IAN JOHNSON
When I first went to China in 1984, my fellow foreign classmates and I at Peking University used to play a game with an old guidebook. Called Nagel’s Encyclopaedia Guide: China, it was first published in 1968 in Switzerland and featured descriptions of important cultural sites visited by French diplomats and scholars. The key for us was that they had gathered the information in the 1950s and 1960s—before the Cultural Revolution. We would look up a temple or a historical site in Beijing and set off on our bikes to find it. I remember one trip to find the Five-Pagoda Temple, which was built in the late fifteenth century and featured five small pagodas on top of a massive stone platform. Nagel’s said most had been destroyed in the turmoil of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but that the five pagodas were still there. Our 1980s maps of Beijing showed nothing, but Nagel’s intrigued us. Did it still exist?
We rode down Baishiqiao Street and tried to superimpose Nagel’s maps of old “Pékin” on our maps of an exhausted, post-Cultural Revolution Beijing. Eventually we had to stop and ask. After many fruitless efforts, we were led through the gates of a factory and into the temple, which was hidden in the back. All that was left was the large stone platform topped by five stone pagodas. Tiles had fallen off the roof, and steles lay smashed on the ground. Weeds grew everywhere. Still, we walked the grounds with a sense of wonder: here was something that had vanished off today’s maps, and yet it existed. In one structure we had the story of China’s cultural grandeur, foreign invasions, auto-cultural destruction, but also of survival. Here, thanks to our odd guidebook, we had Chinese history in a nutshell—the past and the present.
Observing China sometimes requires a lens like Nagel’s. Walking the streets of China’s cities, driving its country roads, and visiting its centers of attraction can be disorienting. On the one hand, we know this is a country where a rich civilization existed for millennia, yet we are overwhelmed by a sense of rootlessness. China’s cities don’t look old. In many cities there exist cultural sites and tiny pockets of antiquity amid oceans of concrete, most of it just ten to twenty years old. When we do meet the past in the form of an ancient temple or narrow alleyway, a bit of investigation shows much of it to have been recreated. If you go back to the Five-Pagoda Temple today, you will find a completely renovated temple, not a brick or tile out of place. The factory has been torn down and replaced by a park, a wall, and a ticket booth. We might be on the site of something old, but the historical substance is so diluted that it feels as if it has vanished.
What does this tell us about a country? Optimists feel a sense of dynamism—here, at last, is a country getting on with things while the rest of the world stagnates or plods forward. This is always said with amazement and awe. The apex of this era of wonder came shortly before the 2008 Olympics, when the Western media tripped over itself trying to trot out the most effusive praise for China’s rise/transformation/rejuvenation—pick your cliché. Typical was a New York Times architectural critic, who raved upon arrival in Beijing in 2008 about “the inescapable feeling that you’re passing through a portal to another world, one whose fierce embrace of change has left Western nations in the dust” and concluded that “one wonders if the West will ever catch up.”
Other emotions are more ambiguous. The bluntest I have experienced is this: a country that has so completely obliterated and then recreated its past—can it be trusted? What eats at a country, or a people, or a civilization, so much that it remains profoundly uncomfortable with its history? History is lauded in China. Ordinary people will tell you every chance they get that they have 5,000 years of culture: wuqiannian de wenhua. And for the government, it is the benchmark for legitimacy in the present. But it is also a beast that lurks in the shadows.
It is hard to overstate history’s role in a Chinese society run by a Communist Party. Communism itself is based on historical determinism: one of Marx’s points was that the world was moving inexorably toward Communism, an argument that regime-builders like Lenin and Mao used to justify their violent rises to power. In China, Marxism is layered on top of much older ideas about the role of history. Each succeeding dynasty wrote its predecessor’s history, and the dominant political ideology—what is now generically called “Confucianism”—was based on the concept that ideals for ruling were to be found in the past, with the virtuous ruler emulating them. Performance mattered, but mainly as proof of history’s judgment.
That means history is best kept on a tight leash. Shortly after taking power in 2012 as chairman of the Communist Party, Chinese leader Xi Jinping re-emphasized this point in a major speech on history published in People’s Daily. Xi is the son of a top Communist official who helped found the regime, but who fell out with Mao, and suffered during the Cultural Revolution. Some thought that Xi might take a more critical view toward the Mao era, but in his speech, which was published on January 6, 2013, he said that the thirty years of reform should not be used to “negate” the first thirty years of Communist rule. In other words, Xi, who added President to his list of titles in March 2013, was stating that China’s current policy of opening to the outside world and economic development could not be supported while also criticizing the Mao era. Both, he said, are one and the same, two sides of a coin.
