Non-fiction / What Happened to Red China

I spent New Year in Beijing, searching for Communism in post-Olympic China. I couldn’t really find it.

China is a nation of over one billion cheap hustlers and hookers with hearts of fake Olympic gold. They seem united by lies and delusions of superiority, or maybe these are not delusions at all. China is huge in every sense. It is overwhelming. And it is nothing, nothing like you can imagine until you’ve been there.

Yet, until recent that wasn’t really the done thing. China is indeed a brutal communist dictatorship with horrendous human rights records and a legacy of what can only be described, even by a non-religious and open-minded person like myself, as evil deeds. I may be a history graduate but I’m not writing this essay as a history lesson. You can just go Google it, or Wikipedia it, and come back in a few seconds to catch up on why China is a nation that is now surprising the world with its openness and loveable cuddliness…

I was surprised. Like I said, I’m a history graduate, and that means that my knowledge of China comes from the period up until around 1990. From then on I’ve not really cared. My interest was the Cold War, the Korean War, the Great Wars… I don’t know much about China in the last twenty years.

When I arrived in Beijing airport to find lots of white people walking about, speaking various languages and looking happy and free, I was kind of put off. Where were the soldiers? Where were the guns and cameras and Communist propaganda? Where were the monuments to evil and the reminders of consequences faced for questioning the savage government? Beijing airport is a lot easier and friendlier to deal with than LAX. But saying that, so are Balkan mine fields.

My first thought was one of regret. I’d once again been brainwashed by the American propaganda machine. Every time I go somewhere I expect people to be running around with guns, shouting politically and religiously controversial sentiments from positions of power, and yet the only fucking place this happens is in America…

But maybe this was indeed an illusion. It wasn’t just the post-Cold Way Americans that spoke of China’s legacy of torture and murder. These were facts, weren’t they? We (and I guess I mean the West) are trying to coax China into our realm for hope they won’t one day enslave us as we would them, given the chance. We gave them the Olympics and overlook every shame and violation that would send US troops into any smaller country. We let them join in all our games, like an all-red Rudolph.

So it stands to reason that China would play ball, putting on a show like the Olympics and then realising the wealth to be found in tourism. Everyone likes money, right? Even the commies… They joined the modern capitalist world for a little while and figured we weren’t so bad. They loved the dumbass yankee tourists with fat wallets, flooding hotels and paying anything to see Mao’s body or the Forbidden City. Why not open everything at a cost? It goes against every Communist principal, but like I said, who doesn’t like money? Communism’s always been a game for poor folks.

I soon discovered a city that was cleaner and with a far better infrastructure than any I’d ever seen. Beijing was clean and pretty, and not black and white and grainy, with tanks and bombs and awful Communist messages everywhere. It was just another part of the modern world. In fact, having arrived from Korea, Beijing was a real step up on the ladder of civilisation – from the worst place on Earth to the nicest. Beijing had no trash on the streets, nobody smelled of kimchi, and all the buildings looked like they’d been built by architects, and not from a Soviet cookie cutter.

The people were nicer, too. Koreans are the worst people in the world, and Chinese are simply better. They say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and don’t stare at foreigners. They hold doors open for one another and line up when a queue is required. Before the Olympics, all businesses in Beijing were required to Westernise and train staff to treat foreigners with respect, or at least without abject racism.

But what surprised me the most was the fact that most businesses seemed to be American. There was a McDonalds on every street, and numerous Dominos, Burger Kings, KFCs, 7-Elevens and even a giant Wal-Mart. Wasn’t this a nation ideologically opposed to capitalism and American business ‘ethics’? Wasn’t this a nation that loathed the idea of individual wealth? Apparently not.

There, too, were a cluster of religious icons. Don’t get me wrong, I assume these are simply for the benefit of foreigners and for the justification of the city’s Olympic bid, but I thought China was against religion… At least that was one aspect of Communism I could get behind. Communists had the sense to see religion as a pathetic affront to rationality, and they crushed it and refused to let people be suckered in by imaginary friends, while all across countries like America people are conned into giving money to super-churches and funding modern Crusades in the Middle East. Nope, I was wrong. According to my propaganda-laden guide book, China sadly accepts and respects all religions equally, and I even got to see a church in the city centre. And there I was, thinking maybe I could go somewhere and not be confronted by the foolishness of a torture device atop an unnecessarily ornate building.

