by Linda Jaivin
Sitwell’s Escape With Me! (1939) is a classic foreign memoir from that time:
the northern sun spatters both the moving people and the many static surfaces of paint with the flat, sparkling discs of a picture by Canaletto. Everyone is talking, laughing, shouting, buying or selling. Carts are rattling and jolting, and cattle are being driven through the best streets by swearing farmers’ boys, armed with long sticks. A line of heavily laden, double-humped camels, proud but melancholy, are making a progress down the sandy track at the side of the broad road just beyond the Palace Walls.
The sense that a unique urban civilization was nearing extinction permeates George N. Kates’s exquisite The Years that were Fat and informed guidebooks like L. C. Arlington and William Lewisohn’s In Search of Old Peking (1935). A visit to the ancient capital where everywhere, ‘roofs sag and pillars crumble’, wrote Peter Quennell in his delightful A Superficial Journey, was ‘a dream of desolation and declining splendour’. Segalen in particular regretted all attempts to modernize or renew the city.
Lu Xun described foreigners who wanted old ways preserved because it made their travel more interesting as ‘loathsome’. Lao She satirized them in the character Mr Goodrich in Si shi tong tang (The Yellow Storm).
The Forbidden City was litter-strewn. Other monuments were collapsing. The Badlands and Tianqiao festered with vice and even the monks of the Lama Temple had grown notorious for assaults and thievery. Yet, thanks in no small part to the writers mentioned above, the ancient capital’s mystique in the West had never been more potent. In 1934 the government decided to develop Beiping as a tourist destination.
The Japanese were already enthusiastically publishing guidebooks and picture books about the city, ominously conceptualizing it, as Naquin points out, within an expanded Japanese empire. On 9 December 1935 students in Beiping marched en masse to demand that Chiang’s government fight the Japanese, not the Communists. Once again, the city’s students provoked a national movement.
Beiping had grown to incorporate surrounding villages, including the small fortress-town of Wanping, built in the late Ming to defend the city from the rebel Li Zicheng. The Yuan dynasty Marco Polo Bridge crossed the Yongding River outside Wanping’s west gate. On 8 July 1937 the Japanese instigated a military incident at Marco Polo Bridge. Their artillery pummelled Wanping, whose walls still display the scars of the first battle of Japan’s full-scale invasion of China. In August, Japanese trucks and tanks rolled up Qianmen Street.
The Nationalists abandoned the city to spare it from attack. The Japanese declared Beiping the capital of the puppet provisional government of the Republic of China, calling it Beijing once more. Until 1940, when they massacred and raped some 300,000 people in Nanjing and moved the capital to that brutalized city, Beijing served as the command centre for Japanese forces in north China. The Japanese interned foreign residents and press-ganged Chinese citizens into slave labour, killing any who disobeyed orders and raping and murdering with impunity. They plundered the palaces and converted imperial gardens into farmland and fisheries to supply their forces, levelling hills in the Yuanmingyuan and filling in many of its lakes and streams. They imported huge quantities of drugs, licensing some 600 opium dens, mostly in Dashila’r; by 1942 one in seven residents in this miserable city, some 250,000 people, were addicts.
After Japan’s surrender in 1945, the Nationalists took over the city once more, but as Beiping, retaining Nanjing as their capital. Corruption blossomed and inflation bloomed; a bag of flour soon cost Beijing residents 500,000 yuan. After civil war broke out between the Nationalists and the Communists in 1946, refugees swelled the population to 1.7 million. Air drops of rice and flour on to the ice of Beihai could not feed the starving city.
In January 1949 600,000 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers surrounded the city – the last siege of a medieval walled city, as historian C. P. Fitzgerald has noted, in the twentieth century. From an airfield in the Dongdan Sports Ground, the Nationalists offered the city’s intelligentsia and cultural elites evacuation to Taiwan. Few took up the offer. As the journalist-historian Dai Qing has observed, ‘How could China’s men of letters ever abandon this of all cities?’ Instead, they helped the two sides to negotiate. On 31 January 1949 the Nationalist commander Fu Zuoyi surrendered and Beiping was ‘peacefully liberated’.
