreme precaution reflects the fact that Beijing is not just the nation’s capital; it is the home of the Chinese Communist Party. The city is a symbol of the Party’s power and prestige, much as it was for the emperors who ruled here until the early 20th century. As such, I found it an interesting place to think about how the Party communicates its authority, and more particularly, how it projects “the China Dream”: president Xi Jinping’s vision for returning the country to national and civilizational greatness.
But as I wrote last week, there are plenty of cracks in the impressive facade of Chinese modernity, and the China Dream is no exception. Xi’s regime is pulling in two directions, driving China into the future while also trying to reconnect the nation with its civilizational roots. This raises some awkward questions about the Party’s own role in Chinese history, since it played no small part in severing the country from its past to begin with.
The Communists captured Beijing in January 1949, and later that year Mao Zedong proclaimed the people’s republic of China from a balcony overlooking Tiananmen Square. The moment is captured in a famous oil painting by Dong Xiwen, though the group of leaders surrounding Mao was repeatedly updated to reflect ongoing purges within the Party. It is a good illustration of how, in Beijing, history often consists in the destruction of history.
Beijing was no stranger to dramatic regime change, having been ruled for centuries by warrior dynasties sweeping down from the northern steppes. These conquests culminated in the Qing, China’s last and in many ways greatest imperial dynasty, who ruled China from the mid-17th century until 1911. But unlike the Qing, Mao’s Communists did not accommodate themselves to the cityscape they inherited. So allergic was Mao to Beijing’s imperial history that he did not even want to enter the city at first, preferring to remain encamped with his army on its outskirts.
Eventually Mao’s Soviet advisors persuaded him that Beijing’s urban fabric, much like its inhabitants, could be broken down and reconstructed. Inspired by Stalin’s 1935 plan for Moscow, the city would be remade as a centre of industrial efficiency, like a giant factory. But the figure who oversaw the redevelopment of Beijing was neither Chinese nor Soviet; it was Leon Hoa, a French modernist who had worked with Le Corbusier himself, and who had never visited China before taking up his post in the City Planning Bureau.
Beijing was thus a prelude of sorts to the destruction of China’s heritage that came with Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s. In this nightmarish episode, Mao mobilised his young supporters to cleanse the country of the “Four Olds”: customs, culture, habits and ideas. The material culture of China’s Confucian tradition, rooted in the worship of ancestors, was desecrated on an enormous scale. It was also a time of rampant xenophobia: among those accused of “promoting westernisation” and banished to the countryside was Leon Hoa himself.
Today’s Beijing, it should be said, does not feel like a factory. There is a wonderful sense of conviviality and bustle in the city, not least in those areas that escaped Mao’s redevelopment, the network of alleys and courtyards known as the hutongs. Many sides of China mingle here, as rich teenagers flaunt their daring fashion alongside old fish-peddlers with sun-beaten faces. Likewise, in the public recreation areas dotted around the city, people of all generations gather in the evening to use outdoor gym equipment, play table tennis, smoke, or watch a game of GO.
Nonetheless, the Party makes its presence known in the layers of security that envelop all kinds of activity. Getting tickets for museums involved struggling with Chinese-language websites, WeChat correspondence, identity checks and payment systems requiring a Chinese bank account. The Covid monitoring was much stricter than in Shanghai, demanding reams of paperwork and numerous digital health codes.
Encounters with authority can be more old-fashioned too. At one of the numerous checkpoints surrounding Tiananmen Square, an official flicked through my notebook and my dog-eared copy of Dubliners. Airport-style security scanners, manned by at least four people, greet you in the entrance hall of every metro station.
But here as elsewhere in China, the most effective monuments to the Party are the visible fruits of affluence and modernity. I stayed for a while near the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, a district devoted to information technology, electric cars, biotechnology and robotics. Among the 26,000 companies that have invested here are Mercedes-Benz, General Electric and Bayer. The neighbourhood was spacious and quiet, its buildings and tree-lined roads still feeling brand-new, as though they had just been taken out of their plastic. Electric cars and scooters flitted silently past, pedestrians sauntered between coffee shops and restaurants, while overhead the clouds were reflected in the glass facades of office buildings.
Here was striking evidence of the government’s efforts to move the Chinese economy beyond manufacturing, expanding its technology and service sectors. I found another, slightly surreal sign of this in the area called “798 Art Zone,” a kind of artificial habitat for urban creatives. This designated “art district” mimics the gentrified quarters of western cities right down to its placement in a former heavy industrial zone; rusted silos, extraction pipes and crumbling concrete pillars frame the area like a parody of hipster aesthetics. There are galleries of all shapes and sizes, “café and artspace” venues, artisanal bakeries, vintage shops and a “Bauhaus square.” It was as though someone had tried to copy a modern cultural sector in the same way they might copy engine designs or missile technology.