The unstated reason for Xi’s unwillingness to disavow the Mao era is that Mao is not just China’s Stalin—someone who the Soviet Union could discard because it still had Lenin to fall back on as its founding father. For the Communist Party of China, Mao is Stalin and Lenin combined; attack Mao and his era and you attack the foundations of the Communist state. Five years after the Cultural Revolution ended with Mao’s death in 1976, the Party issued a statement that condemned that era and Mao’s role in it, but which also ended further discussion of Mao by declaring that “his contributions to the Chinese revolution far outweigh his mistakes. His merits are primary and his errors secondary.”
But on a broader level, history is especially sensitive because change in a Communist country often starts with history being challenged. In the 1980s, for example, groups like the historical-research society Memorial morphed into a social movement that undermined the Soviet Union by uncovering its troubled past. Today’s China is more robust than the Gorbachev-era Soviet Union, but memory is still escaping the government’s grasp, posing challenges to a regime for which history is legitimacy. Even though history is by definition past, it is the present of China, and its future. In this chapter, we will look at some examples of how history has been suppressed, recreated, and revived.
History suppressed?
Chinese cities are ghost towns. Not in the sense of real estate boondoggles—vast complexes built prematurely, lying empty, and crumbling—though there are some of those. Instead, the country’s urban centers are built on an obliterated past, which only sometimes seeps into the present through odd-sounding names for streets, parks, and subway stops.
In Beijing, like scores of cities across the country, streets are very often named after their relationship to things that no longer exist, ghostly landmarks, such as city gates, temples, memorial arches, and forgotten historical events. In the capital, for example, the Foreign Ministry is located on Chaoyangmenwai, or the Street Outside the Chaoyang Gate. Just a few hundred meters west, the street changes name to Chaoyangmennei, or the Street Inside the Chaoyang Gate. In between is the Second Ring Road. The streets’ names only make sense if you realize that the ring road was built on the site of the city walls, which had a passageway right here, Chaoyangmen, the Chaoyang Gate. The wall has become a highway and the gate an interchange. Nothing beyond the street names exists in the neighborhood to remind you of either spectral structure.
One stop further north on the Second Ring is Dongsishitiao, or the Tenth Street (north of) the Fourth Eastern (Pailou). A pailou was a memorial archway spanning a road that commemorated an event or person. Beijing once had hundreds of pailous. Most notable were those lining two north–south streets, one to the east and one to the west of the Forbidden City. To the south of the Forbidden City is Beijing’s main east–west axis, Chang’an Avenue. At the intersection of Chang’an and the big north–south street to the east was a pailou, known as Dongdan, which means “first east (pailou).” On the intersection of Chang’an with the big north–south street to the west of the Forbidden City was another pailou called Xidan, or “first west (pailou).” These pailous gave the north–south streets their names: Dongdan and Xidan. As you went north up Dongdan, you came to a second and a third pailou and then one of the most famous, the fourth, which was called Dongsi, or East Fourth. The alleys, or tiao, running north of the Dongsi pailou were numbered, so the first one was Dongsi First Alley, then Dongsi Second Alley, and so on until Dongsi Tenth Alley. This was at the intersection of a major east–west street that intersected the city walls and gave the gate there its name. Yet none of this is apparent today because virtually all of Beijing’s pailous, like almost all of its city walls, were torn down in the early years of Communist rule. This was because they were seen as vestiges of an imperial, “feudal” order, a designation that opened up a majority of traditional China’s infrastructure to demolition.
It is always possible when generalizing about a culture for a skeptic to relativize a phenomenon by saying, but wait, that exists elsewhere too. So one could say that all cities have neighborhoods or streets named after people or events long since forgotten to all but history buffs. This is of course true, but in China the cultural dislocation is greater, and the barriers to memory are higher. China does have online encyclopedias, as well as books that explain the city’s history. Some even sell well, such as the path breaking work City Record, by the Xinhua news agency journalist Wang Jun. But these are heavily edited, and require cultural knowledge that most Chinese today lack. Back in the 1990s, it was still possible to find citizen activists who fought to preserve the old city because it meant something to them—they had grown up in the city when it had pailous and walls. Nowadays, real Beijingers no longer live in the old city; they have been relocated to suburbs and replaced by migrants (poor ones from China’s hinterland, or rich expats) with no link to the city’s past. The city has its stories, but to most residents they are mysterious.