In May the Communist newspaper People’s Daily announced plans to ‘build the people’s New Beiping!’ and convert ‘the ancient feudalist city into a modern productive city’. The Communists sent army officers to speak with the influential architect and conservationist Liang Sicheng, son of Liang Qichao. Liang Sicheng loved the city’s architecture as much as his father had hated its politics. He’d written of Beijing that it had ‘so much power in general design; such scale in spatial layout’ that it was ‘second to none in the whole world!’ The Communists asked Liang to help them identify and protect the architectural treasures of Beijing. Liang raved to his friends about how ‘wonderful’ the Communist Party was.
The People’s Liberation Army ‘peacefully liberates’ Beijing.
By September, close to national victory, the Communists renamed the city Beijing. Just before 3 p.m. on 1 October, the chairman of the Communist Party, the former Peking University assistant librarian Mao Zedong, climbed the 100 steps to the rostrum of Tiananmen and proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
Mao Zedong announcing the birth of the People’s Republic of China, 1 October 1949.
6 Revolution (1949–1976)
The first Communist mayor of Beijing was the PLA general Ye Jianying. His adopted daughter, the journalist Dai Qing, has described how Ye organized
a unity municipal government that included people from both the old and new regimes . . . transport and communications were soon restored, prices stabilised, and business went back to normal. After years of war, people could finally pursue their lives in peace . . . Beijing, with a red flag now fluttering in its skies, seemed to give concrete form to the ideals of a lifetime: national independence, an end to corruption in political life, a thriving economy and peace for the people.
Within one year of taking office, Ye’s administration removed 94,000 tons of sewage and rubbish, some of Ming vintage, from Beijing’s streets and hutong (which now numbered 1,330). Lao She celebrated this achievement in his play Dragon Beard Ditch, in which the new government brings joy to a Tianqiao neighbourhood by filling in a rank, open sewer. Hutong names got a fresh scrub as well: Shit Field (Fenchang) became Exert Orderliness (Fenzhang) and Stinking Skin (Choupi) became Long Life (Shoubi). Some were renamed to avoid confusion: when the Communists took power there were sixteen hutong called Shoulder Pole and eleven called Flower Blossom.
The new regime scoured the city of vice, closing mah jong parlours, opium dens and brothels. In Dashila’r, the writer Xiao Qian witnessed the roundup of prostitutes, pimps, madams and their servants. He writes in his memoir Traveller Without a Map (1988): ‘the whole lot of them . . . chased into trucks in one smooth operation . . . as dextrously as a post office sorts letters’. Pimps and madams were sent to execution grounds or labour reform camps; prostitutes were ‘re-educated’ to become nurses and actors. Soon, Tianqiao’s wild days were but a memory.
Following a precedent set in the early days of the Republic, the Communists remodelled thousands of historic temples as factories, schools and government offices in the 1950s. The municipal security bureau took over the thirteenth-century Daoist Dongyue (Eastern Peak) Temple, home of the enforcer-gods of the underworld. Peace Park was reborn as the Beijing Municipal Workers Cultural Palace. The Eunuchs’ Temple and cemetery at Babaoshan (Eight Treasure Mountain) in the city’s west, also a cemetery and crematorium under the Republic and the Japanese, became the Beijing Revolutionaries’ Cemetery. Xinhua News Agency moved into the Republican era parliament building and Beijing’s Communist Party School set up on a campus that included Matteo Ricci’s tomb. The new government established hospitals, a museu
m and housing on the grounds of the Temple of Heaven.
The government nationalized many of Beijing’s lao zihao, ‘famous old brands’, including Quanjude, home of Peking duck, and Tongrentang (House of Benevolence) pharmacy, renaming the latter the Number Five Chinese Medicine Factory.
The Palace Museum’s first exhibition following the Communist victory was of Nationalist and American war crimes. The newly purposeful city had no place for the ‘little amusements’ of Bannerman culture. It banned pets and urged people to divest themselves of ‘useless objects’ like Ming furniture, some of which went for firewood. Barmé writes in The Forbidden City:
The new Communist government . . . effectively declared war on old Beijing, deeming its lifestyle of leisure, culture and consumption to be the hallmarks of Manchu decadence, supine betrayal of the national interest and the source of China’s humiliation.
People even dressed more soberly. In Changing Clothes in China, Antonia Finnane quotes the poet Ai Qing (father of the artist Ai Weiwei) grumbling: ‘Look along a street, and all you can see is a great sheet of blue and black.’
