adopt a different, simplified logic to avoid addressing difficult points.
This final opacity is immensely frustrating for the curious and audacious traveller. Innocence is fine when it is willed but bitter when imposed. How dare they decide how much I can understand about them, the traveller fumes!
Perhaps this is precisely why, from the very start, Hébert and Trudeau declared and embraced their innocence towards China.
HÉBERT AND TRUDEAU entered China through its great capital, Beijing. At the time, it was a great communist metropolis: immense, filled with workers, yet still low-lying, empty and austere. In the intervening years, change has come to Beijing like nowhere else in China. In many parts of the city, the places and people described in Two Innocents have simply been replaced by a completely different reality. But then as now, Beijing is the centre of the Chinese universe. In fact, the capital is arguably more potent and central to the country than ever before. It stews with its own specific flavours and habits, but somewhere in the mix is a little bit of everything you can find elsewhere in China.
In Beijing the Two Innocents visited the People’s Congress. They briefly describe some of the rooms representing the different provinces: “the Szechwan room, with its bamboo marquetries, its exquisite watercolours, and its ancient vases; the Kwantung room, with its teak furniture, its jade statuettes, its porcelain flowers…” Then as now in Beijing, you can visit museums or Party buildings where the various regions and ethnic groups of China are proudly displayed, wearing their traditional outfits, singing their folk songs.
As emblems of the radically diverse ways of life to be found within China’s immense borders, these formulaic displays come off as forced and phony. But they should be understood as celebrations of China’s unity, not its diversity. And is it so surprising that the Communists enthusiastically indulge in such symbolism, given that they alone have achieved a unity that had eluded China since early in the Qing Dynasty, a good three centuries ago?
In ancient times, parading peoples and things from the far reaches of the empire was a display of imperial might. And so it still is. The provinces and people on show in the capital are proof of the central government’s hold on all the regions of China. There is even an element of competition, whereby each group stresses its own crucial importance to the totality of China and Chinese history. Thus all these far-fetched energies and passions descend upon the capital as a radiant symbol of the Chinese people, ancient and united.
These days, the notion of Beijing as the focal point of a vast but deeply united empire is further enhanced by the upcoming Olympics. Because of the Games, China is being brought to focus even more clearly in its capital. In Beijing, the peoples of the world will be China’s guests. This is completely unprecedented; historically, the Chinese have been more accustomed to outsiders invading their country than visiting it. Foreigners such as Marco Polo were entertained by the courts of the ancient emperors, but these early visits were sporadic and of limited value to the Chinese.
The Olympics, on the other hand, are all important for the New China. The entire world will show up in Beijing as honoured guests, not hungry invaders or colonizers. The world will thus recognize China and pay it homage. The games will be a celebration of unity and a demonstration like no other of the prominence Chinese society has now achieved on the world stage.
Hospitality is the greatest luxury one can offer. Hosting others testifies to one’s wealth, to one’s command of one’s home. By hosting the entire world in its capital, by overwhelming that wide world with its majesty and its dominion, the New China—for so long reviled, rejected and outcast—will declare its oneness, its might and empire.
The city has already begun its metamorphosis. A new national symbolism is being put on display. Buildings surpassing even the greatest halls of Red China are being quietly erected across the city. The immense new Olympic Stadium, woven together with countless spidery steel girders, is both beautiful and slightly terrifying. An enormous bubbly and translucent box will house the Olympic swimming pool. For the moment, these monstrous buildings are totally inaccessible. They are phantom structures, seen only from a distance, veiled in smog. Legions of unknown workers from the far reaches of the land have been brought in to toil anonymously in their construction. The vast sites are forbidden cities whose power has not yet begun to radiate. Yet already they strike awe across the capital.
In many ways, the Forbidden City proper sits outside of China. It is now a pen in which to hold foreigners. They are driven through it like so many heads of cattle. Is it possible to see the Forbidden City properly? Can the past be seen in the present? The Palace of Knossos, the Karnak Temple, the Forbidden City, these monuments were all built with a purpose. In their day, they were deeply useful. The visitor can still marvel at their surfaces but cannot really penetrate them without feeling the power of their purpose—and this is long gone.
The Forbidden City was a supremely orderly place. It was a tool of obedience and worship. It was also far more important from the outside than from the inside. The Forbidden City was so powerful because it was closed. It was the unattainable nucleus at the very heart of the Middle Kingdom, itself the centre of the Earth. And it was never meant to be open for contemplation. Pedestrian access to the holy sanctuary would have been a fatal breech in its sanctity.
Those who had access to the City—and then, only to its majestic outer courtyard—marched into it in strict formation, through a long tunnel under the massive fortress at the southern end. In ranks and columns, the summoned were lined up on the immense cobbled square beneath the appropriately named Hall of Supreme Harmony. There they awaited word from above. This was a place to be stripped of one’s particulars, one’s name, a place to receive orders to march into battle or enact a new imperial policy. Here stood the tools of Empire, not individuals or men but peons whose very lives and destinies were selflessly subsumed into the higher cause.
Almost a prisoner of the City himself, the Emperor was born into celestial servitude and bore the heavy mantle of a heavenly mandate. In his servitude to harmony, he was no different from his subjects. Harmony meant being at peace with one’s station, embracing it wholeheartedly whether you were the Emperor or the lowliest peasant.
On a cold and rainy day, you may still be able to march into the empty City and feel its old soul pulsing in the solitude and silence. But the modern soul of the Forbidden City is elsewhere. Beijing is still the seat of power, and the centres of power in the capital are as inaccessible as ever. The Forbidden City is now open, but the real centres of power are still closed.
Today, the mysterious face of Mao gazes out impassively from the main gate of the Forbidden City. More than anyone else, they say, Mao changed the nature of power in China. In truth, he didn’t so much change it as move it. Through the first decades of the twentieth century, the Chinese had already begun rejecting the imperial rule that had ended in such decadence and humiliation. The country became polarized into two distinct political outlooks: Communism and Nationalism. Both proposed a break with the decrepit practices of imperial China. The Nationalists wanted to form a government that would represent the modern aspirations of the emerging Chinese bourgeoisie. If the elites took the lead towards modernity and progress, they argued, the rest of China would eventually follow. The Communists proposed something far more radical. They dreamt of a government that would reach out immediately to the entirety of the Chinese people, the wretched and the poor. They hoped to replace a cruel, closed, fragmented and hierarchical society with a levelled-off nation belonging to all.
The Communists came together as a party slowly, over a generation. The party formed as a collective of individuals from all over the country, all moved by this radical idea of a people’s republic. The first leaders—daring, dissatisfied, inspired—came from the educated bourgeois classes of the big cities. With time, sons of landed peasants joined the movement. The brilliant and ruthless young Mao Zedong was one of the latter. Groups began to multiply and grow across the countryside. The rarefied Chinese establishment,