Another difference is that efforts to commemorate the past are often misleading or so fragmentary as to be meaningless. Almost all plaques at historical sites, for example, tell either partial histories or outright lies. A few steps east of the Foreign Ministry along Dongzhimenwai, for example, is the Temple of the East Peak. Out front is a stone marker, which states that since 1961 it has been a nationally protected monument. A second plaque on the wall gives a few more details, explaining how the temple was built in the Yuan dynasty and is a key Daoist temple. In reality, the temple was completely gutted in the Cultural Revolution, and statues burned or carted off to warehouses, where they were to be destroyed. Of the roughly fifty statues now in the temple, all but five are new. The five older statues belonged to another temple, Sanguanmiao (Temple to the Three Officials). After the Mao era ended in the late 1970s and temples reopened, the East Peak Temple’s statues could not be located so it was given the statues from the Three Officials’ Temple.
In addition, the temple’s area was greatly reduced during the Cultural Revolution because it was occupied by military and public security agencies. When the Mao era ended, they vacated the central core of the temple—the three courtyards and buildings that one sees today. The rest was occupied by the Public Security Bureau until the 1990s, and eventually torn down and turned into commercial real estate in the early 2000s. As for the temple that one sees today, it is only partially functioning. The Ministry of Culture took over the temple and turned it into a museum of folk culture. It was only after a protracted struggle that the China Daoist Association retook partial control of the temple in the early 2000s, but still must share the space.
Of course, the plaques explain none of this. Instead, one gets the misleading impression that the temple is as it always was—an 800-year-old relic of China’s great past. This history that I have sketched out is not definite or grounded in solid documentary evidence, but rather something that I have reconstructed by observing the temple over two decades and talking to Daoist priests who now work there. Until municipal archives on the Cultural Revolution are opened, however, or a systematic oral history is conducted, it may capture as much of truth as any account.
Obliterated or sanitized memory is common across China. At best, if you are persistent, you can find a specialized local historical publication known as a difangzhi, or gazetteer, that can help reconstruct the past. For example, I have looked closely at the history of a Daoist mountain east of Nanjing called Maoshan. The official history on the plaques is fragmentary: it says the temple complex was completely destroyed by the Japanese at the onset of World War II. The local gazetteers and interviews with older residents, however, show that the temple was functioning as late as 1962. It was only when the 1963 Socialist Education Movement began, and then the Cultural Revolution three years later, that the temples were truly destroyed. The Japanese had indeed set fire to some of the temples in 1937 (mainly to root out Communist guerrillas who had hidden there), but it was Chinese people who razed the scores of buildings to the ground.
But one shouldn’t focus solely on China’s material culture. Also suppressed are intangible events. One of the most complicated is the events surrounding the holiday of Pure Brightness, or Qingming, the Tomb Sweeping Festival. It was a day to honor ancestors and clean up their tombs, while performing rituals, such as burning paper money, offering food, and kowtowing in front of the tombstone or mound of earth that marked the graves of one’s parents, grandparents, or even mythical ancestor. In some parts of China it is a simple trip to a cemetery or mountainside funeral home. In others it is a complex series of rituals in a family shrine. The holiday was largely banned or downplayed in the Mao period but began making a revival in the 1990s. By 2008 it had become a national holiday, with the date no longer set by the lunar calendar, which varies year by year in relationship to the solar calendar, but fixed as April 5. This was paralleled by increasing participation by senior leaders. Almost every year, they are shown on national television visiting the shrines of Communist martyrs. Some also plant trees because the day is also associated traditionally with tree planting. The clearest link between politics and ancestral worship is a ceremony held on Qingming in Shaanxi province to honor the Yellow Emperor, a mythical founder of the Han Chinese race. The enormous event takes place at the emperor’s tomb, which was rebuilt in the early 1990s for $39.7 million. Events regularly involve an army honor guard, attendance by senior officials, as well as thousands of onlookers.
The holiday, however, is also dangerous for the government. The dead are not always happy and remembering them can be risky—a point not lost on those in power. Many of them remember, as earlier chapters have shown, how mourning and protest came together in 1976 after Zhou Enlai’s death and 1989 after that of Hu Yaobang. These commemorations exist on a smaller, personal scale as well. Xu Jue, for example, is the mother of a young man who died trying to prevent the army from entering Beijing on the night of June 3, 1989. He was crushed by a tank at Muxidi, an intersection about a mile west of Tiananmen Square, one of the many who died that night and early the next morning. Along with many relatives of the dead, Mrs. Xu tries to go to Muxidi on Qingming to honor their dead children.
