Ancient Town and Modern Propaganda

On my first full day in Shanghai I went to Qibao Ancient Town from the lovely hostel where we stayed. The Rock & Wood Hostel was so amazing that we begged them to allow us to come back for one more night before we flew home. It had an award for cleanliness hung on the wall from hostelbookers.com and it deserved it. The delightful fish pool with a boardwalk. It had a long table and an airy, light-filled space, decent drinks and fried rice. Furthermore, the staff were friendly and attentive and the bed was tremendous. What else can you ask for in life...or in a hostel?

Qibao Ancient Town

School of Ancient Arts (http://cnhutong.com/)

A guzheng

After meandering into the area from the state-of-the-art subway system, we came across a school that teaches the Game of Go (aka weichi); how to play the pipa, erhu and guzheng, as well as other traditional Chinese instruments; the art of tea; and how to do calligraphy and traditional painting. If you mastered the four skills qin (instrument), qi (Game of Go), shu (write in calligraphy), and hua (paint), you were considered a lady. The sentence in Chinese is 琴棋书画样样精通, which essentially means that if you were a girl from a respectable family, you had to master these four arts.

Qibao is full of places to shop and is famous with locals for its food, but for me it was also a treasure trove of fascinating history. I bought a ticket for 30RMB that allowed me to see eight sites. My friend went shopping and bought a beautiful dress for herself.

We bought a pig foot (good for your skin) at this stall.

It was hard to forgo these chicken legs and quails, but...

...this salt dome was filled with hard-boiled quail eggs and we devoured a small bag of these for breakfast the next morning.

One museum was about cricket fighting; another had a collection of more than 1,000 doll-house sized, traditional Chinese objects and relics; there was a pawn shop museum; still another walked you through the history of cotton textiles. The most interesting display here was a wax figure jumping up and down on a stone. Historically, he would have had the nearly finished textile beneath his feet and the jumping up and down would have given it a sheen..

One museum was similar to the Shanghai History Museum in that it had wax figures performing various crafts and domestic tasks.

This (waxen) man makes scales and has, obviously, an abacus and some tea on his work table.

At the entrance to the historic area, there was a bell tower, to which my ticket granted entrance. Like a child, I ascended and rang the bell. I was alone in the bell tower and it was peaceful.








I shot some lousy footage on my Blackberry at the museum about shadow puppets. There was an adorable, Jewish-looking French family with two curly-haired cherub boys and a girl accompanied by a stunning Chinese tour guide. She wrangled with the proprietor who opened the room where they sometimes do shows and the docent did a minute-long demonstration of shadow-puppetry from behind the screen.

Zhang Chongren

Finally, there was the Zhang Chongren Memorial Hall. Zhang Chongren was an accomplished sculptor and painter whose subjects included Francois Mitterand and Deng Xiaoping. He was also a noted painter. The museum has been open since 2003 and is inside a Ming-Qing Dynasty style brick and wood courtyard. His influence on Hergé, the creator of TinTin, is why he is best remembered in Europe. Wikipedia reports:

Hergé's early Tintin albums were highly dependent on stereotypes for 'comedic' effect. These included evil Russian Bolsheviks, black Africans as lazy and dumb, and an America of gangsters and cowboys and Indians.

At the close of the newspaper run of Cigars of the Pharaoh, Hergé had mentioned that Tintin's next adventure (The Blue Lotus) would bring him to China. Father Gosset, the chaplain to the Chinese students at the University of Leuven, wrote to Hergé urging him to be sensitive about what he wrote about China. Hergé agreed, and in the spring of 1934 Gosset introduced him to Zhang Chongren. The two young artists quickly became close friends, and Zhang introduced Hergé to Chinese history, culture, and the techniques of Chinese art. As a result of this experience Hergé would strive, in The Blue Lotus and subsequent Tintin adventures, to be meticulously accurate in depicting the places Tintin visited.

Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre

I really enjoyed meeting the proprietor of the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre. I asked him about how he got into it and I also asked if he had granted interviews. He referred me to his website and showed me his prized possession, which was a dazibao. We had an interesting conversation about the mistakes of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. He acknowledges that China would be very different were it not for Deng.

His touching website description says:

Dazibao (Big Character Poster) Art
This collection of hundreds of Dazibao (Big Character Posters) came to me just by chance when they were used as wrapping paper for Cultural Revolution artifacts and photos that I obtained. When I unwrapped them, and saw these Dazibao, I was shocked. They no longer looked as they once did when they were posted on walls to rally public opinion for political struggles. Now they resembled freehand contemporary art. I have no intention of reading these pieces now, but just enjoy their art form. They are so special and beautiful.

