Blasting the Past in China
by Xiaolu Guo
In Beijing, our two favourite words on posters or in newspapers are ‘New’ and ‘Construction’. ‘New’ – for no doubt we are building a new China which will be very different from our five thousand year-old civilization. ‘Construction’ is a word that usually carries positive connotations, but in China today it has acquired an entirely different meaning. ‘Construction’ has in practice come to mean ‘demolition’ – a process with consequences that are far from positive. Not long ago, I discussed this process of construction-demolition with my friend Chris, a Beijing-based American screenwriter. He is somewhere between a Woody Allen-type intellectual humorist and a mainstream Hollywood movie writer.
“You know, I really love China!”, Chris exclaimed. “It’s got so much history and culture!”.
?Then why don’t you like Europe?”, I asked. ?What about France or England? Doesn’t Europe have a long history as well??.
“Yeah – but Europe’s no good. It’s just got too much culture”.
“So?”.
“When it comes to demolition, Europe can't hold a candle to China! China has demolished practically all of its cultural heritage, so the little that’s left is a lot easier to get your head around”.
I examined his expression for traces of sarcasm, but he seemed sincere. Having lived in the Chinese capital for almost ten years, Chris is one of the few foreigners who have witnessed the gathering pace of destruction there. Old buildings almost everywhere have succumbed to the wrecker?s ball, as an area within the second, third and even the fourth ring roads has been cleared for the construction of a ‘New Beijing’. This ‘demolition’ is not simply a form of mindless cultural violence. It has become a vital tool in the ‘progressive’ and ‘civilising’ project sweeping the country. Demolish the old! Demolish the peasant economy! Demolish anything that stands in the way of ‘modernisation’! Demolish the weak! Demolish the rotten! Demolish tradition! Demolish history! Demolish memory! Go to the museums and destroy even the dusty old photographs, the shadows of memory! Demolish until there is nothing left to demolish, until nothing remains but flat earth – without depth, without culture, without a past!
We are historical orphans: a brand-new, brave new generation. I was born in the early 1970s. By the time my contemporaries reached adulthood, the demolition process was already far advanced, and there was little history left for us to see. Our background, our upbringing, should by rights have made us fervent supporters of ‘demolition’. Even a child of the 1960s such as Wang Shuo, China?s most famous contemporary writer, has been so completely immersed in the attitudes of the Cultural Revolution that he writes, “If you want to stand tall and cast a great shadow, you first have to clear a space around yourself”. If our great modern literary idol takes this sort of view, then how can we younger 1970s kids be expected to value the past? But today, as I watch this vast old city disappearing around me, and the brutal modernist nightmare rising in its place, I feel like a childless old woman gazing helplessly at the annihilation of all she holds dear.
This is the China in which Starbucks can open a branch in the Forbidden City, where folk religions have become confined, more or less, to the small towns of the South; and where Beijing opera, and its regional variants, have become merely the pastime of an aging minority. What place is there for history in this post-1949 China, with its iconography of the Little Red Book and the five-pointed star? Where in our country today can we actually see or feel the past? Perhaps in the history museums, open daily from 9am to 4pm, closed weekends, Mondays and national holidays? No – that is dumb history, dead history. Maybe in Chinese films then? Yes: if you are looking for living images of China’s past, the cinema is a better place to look than any.
The ‘Fifth Generation’ of Chinese film-makers, including such internationally-renown names as Chen Kaige (Yellow Earth), Zhang Yimou (Shanghai Triad) and Tian Zhuang Zhuang (The Blue
Kite), first came to prominence during the 1980s. In the midst of the featureless wilderness that was China’s post-Cultural Revolution artistic landscape, they constructed visions of the nation’s ‘pre-demolition’ culture and history. From the ?Fifth Generation? have come such films as the understated but beautifully vivid Red Sorghum, the masterpiece Raise the Red Lantern, the phenomenally well-acted Farewell My Concubine (featuring the late Leslie Cheung in perhaps his greatest role), and the definitive screen depiction of the famous legend of the Emperors’ tales.
But once again, where is the ‘reality’ of the world we are living every day? Where is our newly- shaped depression, in the cities as well as in the countryside? With my one hand writing novels and the other holding a film camera, I try to record the process of each brick building ambitious skyscrapers in a horizon without history. Please, reader, when your plane passes above the Great Wall, just take a minute to look out of the window and try to imagine our mind-spinning history, and all the great joys and sorrow we have lived through.
Translated by Edward Vickers.
Xiaolu Guo is author of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
and 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth (Chatto).
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