Elsewhere in the capital, history has not been repurposed but lovingly restored. The Qing-era structures that miraculously survived Mao’s reign – such as the Temple of Heaven, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace and the Temple of Confucius – are again much venerated. These are extraordinary places, where the esoteric mystery of the emperors’ ceremonial culture still shines through, despite the thousands of tourists (all Chinese at the time of my visit) who throng their sacred passageways and squares.
It is difficult to work out what such monuments signify in a country that still bears the scars of the Cultural Revolution. They have been so carefully brought back to life, in all their vibrate colour and ornate detail, that they look more like freshly-minted replicas than authentic historical sites. One British expat I spoke to in Beijing had an intriguing theory: maybe such lavish recreation of the past is a tacit recognition of the spiritual void left by the ruptures of the 20th century.
At any rate, this interpretation points to one of the tensions in Xi Jinping’s China Dream. Xi has tried to bind together Chinese national pride and party loyalty through historical narrative, portraying Communism not just as a modernising force but as a vehicle for restoring the greatness of Chinese civilisation. He has even rehabilitated the Confucian heritage that Mao worked so hard to purge from the national psyche. For the regime, Confucianism has the double benefit of linking China to its past and providing a language of unity and collective duty. Consider the Confucian terms in which Jiang Shigong, one of Xi’s intellectual promoters, has written of the Party’s historic mission. “Communism,” writes Jiang,
will never again be like it was under Mao Zedong – something that was meant to take on a real social form in the here and now – but is instead the Party’s highest ideal and faith. … it is [now] intimately linked to the ideal of ‘great unity under Heaven’ from the Chinese cultural tradition.
In recent years, Xi has cited Confucius in a speech to the Party, and has even provided a blurb for a bestselling new edition of Confucius’ works.
But at the same time, Xi is seeking to paper over the Party’s own responsibility for severing China from its past. Before Xi took power in 2012, the CCP had officially acknowledged Mao’s Cultural Revolution as an error. Today recognising this and other disastrous episodes from Communist history has increasingly become verboten. The charge of “historical nihilism” is applied to any discussion of the Party’s past mistakes. The latest edition of the Party’s official history praises the ideological intentions behind the Cultural Revolution, while blaming any negative consequences on flawed implementation. The academic Sun Peidong, who has now left China, is among those who have been censored for teaching the Cultural Revolution.
Xi’s thinking seems to be that the Party’s authority depends on the Mao era being fully integrated into the arc of “national rejuvenation,” downplaying the idea of a radical break when, in the late 1970s, the country pivoted to capitalism under Deng Xiaoping. Communist cadres are now being taught that criticism of Stalin’s crimes was a fatal error for the Soviet Union’s communist regime.
The result of this selective embrace of the past is, naturally, a rather artificial and airbrushed version of history, which I saw for myself at the National Museum of China. Since I was there during the CCP’s centenary celebrations, even more of the museum than usual was given over to honouring the Party. There were galleries full of political texts and images of functionaries going about their business of hand-shaking and speech-giving. More revealing was the exhibition titled “Road to Rejuvenation,” the very place where Xi first spoke of his China Dream in 2012. The show details China’s apparently seamless rise to power and prosperity since 1949. Alongside memorabilia from the 2008 Beijing Olympics – clearly a moment of national pride – there was plenty of military hardware, infographics visualizing economic growth, records of technological progress (including a cabinet showing the development of mobile phones), and a full-scale model of a high-speed train carriage.
But the most striking display was in the museum’s entrance hall. Here a collection of statues, reliefs and paintings celebrated the heroic struggles of the Chinese Communist movement in its early decades. The message seemed clear: China’s return to greatness began with the Party’s own emergence as the force destined to lead the nation. I was distinctly reminded of the kitsch Nazi- and Communist-era statues I had seen at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin; the difference being that in Europe today, such romantic monuments to ideology are displayed with a sense of irony and sceptical detachment, whereas in Beijing they are presented with complete sincerity.
It is difficult for an outsider like myself to grasp how these historical narratives resonate with the public. Do Chinese breasts swell with gratitude when they encounter the Party’s self-glorifying accounts of the past, or are they conscious of everything that is left out and revised?
An interesting reference point in this regard comes from the Chinese intellectuals translated by David Ownby, as part of his superb project Reading the China Dream. Among these voices there is a great deal of concern about China’s trajectory, and even a fair amount of thinly-veiled criticism of the Party. But as Ownby notes, almost all of them share an acute consciousness of China emerging as the subject of world history; an assumption that the Chinese system, whatever its faults, has already superseded the western one.
Of course intellectuals are a species unto themselves, but it does seem to me that this feeling of national apotheosis is widespread in China today. If this is the lens through which Chinese people view the past, then they may well be receptive to narratives that flatten the contradictions of history and frame China’s rise with a sense of destiny.
On the other hand, Xi is surely giving a hostage to fortune with his blatant efforts to cover up the traumas of Maoism. There is always the chance that such buried memories will be unearthed at a later date, at which point they will be doubly explosive for having been concealed.