Such posters were the most powerful artworks of the Cultural Revolution. Each one represents the fear, violence, paranoia and chaos of that era. It was a time in which students denounced teachers as reactionaries, either because the students actually believed those accusations or because they feared that any student who did not do so would be considered a rightist-sympathizer.

Many of the posters were imaginative creations. They bore almost no link to any truth, yet had a powerful ability to drag the physical world into their illusions. In fact, Dazibao were created by Mao as a weapon in the Cultural Revolution. China is the birthplace of paper, and Mao always thought of himself as a calligrapher. Perhaps he was the only person in history to start a revolution with a paper and pen. Describing these works of calligraphy as pieces of art, as opposed to historical documents, brings up ethical considerations about what art can be used for and what it can do.

Dazibao suddenly disappeared after the Cultural Revolution, as people hated what they stood for, and nobody saw them as having any value as an art form. After finding this collection, I put ads all over the country seeking other original Dazibao peeled from walls. Nobody replied to my ads, because such posters are so rare now. Our collection is probably the only one like it in the world.

I was a university student during the Cultural Revolution. The school campus was full of Dazibao, posted on walls. Even today, when I close my eyes, I can still see them vividly in my mind. I never expected that, years later, I would be showing Dazibao as art. I smile with satisfaction when visitors walk into the exhibition room and express great surprise upon seeing the collection. I am very proud to be the first person to discover the art value of Dazibao. These posters are unsurpassed as people’s art, not only as a historical witness of the Cultural Revolution, but also as priceless treasures of Chinese contemporary art.

Also, the museum had a large number of posters focused on American "imperialism" and he has a huge collection of Mao busts. There are some lovely posters of Shanghai ladies from the early- to mid-Twentieth Century, as well.

What Can I Say?

A number of friends have asked me to weigh in on the controversy surrounding Chen Guangcheng. I think my friend, Bill Bishop, has done an excellent job of asking the tough questions at his blog Sinocism. The New York Times has run a great cartoon by Patrick Chappatte of the International Herald Tribune:

A number of people have all asked me to weigh in on the controversy surrounding Neil Heywood's death. This is, by far, the more interesting story, but I have nothing new to say about this so would recommend that you sign up (and contribute) for Bill Bishop's Sinocism blog if you want to read the latest rumors, analysis, scuttlebutt, etc. There is no question that the future of China will be affected profoundly by how this all works out. I hope and pray that nobody else gets hurt.

If you have questions about these topics, you may post them as comments on this entry. I will do my best to respond in an accurate and diplomatic fashion.

Shanghai History Museum

For over fourteen months, I have called China home. This week my mother, in her well-meaning way, resorted to the ad hominem to convince me that I should return home. She told me that I had turned my back on my country and my family.  Actually, I miss them a lot and see my work here as valuable. Every time that I teach somebody English in a world where Mandarin is the most prevalent native tongue, I help perpetuate the primacy of our language. Furthermore, I am teaching Western culture at The Culture Club and I represent the United States proudly.

That said, the intense pride of this people concerning their 5,000 years of history used to annoy me. Yesterday, though, I turned a corner. Instead of seeing this patriotism as the outgrowth of propaganda, I now realize that for millions of Chinese this feeling is well-founded because, in some important ways, theirs is a culture that is sophisticated and refined. Perhaps, it was Qibao Chow's Miniature Sculpture Museum that solidified this for me. This post is about my visit to the Shanghai History Museum. A subsequent post will discuss the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Museum and Qibao Ancient Town.

Source: http://blog.chinatravel.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/DSC0124-622x416.jpg

Shanghai History Museum

The Oriental Pearl Tower

Shanghai History Museum is in the basement of the Oriental Pearl. You will remember from last year's post over the May Day holiday that the Pearl is a landmark of the skyline here, for better or worse, that lies at a bend in the Huangpu River.

After landing at Pudong and a lengthy subway ride, my girlfriend and I went there first--do not pass Go, do not collect 1200RMB. We did not pay the preposterous prices to go up, but one flight down is a sort of Madame Tussaud meets Sturbridge Village. You could easily spend more time than we did, but even so it took us a couple hours to wind our way about on the two floors of the museum.

I would like to bring you on the tour with me.

Some Sage Advice from Bill McKibben

These are the answers to some questions that I recently posed to my friend Bill McKibben. Back in 1996, I wasted gallons of fossil fuel driving around a mountain in the Adirondacks trying to find Bill; his wife, Sue Halpern; and now grown-up daughter, Sophie. This family was one of three profiled in my honors thesis. Now Bill is a Scholar-in-Residence at my alma mater and an internationally-known leader in the fight to arrest anthropogenic climate change.