This is something the government doesn’t want to happen, and yet it seems unwilling to completely prevent her from honoring her dead family members. So every year about a week ahead of Qingming, police escort her to the Babaoshan People’s Cemetery and watch her pay her respects.
One year I waited outside the cemetery and watched the strange ritual unfold. It was a blustery day, the blue sky slightly covered by a film of dust that was being whipped up by the Mongolian winds. Xu Jue arrived in a black Audi, escorted by four plain-clothed policemen.
Two of the officers stood out front while she went in with the other two. She walked in the west gate and first turned right to her husband’s grave. She always goes there first, she had earlier told me, because they had been married for over thirty years and she felt that his grave was less problematic—if something went wrong at her son’s grave, at least she’d have done her husband’s grave. When I talked to her later, she told me how she felt: Qisile, she said to herself as she looked at the tomb—he had died of anger. Soon after her son had been killed, her husband’s hair had gone white. He had begun to curse the government regularly. Within five years of the massacre he was dead, of anger, and leukemia.
The front of the tombstone was engraved with his name and the back carried a poem written by a friend. Four of the middle lines were crucial, listing the flowers to be laid out in front of the grave:
Eight calla lilies
Nine yellow chrysanthemums
Six white tulips
Four red roses
Even though her husband had not participated in the protests, the numbers explained what had killed him: 8 9 6 4, or June 4, 1989. The two police officers stood well back and she laid down the chrysanthemums. As always, she added one red rose, for the blood and her love.
Then she walked back to the main path and straight over to her son’s grave, the two officers trailing her by a dozen feet. The stone was small and simple, indistinguishable from the other graves. Obtaining it had been a small feat. She and her husband had to plead to get his corpse from the hospital. Worried doctors had told them they were under orders that corpses had to be surrendered to the army for a mass cremation. Yet doctors had turned a blind eye to the couple when they brought a flat-bed rickshaw to the back door of the morgue to load their son’s body. Others had quietly bowed their heads and processed the paperwork when they registered for the grave. A young man who had been crushed to death on June 4. Who could not know what it meant? Yet no one asked any questions and the body was quickly buried.
Between every fifth or sixth tombstone, pine trees had grown, giving the area a quiet, shady feel. She stepped into the grove and found his tombstone: row 3, number 13. One of the rituals many Chinese perform is to use red paint to fill in the engraved characters to make them stand out. She pulled a jar of red paint and a brush out of her bag and stooped over to fill in the three characters of her son’s name, which ran down the center:
Wu Xiangdong
Then she went to fill in the smaller lines to the left and right, giving his birth and death dates. But as she stooped down, she grimaced. Her back was sore and she put a hand on her hip, blowing out a sigh of pain and weariness. One of the plain-clothed officers stepped forward and reached out for the jar and the brush. She did not resist, and handed them over. He crouched down and carefully painted in the lines to the upper right:
Born: Year of 1968, August 13
Died: Year of 1989, June 4
And then to the bottom left:
Father: Wu Xuehan
Mother: Xu Jue
The police officer then painted the top and sides of the tombstone red. Not everyone did this but she wanted it to stand out, and if the symbolism of dark red paint was more than a little obvious, the officer did not argue. Maybe he wanted to get home, or maybe he was willing to grant her this bit of dignity—the right to paint her son’s tombstone the way she wanted. He liberally slathered red paint over the top and sides, making it pop out of the row of whitish stones. The demands of the past had won.
History recreated
History is not just suppressed: it is also recreated to serve the present, appropriated to further overt ideological ends. In China, this has followed the CCP’s near self-destruction in the Cultural Revolution, which led to a desperate search for ideological legitimacy. At first, this was mainly economic, although already in the 1980s the Party encouraged veneration and respect for national symbols, such as the Great Wall. Yet following the June 4th Massacre, the Party began to promote itself more aggressively as the defender of Chinese culture and tradition.