Another Beijing tradition the Communists scrapped was that of idly consuming what the rest of the country produced. Soon after the establishment of the new government, municipal Party Secretary Peng Zhen told the architect Liang Sicheng that Chairman Mao had declared that in the future the view from the rostrum of Tiananmen would be that of a forest of chimneys. The Beijing writer Zha Jianying describes the scene in China Pop: ‘Peng patted Liang on the shoulders: “Imagine that, Mr Liang!”’ He did, she writes, and ‘almost fainted’.
As Beijing’s newly appointed chief urban planners, Liang and another overseas-educated architect, Chen Zhanxiang, urged the preservation of the Inner City together with its walls. That ‘forest of chimneys’ could grow elsewhere. The walls themselves could become an elevated people’s park, its moats reserved for boating and fishing.
The Communists’ Soviet advisers dismissed these ideas as ‘petty bourgeois’ and impractical. Raze the old city to the ground, they said. Create a central plaza like Red Square and rebuild around it. Chen and Liang argued that the Soviet plan would displace nearly 200,000 people, intensify pressure on infrastructure, worsen traffic congestion and destroy priceless heritage. Mao didn’t care. When working in Peking University’s library, he felt scorned by the city’s intelligentsia as a thickly accented provincial. Their beloved imperial monuments were but feudal impediments to the fulfilment of his revolutionary vision. Despite mounting the rostrum at Tiananmen numerous times, Mao never once set foot inside the Forbidden City itself. In 1952 Chen and Liang’s pleas were answered by the sound of sledgehammers. The demolition of the walls had begun.
The government also condemned Beijing’s pailou. Free-standing arches of wood, stone and glazed tile, some dating back to the Ming, pailou spanned streets and bridges to commemorate virtuous women and righteous men. While not unique to Beijing, the capital had more pailou than any other Chinese city. Chang’an Avenue lost its pailou when it was widened and lengthened to give the city a more politically resonant east–west axis. Liang’s appeal to preserve a landmark twelfth-century temple with twin pagodas just west of the palace also fell on deaf ears; the fattened boulevard rolled straight over it.
A Beijing pailou.
Six thousand factories began production in greater Beijing, straining Beijing’s water supply and belching toxic smog into once famously clear skies. Michael Meyer writes in The Last Days of Old Beijing that 14,000 smokestacks punctuated ‘the skyline like exclamation points proclaiming the city as: The nation’s largest petrochemical base! The leading producer of rubber products, plastic, and refrigerators!’ Textile industries clustered in the area east of Jianguomen (today’s CBD) and chemical industries to the south. To the north was the electronics district of Jiuxianqiao (Drunken Immortal Bridge). There, architects from East Germany designed a top-secret military-industrial complex, the largest in both Asia and the Communist world, in the style of the Bauhaus. Completed in 1957, it covered nearly 150,000 sq. m. Its 10,000 workers enjoyed on-site dance halls, night schools, dorms, and swimming pools and baths heated by water in the plant’s cooling towers. Among its products were the command components in long-range guided missiles. Its factory zones were identified only by number: 798, for example.
Po-faced Soviet-style apartment blocks sprang up to accommo date workers recruited from all over China. The tenement dazayuan courtyards grew more crowded than ever. As in the Republican period, high officials and government bodies occupied the best of the old princely residences and courtyard homes. Kang Sheng, a cruel aesthete in charge of Mao’s secret service, settled into the lovely Purple Bamboo Garden, today a hotel, and Long March veteran Chen Yi moved into the former residence of Cixi’s chief eunuch Li Lianying. The Ministry of Public Security requisitioned the mansion said to have inspired the setting of Dream of the Red Chamber, Gong Wangfu (see p. 231). The central leadership moved into the Lake Palaces of Zhongnanhai, Mao ensconcing himself by the Republican era swimming pool in Kangxi’s Garden of Abundant Nourishment.
The newly widened Eastern Chang’an Avenue.
The Legation Quarter walls came down. As China’s diplomatic ties largely followed Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan, the municipal government took over Japan’s old mission and converted the French and British embassies into state guest-houses, the Ministry of State Security later occupying the British Legation. The government awarded the Dalai Lama, with whom it was still friendly, the American mission and Burma and East Germany acquired the Belgian and German embassies. Soviet diplomats moved into a sprawling early Russian Church mission in the city’s northeast; Soviet advisers moved into the custom-built Friendship Hotel in the old Uighur district of Weigongcun.