Alex: Charles Kupchan recently wrote in the New York Times, "The democratic, secular and free-market model that has become synonymous with the era of Western primacy is being challenged by state capitalism in China, Russia and the Persian Gulf sheikdoms. Political Islam is rising in step with democracy across the Middle East. And left-wing populism is taking hold from India to Brazil. Rather than following the West’s path of development and obediently accepting their place in the liberal international order, rising nations are fashioning their own versions of modernity and pushing back against the West’s ideological ambitions." Which style of government do you think has proven itself best equipped (in practice, not in theory) to address the serious threats posed by climate change? Why?

Bill: I think our only hope is people's movements rising up--so, the kind of governments where that can happen is preferred I suppose. As the Arab spring shows, it can happen almost anywhere

Alex: John Daly wrote a piece for oilprice.com where he discussed the state of fracking in China and outlined joint plans for technology transfer negotiated by Obama and Hu Jintao. What are the ethical and environmental ramifications of these developments?

Bill: A few years ago we might have said: not so bad, since burning natural gas is better than burning coal. Now we know more about fracking, and the evidence indicates not only that it does massive environmental damage close to home (the latest study indicates disposal of fracking water has been triggering earthquakes across the U.S.) but that enough unburned methane escapes into the atmosphere, negating the theoretical global warming benefits.

Alex: You have been a leader in the effort to slow the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. What do you say to those, like Joe Nocera of the New York Times, who argue that if the United States does not buy Alberta shale oil from the tar sands, it will be shipped to China, so we had best buy from a trusted ally and neighbor?

Bill: Well, it has to get to China first. They're trying to build a pipeline to the Pacific that would make that easy, but so far Canadians, especially First Nations peoples, are effectively blocking it. Even if we get very lucky, given five or ten years the Canadians will find a way to get those tar-sands out--which means in the next five or ten years we better do the work necessary to make sure that the world fears climate change enough to demand that carbon be kept in the ground. Because in global warming terms, of course, it makes no difference where it's burnt.

Alex: What are the major stumbling blocks between China and the US as they seek to forge a binding international agreement on climate?

Bill: I think the power of the fossil fuel lobby within each country that constrains actions by leaders

Alex: Have you been to China? If so, where did you go? What impressed and depressed you?

Bill: Several times. Depressed by: urban air pollution, desertification, water pollution. Impressed by: drive of the people to work, and by the rapid introduction of some new technologies (see below). (also impressed by the food)

Alex: You once wrote a book called Hope, Human and Wild. Are you aware of any really hopeful stories in China? Is there any transferable massive project or replicable local endeavor that you think sets an example for other nations?

Bill: I think the rapid adoption of solar thermal technology is a very good sign--it's the biggest source of renewable energy on earth, solar hot water in China. There are a number of cities where adoption rates approach 100%, and the total for the nation may be as high as 25%--compared with less than 1% in the U.S.  So, while China is emulating some of our bad habits (coal plants, cars) it is also creating some good habits we'd do well to copy.
 
Alex: If you could ask the average city dweller in China to do or not do one thing that would help the climate and help China develop in sustainable ways, what would it be? Please answer this question for rural residents, as well.

Bill: For urban dwellers: return China to a biking country. It's what the most avant garde cities on the planet (Copenhagen, Stockholm) are rapidly doing, and it would make life easier in every way.

For rural dwellers: well, I always thought my old friend Ren Xuping,  the rabbit king of Sichuan, was on to something.  Animal protein without grazing, on a scale easily accessible to women and children, with small capital investment and best of all helping not hurting China's huge soil erosion problem. It grew out of a Heifer project in the '80s, so I like the sense of international solidarity too.

Alex: I live in one of the largest high-speed train manufacturing areas in the world. Do you think President Obama, during a second term, would be able to make more progress on improving the transportation infrastructure of the United States? Do you think high-speed trains are the right technology to focus on?

Bill: I think trains period in the U.S.--we're not going to get super high speed trains except perhaps on a couple of corridors. But we can have fast enough trains.

Alex: Eating meat was rare for millions of Chinese country-side dwellers just a couple of decades ago. Now eating meat is a status symbol here. Feeding the world's growing population is likely to be a challenge with climate as a complicating factor. What do you think can be done to make farming and eating sustainably a priority of governments and their populations? Please answer this question in the context of the findings in this report Achieving food security in the face of climate change, referenced in this New York Times article.

Bill: I think if we're going to eat meat, we should do our best to copy culinary practices in China and elsewhere--i.e., treat it almost as a condiment, a flavoring, and hence use smaller amounts than the 'great honking slab' method of American cooks. And I'm glad to see practices like semi-vegetarianism spreading