One way the Party has begun to do this has been to position itself as a protector of “Intangible Cultural Heritage,” a term most widely associated with the United Nations Educational and Scientific Organization, or UNESCO, which keeps a country-by-country list of traditions important to a specific nation. As opposed to World Heritage Sites, which are physical structures like the Great Wall or Forbidden City, intangible heritage includes music, cuisine, theater, and ceremonies. As late as 1990s China, some of these were still being labeled “feudal superstition,” a derogatory term in the Communist lexicon, denoting cultural practices deemed backward. For example, traditional funeral practices were widely discouraged but now funeral rites are on the government list of intangible culture. So, too, religious music that is performed exclusively in Daoist temples during ceremonies. This music is virtually never performed in a secular setting, so the support—which can be over 10,000 yuan a year—essentially subsidizes traditional religion.
Since taking power as Communist Party General Secretary in November 2012 and then assuming the title of President in March 2013, Xi Jinping has increased this turn to traditions. Indeed, it might not be too much of a stretch to say that Xi has cloaked himself in the mantle of tradition more thoroughly than any Chinese leader since the imperial system collapsed in 1911. His only rival, Chiang Kai-shek, often portrayed himself as a great traditionalist when fighting Japan or when in exile in Taiwan. But during the ten years from 1927 to 1937 when he had effective control over China, his Kuomintang party regularly launched attacks on traditional religion, destroying temples, banning the use of the lunar calendar, and declaring that many traditional religious practices were superstitious. Chiang and many of his key allies were Christians and, although some Confucian rites were reintroduced during his rule, he was by and large suspicious of traditions, especially the political-religious system that had dominated local Chinese society under the imperial system.
Xi, by contrast, has fewer qualms about the past. As a good Communist, he and his government still push Communist heroes, such as Lei Feng, and he appeals to Communist ideals when calling on Party cadres to be more honest and less corrupt. But these are almost de rigueur appeals to Communist ethics, and are overshadowed by his embrace of traditional terminology. Building on the work of his predecessors, especially Hu Jintao and his call for a Daoist-sounding “harmonious society” (hexie shehui), Xi’s ideological program includes a much more explicit embrace of traditional ethical and religious imagery. Taken as a whole, it may well be seen as an effort to create a “civil religion” not unlike that described by the famous sociologist of religion Robert Bellah regarding the United States, or indeed that which existed in China prior to the collapse of the imperial system.
In 2013, according to a news report on December 5 of that year, Xi visited Confucius’ hometown of Qufu, picked up a copy of The Analects, as well as a biography of the great sage, and declared that “I want to read these carefully.” He also coined a Confucianesque aphorism, stating that “a state without virtue cannot endure.” The next year, he became the first Communist Party leader to participate in a commemoration of Confucius’ birthday. Speaking at the International Confucian Association, Xi said, “to understand today’s China, today’s Chinese people, we must understand Chinese culture and blood, and nourish the Chinese people’s grasp of its own cultural soil.” Indeed, so numerous have his classical allusions become, that on May 8, 2014, People’s Daily published a full-page spread explaining them.
Not all of his rhetoric has been Confucian. In 2014, he visited the UNESCO offices in Paris and praised Buddhism, saying that after it had indigenized it made great contributions to Chinese culture. He also has made a point of meeting Buddhist leaders, such as the Taiwanese Buddhist Hsing Yun, and calling for greater morality in Chinese life. Tellingly, he has never spoken positively about Christianity or Islam. Indeed Protestant churches in the province he used to rule, Zhejiang, have suffered an unprecedented campaign that forced them to remove crosses from atop their steeples.
Xi has never spoken publicly about his faith—all eighty-plus million Communist Party members are supposed to be atheist—but his family has long been seen as sympathetic to Buddhism. His father, the senior Party leader Xi Zhongxun, was a personal friend of a key spiritual leader of Tibet, the tenth Panchen Lama, and wrote his obituary in 1989.
Maybe most tellingly, when Xi took his first major assignment, as Party chief of Zhengding County between 1983 and 1985, he made a point of cultivating close ties with local religious leaders. He was especially friendly with Shi Youming, a famous Buddhist monk who lived in the Linji Monastery. It had been a famous center of Chan, or Zen, Buddhism but had been mostly destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. These were the early days of economic reforms, when few temples were being rebuilt, but Xi made a point of visiting the temple on several occasions and approving its reconstruction. Shi Youming’s former apartments are now a small museum, and include a photo of the 31-year-old Xi shaking his hand. In 2012, shortly before Xi took power, I visited the temple and the current abbot, Shi Huichang, told me: “Xi did a great service for Buddhism.”
