Memories of the Cultural Revolution, Dashanzi, Beijing

Victors in war often memorialise their darkest hour, thereby stressing the magnitude of their achievement, not just in winning, but winning from extreme adversity. Hence the British obsession with the Dunkerque landings, which were in reality a brave but ragged retreat. If they had been a precursor of ultimate defeat perhaps they would not now be so celebrated. The Long March has a similar place in the history of the Chinese Communist Party’s victory over Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang which led to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. The Long March was in fact a long retreat from the advancing Nationalist troops, ending in the mountainous North East Shanxi province in the Yan’an area. According to the mythology more than 800,000 Communists embarked on the Long March and about 25000 made it to the end. Jung Chang has suggested in her biography of Mao that Mao didn’t do much marching, spending much of the time being carried in a Sedan chair.

In the Dashanzi area of Beijing, adjacent to the hyper-contemporary art zone, 798, a theme park celebrating the Long March and the Shanxi region has been established. You enter a courtyard to the sound of revolutionary songs broadcast across a tinny public address system. Around the courtyard are revolutionary statues and red stars. One of the buildings contains a museum about the Long March and the Yan’an area of Shanxi. Most of the exhibits are photographs of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, including Mao and Zhou En lai. They are dressed in thickly padded and very crumpled Chinese suits, swathed against the cold which would have been extreme, and they look sternly out of grainy black and white photographs against a backdrop of grey mountains. Mao looks haughty and, relatively speaking, well-groomed. Zhou looks determined with a firm expression and that dignified, upright bearing which was so much a part of the grace and style with which he approached foreign relations in his long years as Chinese premier. There are a few exhibits, some chairs said to have been used by Mao, his calligraphy brush and inkpot, the binoculars and leather bag supposedly carried by Mao’s bodyguards. The photos are prints and they are a mix of pictures of meetings, where a crowd of seated participants listen to what one suspects were long-ish speeches from their leaders. The guide tells us all the important decisions about the foundation of the People’s Republic of China were taken in these meetings in the mountains. There are also pictures of the warm reception the Communists received from local farmers. These are, needless to say, wholly unconvincing.

One section of the display contains photographs of Yan’an in the Cultural Revolution. Schoolchildren had been brought to live there and are being ‘educated’ by farmers. The pictures are of meetings, more meetings, and students working in the fields alongside the farmers. We know from the testimonies of people who subsequently emigrated to the USA that, in fact, the children from the cities had contributed little and learnt less. They had been distributed amongst local families, often miles apart across fields and mountains. They had just been another hungry mouth to feed, though occasionally they brought with them useful things like medicines which could be shared.

Suddenly we discover that the group of middle-aged Chinese people in the museum with us are in fact a class reunion of the pupils in the photographs who had been sent to Yan’an in the Cultural Revolution. We get talking to one of them. He looks about 40, thin and dressed entirely in black, on the surface every inch the modern Beijing-er. He tells us he was taken straight from school with a group of his classmates. Taking classes of schoolchildren to the countryside at short – or no- notice was fairly routine at the height of the Cultural Revolution. None of their families came with him. He was about fourteen years old, just at the school leaving age. He points out himself in one of the photographs, an earnest, worried looking adolescent marching along a dusty rural street. In other photos unhappy-looking people have banners around their necks bearing slogans and pictures of Mao. These people are probably being denounced by the Red Guards, but in the photo of the marching students no one is carrying banners, nor are they surrounded by a watchful crowd. We ask him if it had been hard. He looks down at his shoes, wary and evasive but certainly not wishing to be disingenuous, smiling weakly. It had been very hard he says softly. He was there for a few years until he was an adult, working in the fields and ‘learning’ from the peasants. Then he was assigned to a job in a factory in Shanxi province and did not return to Beijing until 1990, by when he was middle-aged. We want to ask what had happened to his family, but the interpreter is becoming anxious and tells us we must be going. “It’s controversial”, he says simply, again combining discretion with a wish not to be dishonest.