The Party has a Party
June 22, 2021
TO MARK the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party, journalists were invited to visit a lavish new Memorial Hall in Shanghai this week. The site was, as you’d expect, a bombastic, triumphalistic and one-sided affair focusing on the Party’s inexorable rise and China’s national “reawakening”.
The masses have been rallied. Long crowds snaked around the venue, including monks in their robes, excited teenagers in special centenary T-shirts, and corporate groups - an airline, a coffee shop chain - wearing their company attire as they inched towards the entrance, all of them invigilated by groups of armed police.
Our guide tells us that the exhibition, built in what amounts to an underground bunker underneath the original site of the first National Congress in 1921, shows the Party “leading the Chinese people to victory.” We are immediately presented with handsome bronze statues of the thirteen founder members, with Chairman Mao positioned close to the centre, the first among equals with his feet set the furthest forward. Next to them, the programme of the Party is engraved into a panel of the wall.
The exhibition is divided into three sections: the “national struggle”, the “public awakening” and finally, what seems to be the uninterrupted glory of the Party after 1949. The current leadership are firmly embedded in the hundred years of CCP history and in the decades of bitter struggle that preceded it.
Through the CCP’s fuzzy and sepia-toned prehistory we hear the tales of woe about China’s struggle for survival amid foreign aggression, unequal treaties and humiliating territorial concessions, which are clearly a very important part of the foundation myth, with the ravages of imperialists and warlords culminating directly in the creation of the Party in 1921.
The artifacts on display include a pair of torn trousers shared by a working couple in Shanghai, which were supposed to demonstrate how poor the workers were in those days, but felt risible in a sort of Monty Python “Four Yorkshiremen” kind of way.
Li Dachao and Chen Duxiu figure prominently as we are told about the growing attractions of Marxism, especially after the launch of the May 4 Movement aimed at repelling the humiliations of the Versailles Treaty, which handed Germany’s Chinese concessions straight to Japan.
I came here to see how much China’s official history would skirt over inconvenient truths. In the first place, some historians say it is a myth that the Party was founded here, a myth designed to show that the figurehead Mao was in charge from the very beginning. The Japanese historian Ishikawa Yoshihiro says “the first national congress later acquired a symbolic importance well beyond its reality.” Still, the memorial explains this away by talking about a sort of preliminary Communist “group” founded by Chen Duxiu that served as the precursor to the Party proper.
The Memorial Hall does at least provide some inconvenient details of that early history. In a room dedicated to the 13 participants of the inaugural Congress, we see Zhou Fuhai and Chen Gongbo, both of whom left the party and became senior figures in the reviled “puppet” government of Wang Jingwei, which collaborated with Japanese occupiers. Zhou died in prison and Chen was executed as a traitor.
Still, this did little to undermine the message of national salvation that followed in Section Three, which covers the CCP’s post-1949 victory and celebrates China’s uninterrupted national rejuvenation under the Party’s benign leadership.
It included a loud video presentation of the Party’s role in the alleviation of poverty, the assembly of China’s first atomic bomb, the launch of great economic endeavours such as the Daqing Oilfield and the Shanghai Stock Exchange, as well as the construction of mammoth prestige infrastructure such as the Qinghai-Tibet railway. All this culiminated in the recent unmanned space mission to Mars and President Xi Jinping’s 2019 speech about “China’s tomorrow” being ever more beautiful.
There is, needless to say, no mention of any of the darker moments of China’s recent past, including the “Great Leap Forward” famine of 1958-1960, the political persecutions of the “Cultural Revolution” starting in 1966, and the crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
We are ushered into a back door and given three minutes to scrutinise the site of the congress itself. It it is all rather underwhelming: a little room with teacups and stools and an electric lightbulb dangling above. Still, there was also a terrific high-definition 3D movie dramatising the inaugural meeting and ending in the knock on the door by the authorities, at which point they flee to Jiaxing and concluded their business on a barge in a lake - another little segment of the CCP origins myth.