Perhaps this background makes it less surprising that soon into Xi’s tenure as Party chief, traditional rhetoric came to dominate the public space of China’s cities. A dramatic example concerns one of the biggest propaganda campaigns of recent years, which began in mid-2013. Posters began going up across China almost overnight whose appeal lay in their clever appropriation of traditional Chinese art, such as woodblock printing, paper cuts, and especially clay figurines by a well-known artisan, coupled with references to the “China Dream.” The “China Dream” was to be Xi Jinping’s contribution to national sloganeering—every top leader has to have at least one—but instead of being something esoteric and incomprehensible, as was the case with Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents,” this was an easily understood idea. Although it would become associated with many goals, including nationalism and China’s surge to global prominence, in public propaganda campaigns its imagery was almost always linked to traditional culture and virtues.
The posters were ubiquitous for many months, adorning the main squares of several big cities, overpasses, highway billboards. They were even printed on wooden barriers around construction sites, and impregnated on synthetic tarps used as windshields next to agricultural fields. Most traditional propaganda has a tired feel, usually touting someone like Lei Feng, the model citizen and soldier who became the subject of a nationwide posthumous campaign in 1963. And the form of this propaganda is boring: often red banners with white or gold lettering exhorting people to follow a Party policy, comply with a census, or make their local district more beautiful. The China Dream posters, however, were colorful, bright, and cute. Many of the posters featured paintings of clay figurines fashioned by “Niren Zhang” (Clay-man Zhang), a national-level intangible cultural heritage practitioner. Traditionally, these figurines show scenes from daily and religious life, or entertainment, such as characters from Peking Opera, or gods like Lord Guan or Zhang Gui. Sets of the figures were given to the Dowager Empress Cixi on her birthday and sent to world’s fairs during the Qing dynasty as examples of Chinese arts.
In the propaganda campaign, the figures included many cute figures, such as a dreamy-eyed girl, or little boys practicing calligraphy. These are augmented by special creations for the campaign, such as a couple of upright cadres or a diorama of People’s Liberation Army soldiers helping in disaster relief or a couple of upright cadres. The latter had in brash calligraphy “Great Love for China” and below it a poem that referred to an earthquake:
Such a short time, the ground cleaves and the land slides
Such a short time, struck with fear
Racing, pounding toward life
Writing the harmony for Great Love of China!
The most famous of the posters is a clay figurine of a chubby little girl, dreamily resting her head. Below it is a poem that conflates personal and national dreams:
Ah China
My Dream
A fragrant dream
The author of these poems was Yi Qing, the pen-name of Xie Liuqing. Xie is an editor of the magazine “The World of Chinese” published by The Commercial Press. He is also the head of “Salon Famous Blog of China,” a blog registered under the Ministry of Propaganda’s official website. Xie also writes dramas and musical plays. More than several dozen of his works based on big historical events have been published, made into movies or television shows, or put on in theatres. Some of his blog articles have been published by the Party’s chief ideological magazine, “Seeking Truth.”
On one level, Xie could simply be seen as a government apparatchik, cranking out material for the government’s latest campaign. But when I went to visit him in 2013, his story turned out to be more interesting, and revealing of the sophisticated propaganda techniques used by the Party during the 2010s to create an ideology that can link traditional Communism with traditional values. After we got in touch through a popular Chinese online messaging service called QQ, he invited me to his office. This turned out to be a hotel room at the Ordos Hotel, named after a small Inner Mongolian city famous for its cashmere and for having built an elaborate new center that was now a ghost town. I was surprised to learn that Xie lacked a proper government office as he was not the government official I had imagined, but instead a free-lancer.
“I like to work here because it’s more convenient,” he said, sitting on one of the twin beds in the room. “I don’t have an office and it’s easier to work here than at home. And they give me a long-term rate, store my material when I’m not here, and wash my clothes.”
We chatted for a while and he told me he was from Mao Zedong’s home province, Hunan, and that he wrote for a variety of publications, as well as operas, theater plays, and television shows. Most were about Mao, who he said was a hero of modern China.
“You can criticize him but you can’t deny that he was important. This is my firm belief; it’s something maybe due to me being Hunanese, I don’t know. But I honestly believe it.”
We were joined by Zhang Jiabin, an editor at Red Flag Publishing House, a Communist Party company that had just published a collection of the posters, and also of Xie’s poetry. Xie turned on his computer and called up a recording of an event that had been held the day before. It was a ceremony honoring the China Dream posters and we watched the seven-minute segment.
The show honored a new government creation, “public service advertisements,” that were displayed on the host website. A hostess called Xie onto the stage to explain how he had seen the signature statue of the chubby girl while at an exhibition in the Beijing suburb of Huairou. He posted pictures online with a few couplets of poetry.