Well, sorry China, but I’m not buying it. I still believe you stamp out the majority of offenders. There weren’t many churches, and certainly the night was not lit up by neon crosses, but rather by the usual selection of advertisements and hotels that made the skyline indistinguishable from any Western city.

All the mystique was gone, too. I thought I’d have to hunt out the China I wanted to see, but it was all there in the guide book, and taxis and subways toured millions of Russians and Americans from sight to sight to sight. It seemed not much was hidden. Sure, there were no references to the Tiananmen Square of 1989 or the millions of deaths caused by that ubiquitous figure, Mao, but Beijing seemed to offer more of a look at Chinese history than I thought would ever be possible. There was the pretext of openness.

At every tourist spot there were the thousands of shite-hawking vendors. They all sold the same crap – Mao’s face on cards, magnets, books, t-shirts and bags. There were Olympic knock-offs, too, and soldiers and police walked among it all, seemingly oblivious to the harassment of these street people. It seemed to me that everyone was addicted to this new cult of tourism. We dumb foreigners could be taken for all our money with little effort. We all wanted something unbelievable to take home, like a t-shirt with the face of a man responsible for millions of tortured and dead innocent people. We wouldn’t walk around with Hitler on our chests, but Mao is cool, man!

It’s strange how a place adapts to being dragged into the Western way of thinking. Japan fell for it straight away and became a beautiful example of the possibilities of capitalism. Korea went for it and made off financially, but was left culturally dead. China’s been at it a few years, and is terribly interesting to watch. The people seem to love it, and the country is prospering more and more, but what will happen? Can this all be stable? Will China really stick by McDonalds and put a Starbucks in the Forbidden City? I was amazed watching a country so entrenched in its isolationist revolutionary politics so quickly fall into being just another part of the world. Maybe now there’s no reason to be afraid. It doesn’t matter who has the nukes now, as long was we all shop at the same few places and we don’t give up on trying to stab each other in the back for a few cheap yuan.

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Reviews

March 18, 2009

Humata

No. of Reviews	Overall Quality	Comment Followup
10	100.0% (2 votes)	13.0%

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Age	Gender	Location	Last Login
56	M	Boise, ID	September 08

Humata reviewed Version 1 - Read 100% of the Item

In your second line you don’t give reason for such a racial slur, and no actual experiences that explain the anger in it. By the end it seems you mean, ‘metaphorically in their souls’, but if so you need to say that and maybe wrap up the whole by coming back to it and explaining it. The rest of the first paragraph is confusing. It’s something you keep doing throughout the piece… say something, take it back, and then wander off somewhere else. Here you should be clear about the main idea of the piece, but it doesn’t communicate that.

“Yet, until recent that wasn’t really the done thing.” Should be “recently”, and what are you referring to here? I think you mean going there. “Indeed” is unnecessary. It took me three reads to understand that the last sentence in the second para meant that they were terrible before and “is now surprising the world with its openness and loveable cuddliness.” The trouble is you haven’t really established your view (ie that China is only showing us that to make a yuan) for us yet to know that you are being facetious.

“Like I said” from “Like I said, I’m a history graduate…” I think you can drop. I would rephrase “not really cared” here as there is so much emotion in the rest of the piece that dropping affective phrasing, when it seems likely you don’t mean it, allows the emotions elsewhere to matter rather than get lost.

From here, despite it being interesting in a number of ways, you never seem to get clear what exactly you are writing about. Are you angry at the US for all of its brainwashing about how bad it is in China, or are you convinced that it actually is that bad in China? Are you angry at China for being a repressive communist totalitarian regime, or are you angry that they are not? Or that they are becoming more like us? Are you angry at the US or at China? Or at religion? (You may want to beat up on religion, but you should do it in another essay for that. It stands out as a rant of its own, that loses focus in relation to the piece.)

This is an interesting piece but it needs work. Especially in nailing down its theme, and then exploring and developing that. I was interested throughout, and first hand experience of China post Olympics is automatically going to generate interest, but the venting keeps getting in the way. If all I keep getting is your emotional reaction to things, I stop believing what you have to say because your not presenting me enough real ideas to justify it. I start hearing only your subjective state. And I am not necessarily convinced by your subjective state when it comes to ideas any more than you are convinced of the assertions of religion by the emotions evoked around them.

You need to communicate slower in this piece, develop and support your reactions, and not fly off all over the place. Decide the important ideas and then focus and develop them. Give me some more reason to believe you than your subjective valuations and opinions, and rein in your tendency to hop back and forth between topics, asides, reactions, and ideas.