a weirdo in china, pt. 11: partition

I set my course in the direction of the Forbidden City.

Tiananmen Square

The entrance to the F.C. stands right on Tiananmen Square, which is an enormous, empty, soulless expanse of concrete dead in the center of Beijing. One one end, the mausoleum of Chairman Mao, in which his preserved body lies forever in state. I did not go to see it.

At the other end, the Gate of Heavenly Peace itself promises entry to that most forbidden of cities, watched over by Grandpa Mao himself.

For being an enormous city square packed with thousands of tourists, Tiananmen Square is a surprisingly subdued place. And don't be fooled by the color of the sky in these pictures -- this is what passes for a sunny day in the smog-chocked Beijing city center. People came out in droves, but they seemed to be maintaining a respectful attitude in the presence of these foundational pieces of Chinese national identity.

Our guide actually mentioned the 'student protests', but only to say she couldn't discuss them in any depth. She seemed unsure whether we'd even know what she meant. I've found that explaining the Western view on Chinese totalitarianism to mainland Chinese is kind of a waste of time. Their government has done a pretty spectacular job constructing a narrative where China is essentially blameless. So we just shrugged and said, yeah, every American who knows about China knows about Tiananmen Square.

So it was huge and striking and somber. More than anything, there was an air of sacrifice to the place, a constant reminder that the Anti-Japanese War (yes, they call it that) was an existential struggle that forged a nation of heroes. It's a strange contrast that America, young as it is, is so temporally distant from its founding fathers, while China's five-thousand-year history still permits it to produce figures like Mao who can reinvent the country anew.

Once passing through the gate and entering the Forbidden City proper, the first thing I noticed was a basketball court.

This was part of a rest and relaxation area for the guards stationed in the square and Forbidden City, I guess?

But moving past that, I started to take in the interior. I found that it looked like most of Beijing, actually:  huge, monolithic, and repetitive.

There were gardens, sculptures, courtyards, fancy pagodas, and all the rest, but surprisingly little that I would call beautiful. It felt like a museum more than a palace, and from what I know about the lifestyle of most Chinese emperors, that probably isn't too far from the truth.

We processed through the Forbidden City, ooh-ing and aah-ing where appropriate, but ultimately it's just the same type of building, with minor variations, repeated over an enormous piece of real estate. It's the kind of thing that's not really easy to appreciate from inside, so I was happy when we found the exit.

Jingshan Park, just outside the F.C., is a hill with a pavilion atop which offers the ideal viewing angle to really absorb the majesty of the golden-roofed city. It really delivered!

This stuff all kind of speaks for itself. It's a phenomenal visual spectacle, and it purports to be a cultural spectacle as well, but it's kind of hard to see that. When you visit Europe and go to castles, there is a great deal of reverence and import placed on the royal persons who once lived there, but there's also this general vibe that feudalism was pretty bad and we're all better off thanks to the Enlightenment and the supremacy of liberal humanist principles.

The Chinese approach to the Forbidden City and its history seems to be beyond that reverence, though. The attempts to create continuity between the emperors and the Communist Party leaders are clear, clumsy even. Autocracy is an accepted fact of life. Sure, Mao wasn't right about everything -- our guide said she was taught the 70/30 rule in school, Mao was 70% right, 30% wrong -- but he had the general idea.

And...that's just preposterous. The only thing today's China has in common with the society Mao envisioned is that it idolizes Mao. But they keep the pretense going, because what else do they have? The men in suits running the country today didn't save their people from the brutality of Japanese invaders.

But the City is open. Is that progress? I was told repeatedly that the people actually running the government today have their offices far, far away from the noise and pollution of central Beijing. They would never stoop, I was told, to being around the riff-raff.

It's a Pleasure Island, and I was glad to leave it, even if the views were great.