In early 2013, when the civilization office, a government body, was planning a campaign to promote Xi Jinping’s idea of a China Dream, they saw Xie’s poems and the pictures of the figures. He met with officials and they brainstormed, coming up with the idea of broadening the campaign to include many forms of traditional culture, including papercuts, peasant paintings, and woodblock prints.
“They said, hey we need more poems, so I just dashed them off quickly and now they’re up,” he said as the video segment ended. “It’s supposed to be a sixty-thousand-kilometer campaign. That’s how many kilometers of highways there are in China—we joke that every meter of every road will be covered with it.”
That was hardly an exaggeration. It was hard to avoid the posters, which covered billboards, and were even made into murals that lined some Beijing streets. They sometimes advocated traditional values like filial piety (“honesty and consideration, handed down through the generations”), other times outright admiration for the Communist Party (“feet shackled, hands cuffed | sturdy grass withstands strong winds | the Communist Party members on the road | the mountains can shake; their will is unshakeable | hot blood and spring flowers will write today's history”), and sometimes just patriotism or nationalism (“Our country is beautiful” and “It’s springtime for our father’s future”). All showed how for today’s government, there was no better ally than history.
History recovered
Sometimes the resurfacing of history into the public consciousness is inadvertent and apolitical. This was driven home to me one day in 2014 when I went to hear a talk at the main office of the National Archives next to Beihai Park. The archives are located in 1950s-era buildings, built in the then-fashionable mixture of foreign and Chinese styles. The walls are high and of brick but the roofs are sloping and the eaves curved. When it was built, many roundly condemned the structure as a kitschy pastiche of styles, but today they are among the few buildings in the capital that bridge the past with the present.
The archives have a big auditorium with red velour-covered walls and enormous windows that overlook Beihai Park. On this February day the sun flooded in, making the winter seem less harsh and the polluted grey skies less oppressive. The speaker was Liu Guozhong, a Hunanese professor at Tsinghua University with a heavy accent and small eyes that often disappeared when he laughed. Liu spoke freely without notes for ninety minutes about something that might seem obscure but which was slowly shaking China’s intellectual world: the discovery of long-lost texts from 2,500 years ago.
Liu began to talk generally, making his points understandable for lay people. He said that the Egyptians wrote on papyrus, while in Babylon there was no papyrus so they used clay tablets. In China, an early form of writing was found on tortoise shells, which were heated with pokers until they cracked. The lines were used in divination, much like the lines on people’s hands might tell their future. On the tortoise bones, the questions and answers were written down, giving them their name: oracle bones. Those are the earliest known Chinese writing, but mainly about very narrow topics: should the crops be planted on such-and-such a day, should the king launch a war? Marry? Travel? Through them, the nitty gritty concerns of a Shang king’s life could be fathomed. It was useful but limited.
The texts we were here to learn about had been written later on flat strips of bamboo. The slips were only the size of chopsticks. From the desk where he sat, Liu demonstrated how researchers think the texts were composed: a strip was placed on the left forearm and the writer used the right hand to hold a writing brush and compose the text. This, he said, is presumably why for millennia Chinese wrote their script top to bottom, right to left.
Even more significant were the topics. These were not the miscellanea of court life, but the ur-texts of Chinese culture. Over the past twenty years, three batches of bamboo slips from this era have been unearthed. One cache was discovered in 1998 in Guodian and has 800 slips. Another discovered in 2000 and held by the Shanghai Museum, has 1,200 slips. The discovery Liu was introducing has a whopping 2,500 slips. (The exact number of slips is open to debate. Twenty-five hundred include some fragments. At least 2,000 are full slips.) The trove came to light because of grave robbers who were likely working in Hubei. The slips ended up in Hong Kong and were to be auctioned off when a donor stepped in, bought the lot, and gave it to his alma mater, Tsinghua University, in 2008.
The Communists made Tsinghua into China’s most famous science and technology university, but before 1949 it also had a famous liberal arts tradition. The slips are now at the center of Tsinghua’s efforts to revive this past and it did so by recruiting the country’s most famous historian, Li Xueqin, to head the project to catalog and study the slips.