Peking University occupied the ‘garden campus’ of the former Christian university Yenching and absorbed its arts faculties. Tsinghua University took over Yenching’s engineering department. Within a decade, Beijing went from eleven tertiary institutions to 52, more than any other city or even province in China, and including specialist schools of filmmaking, petroleum extraction and aeronautics. Its student population surpassed 100,000.
Wu Han, a Ming history enthusiast, was deputy mayor of Beijing in 1956. Curious to discover if the Wanli emperor had got his wish and been buried with his beloved Lady Zheng, he defied an ancient curse and opened Wanli’s tomb. Lightning struck the excavators. The tomb spewed miasmic black mist. But the mystery was solved. Wanli had been condemned to a loveless eternity with his official empresses.
That year, the Communist Party invited the Chinese people to critique its first seven years in power: ‘let a hundred flowers bloom’. Liang Sicheng was among those who spoke out, declaring that with each brick stripped from Beijing’s walls, he felt like his own skin was being sliced off.
By 1957 Mao had heard enough. Under the supervision of Secretary-General Deng Xiaoping, the party labelled half a million mostly well-educated people ‘Rightists’, condemning them to labour reform camps and internal exile. Though forced to write a ‘self-criticism’, Liang was spared the gulag; not so his colleague Chen Zhanxiang, the poet Ai Qing, nor, incidentally, the archaeologists who excavated Wanli’s tomb.
In 1958 Mao declared that China was ready for a Great Leap Forward to true communism. He ordered a quadrupling of industrial and agricultural output. Some 1,400 new factories began operation in Beijing’s Inner City, smokestacks breaking through yet more temple roofs. Three ‘Communist Mansions’ were built to serve as urban communes where hundreds of families shared one kitchen.
Beijing’s water supply couldn’t meet the frenetic demands of industry. The government mobilized thousands of people to dig reservoirs. One near the Ming Tombs proved useless. Another, by the Great Walls at Miyun, was more successful (see p. 203).
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic on 1 October 1959, the party recruited 10,000 ‘volunteers’, including students and teachers, to build ten major s
tructures for the capital in ten months: the Great Hall of the People and Museum of Revolutionary History on Tiananmen Square, the Revolutionary Military Museum, the Beijing Railway Station, the Minorities Cultural Palace, Minorities Hotel, Workers’ Stadium, Overseas Chinese Mansion, Agricultural Exhibition Center and the refashioning of the Jin dynasty ‘detached palace’ of Diaoyutai into a state guesthouse in the Soviet style.
One of Mao’s ‘ten great buildings’: Beijing Railway Station.
The factories of 798 manufactured the electrical components and lighting fixtures for all ten Greats and the loudspeakers for an expanded Tiananmen Square. At 400,000 sq. m, Tiananmen Square was now the world’s largest plaza, five times the size of Moscow’s Red Square. In its centre rose the obelisk Monument to the People’s Heroes. Grandstands winged Tiananmen, over which Mao’s portrait became a permanent fixture. ‘It took Chinese emperors centuries to build their fabulous capital,’ mourns the architectural scholar Xiao Hu, ‘but only a decade for the Party to obliterate its excellence.’
Tiananmen Square, the Monument to the People’s Heroes and, behind it, the Great Hall of the People.
At the end of 1959 Mao officially pardoned Puyi, the last emperor of the Qing, who had spent a decade in a labour reform camp for collaborating with the Japanese. Returning to Beijing for the first time in 35 years, Puyi became a gardener in Beijing’s Botanical Gardens and an ornamental plant in the flowerbed of communist propaganda. In his autobiography From Emperor to Citizen, written with Lao She’s help, the one-time master of the Forbidden City called the voter’s card he received in 1960 ‘the most valuable thing’ he ever owned.
The economically catastrophic policies of the Great Leap Forward, a string of natural disasters and a rancorous split with the Soviet Union, which subsequently withdrew all aid, threw China into a three-year famine that would claim well over 30 million – possibly 40 million or more – lives. In June 1959 an article appeared in the People’s Daily that recounted a story in which the upright Ming official Hai Rui tells the Jiajing emperor, ‘You think that you alone are right, you refuse to accept criticism and your mistakes are many.’ The following year the story appeared in Beijing Literature and Art in the form of a play, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office. The anonymous author of both was Deputy Mayor Wu Han.
