The bullet tore through Mao Guangrong’s back and came out through his groin. It took five men to hold him down as they stuffed the wound with cloth to staunch the bleeding — the only treatment the troops could muster as they struggled to defend the communist base at Yan’an.
But nine months later, he was back in battle against the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) troops.
It was simple: If the People’s Liberation Army won the civil war, “we could have shelter and land. And we wouldn’t suffer starvation. And we wouldn’t be oppressed,” he said.
Mao, now 90, would have given his life for the cause. But for youthful compatriots, reliving his experience comes somewhat cheaper — a 68 yuan (US$9.95) ticket to the Defense of Yan’an re-enactment, held on a site northwest of his care home at 11am each day.
Tourists clamp their hands to their ears as explosions rend the air. The ground shakes and smoke billows from craters as soldiers dash across the field, red flags fluttering prettily in the breeze. For an extra 10 yuan, spectators can even dress up and participate.
As China celebrated the 60th anniversary of party rule yesterday, its communist heritage was good business — and nowhere more so than in Yan’an, the “holy land of the revolution.”
Four years ago, Beijing launched a drive to promote “red tourism,” believing it would reinvigorate the “national ethos” of visitors and the economies of mostly poor, landlocked areas such as this city in Shaanxi Province; Shaoshan, Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) Hunan Province hometown; and Xibaipo in Hebei Province, another communist base. As elsewhere in modern China, capitalism marches in step with the political status quo.
According to official — perhaps generous — statistics, visits to individual sites reached 272 million last year, an increase of more than 18 percent year-on-year; while income from red tourism rose to 124 billion yuan, up 35 percent.
Authorities expect a further boost in the coming week-long national holiday, thanks to the anniversary.
The battle re-enactment usually attracts a few hundred spectators; on a bad day, the cast outnumbers the audience. But the owners are expanding seating to cope with up to 2,000 visitors daily.
Yan’an is now a sprawling, dusty and charmless city, with two KFC outlets, Western sportswear shops and scores of high-rise construction sites.
But for a decade, from 1937, this provincial town was a beacon for leftwingers around the world. Works such as Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China depicted it as an egalitarian utopia.
Mao Guangrong joined the Red Army as a destitute 15-year-old orphan reared in a brutal, hierarchical society where men could kill their wives with impunity and ruthless landlords could seize grain and leave farmers to starve.
Now he was rubbing shoulders with the future rulers of China.
“Chairman Mao was a very simple person — he didn’t wear smart clothes. He used old clothes we made ourselves and they had patches. After he finished his meals, he would walk out and talk to ordinary people ... It wasn’t like now, when it’s so difficult to meet leaders,” he said.
It is hard to imagine what its former denizens would make of Yan’an today. At Mao Zedong’s former home at Zaoyuan, you can buy postcards, tobacco tins and keyrings depicting the Great Helmsman.
Vendors sell Pepsi and Seven-Up and benches are sponsored by China Mobile: about 700 million people in China have mobiles today. Visitors pull up in gleaming cars; vehicle ownership is surging and Credit Suisse predicts it will rise fivefold in the next decade.
For 15 yuan, you can be photographed as a dutiful cadre in a blue jacket and trousers far smarter than the late chairman’s.
“It gives me a patriotic feeling,” said Ma Xiaoyu, a teenage shop assistant from a nearby city, pulling off the uniform and smoothing her fashionable haircut. “We came because we really wanted a look at how Chairman Mao and those leaders lived in those times. They built up the new China, so we need to remember them.”
Her friend Xu Ru — teetering on shiny leopard-print stilettos and clutching a souvenir Mao Zedong medallion — nodded appreciatively.
This is precisely the kind of sentiment officials like to hear. They launched the red tourism drive with a promise to inspire young people and “consolidate their faith in pursuing the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
A reported 2,000 visitors a day inspect historical artifacts at Yan’an’s new revolutionary memorial hall and pose for snapshots beneath its huge Mao statue.
But many work for the government or state-owned firms and are shipped in by their work units.
Civil servant Xue Zhongmei was on an outing with 150 colleagues.
“Yes, it was interesting. And after we go back, we will write essays studying it from the scientific development point of view,” she said brightly.
Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing-based analyst, said that “it says something about red tourism that the party has to be so full square behind it. Twenty years ago, people would go to these sites by themselves.”
Now it was “a loyalty test,” he said.
With signs for features such as the “irrigation canal of happiness,” this might seem unsurprising.
But others find the sites stirring. Geng Jianchan was celebrating his fourth visit to the town by buying not one but three gold busts of Mao Zedong from a vendor outside the chairman’s cave-house.
“Every time I’m depressed in work and daily life, or I feel under pressure, I come here to look for his spirit,” said the 40-year-old, who lives a five-hour drive away.
Despite his praise for Mao Zedong’s “social fairness,” Geng seemed baffled by the notion of any disjuncture with today’s rampant capitalism and soaring inequality.
The leader’s ideals were just as relevant to contemporary businessmen like him, he said.
“It’s his spirit of never being defeated and fighting hard when in difficulties. He experienced ups and downs. That always encourages me,” he said.
This depoliticized version of class struggle can embrace everyone.
“We came here to study the experience of our ancestors,” Dou Jingzhe said as he waited for the battle re-enactment to begin.
But the 33-year-old Beijing businessman shook with laughter when asked if his grandparents were red soldiers.
“Our family were the landlords,” he said.
Their factories and homes were confiscated, he said, adding cautiously: “I feel it was a little unfair.”
In a ruthless age, many suffered worse fates.
“After one village had turned red, we would start the propaganda work about what should be done next; what kind of people should be killed — despotic gentry, [harsh] landlords and local tyrants,” Mao Guangrong recalled. “Also, beggars needed to be killed, because they didn’t live on their own labor.”
“It was very easy to kill somebody. If you said anything reactionary they would kill you and if you didn’t follow their leadership they killed you,” he said.
But to him, the party’s achievements are almost innumerable: advanced military technology, women’s rights, education. Unable to recognize a single character, he is proud that his grand and great grandchildren can read, “so their minds are more open than mine.”
Above all, there is food now, and plenty of it. He wolfed down his dinner of noodles with relish.
“Life is so good now, couldn’t be better,” he said. “When I was little, people ate the husks [of rice] and wild greens.”
There was mass starvation in the 1940s as corrupt KMT officials siphoned off foreign aid. But tens of millions would starve in the new China, too. Mao’s Great Leap Forward, intended to send industrial and farming output soaring, led to the Great Famine.
On one estimate, 36 million were persecuted in the Cultural Revolution and hundreds of thousands killed. They included people who had devoted their lives to the party.
“How many hard-working farmers died of starvation during the last 60 years? How many mistakes were made? How many good and honest people have died?” Bao Tong (鮑彤), once a senior official and now a dissident, wrote last week.
“The long-term, nationally pervasive mistakes of the last 60 years were all led by and planned by the Communist Party,” said Bao, the most senior figure jailed over the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
Though the party has admitted errors — Mao Zedong’s policies were only “70 percent correct” — no one expects the reassessment Bao demands, least of all in this anniversary year.
The founding of the new China is celebrated and so too are the achievements of the last 30 years, since Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) launched “reform and opening,” transforming the country’s economy.
But between them lies a large black hole, which will not be filled by the history promoted along the red tourism trail.
“There’s no political pay off behind reinvestigation,” Moses said. “This is not a party seeking catharsis. They want congratulation.”
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