Born in 1933, Li has headed numerous key projects, including an effort in the 1990s to date semi-mythical dynasties from roughly 5,000 years ago, such as the Xia and Shang, which are seen as the earliest dynasties in Chinese civilization. For millennia, their existence was taken for granted, even though no texts or archaeological material relating to some were traceable (the historicity of the Xia in particular remains in doubt). In the early twentieth century, historians in China started a “doubt antiquity” movement that challenged the existence of these dynasties, positing that they were merely myths. That was more than an intellectual dispute; it challenged the deeply cherished certainty among Chinese that they are one of the oldest civilizations on the planet, going back as far as ancient Egypt. Li’s efforts essentially pushed back against this skepticism, marshaling evidence that these dynasties did indeed exist.
The bamboo slips are from a much later date, but they challenge certainties of Chinese culture in other, possibly more profound ways. The texts stem from the Warring States period, an era of turmoil in China that ran from the fifth to the third centuries bce. It was a time when civilizations around the world, from the Yellow River in China to the Greek peninsula in Europe and the Indian subcontinent, were organizing new ways of political and philosophical order—a period so crucial to world history that the German historian Karl Jaspers called it the Axial Age. All major Chinese schools of thought that exist today stem from this era, especially Daoism and Confucianism, which has been the country’s dominant political ideology, guiding kings and emperors—at least in theory—until the twentieth century.
The bamboo slips that Liu was describing change how we understand this era. Some have compared its impact on China’s understanding of the past to how the past was viewed in Europe’s Enlightenment, a period when Western core texts were for the first time analyzed as historical documents instead of texts delivered intact from antiquity.
“It’s as though suddenly you had texts that discussed Socrates and Plato that you didn’t know existed,” Sarah Allan, a Dartmouth university professor who has worked with Liu and Li in the project, told me a few months before I heard Professor Liu speak. “People also say it’s like the Dead Sea scrolls, but they’re more important than that. This isn’t Apocrypha. These texts are from the period when the core body of Chinese philosophy was being discussed. They are transforming our understanding of Chinese history.”
Until now, most of this history was culled from the classic texts of Confucianism, which includes the Analects and the Mencius that also date from about 2,300 years ago. One of the surprising ideas that comes through in the new texts is that ideas that were only alluded to in the Confucian classics have now become full-blown schools of thought that challenge some Confucian ideas. One key text, for example, argues in favor of meritocracy much more forcefully than is found in currently known Confucian texts. Until now, the Confucian texts only allowed for abdication or replacement of a ruler as a rare exception; otherwise kingships were hereditary—a much more pro-establishment and anti-revolutionary standpoint. The new texts argue against this. For an authoritarian state wrapping itself in “tradition” to justify its never-ending rule, the implications of this new school are subtle but interesting. “This isn’t calling for democracy,” Allan, author of Buried Ideas: Legends of Abdication and Ideal Government in Early Chinese Bamboo-Slip Manuscripts, told me, “but it more forcefully argues for rule by virtue instead of hereditary rule.”
Back in the auditorium next to Beihai Park, Liu continued to talk about the new findings. Some texts are curious—a chart for multiplying and dividing complex numbers, as well as new books of divination, perhaps showing that the magical and esoteric were as important to this era of Chinese as the more rational and this-worldly Confucians. That in itself is a challenge to a government trying to instrumentalize the past, but wary of unpredictable religious and spiritual outbursts.
Although the contents of the strips are known to most experts, they are being edited carefully and one volume is being released a year. Professor Li still comes in each day, Liu says, and helps guide the younger scholars.
Liu then flashed newspaper headlines on the screen. Media interest in China has been intense, he said. After each volume is released, the Chinese media rush to discuss the findings, while blogs and amateurs—like many of the people here this winter afternoon—try their own hands at interpreting these new finds. The audience listened carefully to Liu as he outlined their Tsinghua team’s publishing schedule.
“We think we have another fifteen volumes, so that’s another fifteen years—until I’m retired,” Liu said, laughing. “But then you and others will be debating this for the rest of this century. The research is endless.”
Liu concluded and bowed to the audience. He had gone on past the allotted ninety minutes and the janitorial staff was eager to go home. No sooner did he leave the podium than they began to turn off the lights. But the audience rushed the stage, peppering Liu with questions. There was a man from the “I Ching Research Society” asking how they should treat the new texts on divination. A graduate student from Peking University eagerly asked about the political implications of abdication. Liu answered them all, while handing out name cards. When the last of his stack was gone, people began to pass them around, snapping photos of his card with cell phones. The room was now lit only by the dim winter sun. The guards at the back waited to lock the door but the crowd of two dozen wouldn’t let Liu leave. For them, he held a key to the present: the past.