Shanghai Street View: Memorializing the Party 沪经动向：纪念中共

Beijing and Xi’an may have the edge over other cities as treasure troves of Chinese history, but Shanghai is the clear leader when it comes to the history of the Communist Party. The CCP was founded here in Shanghai in 1921, which was chronicled in the star-studded but disjointed film “Beginning of the Great Revival”, released last year on the Party’s 90th anniversary. The city’s status as an intellectual hotbed in the early 20th century made it a natural home for the Party in its younger days, even if the going was often difficult as CCP leaders and members played a game of cat-and-mouse to avoid being wiped out by a ruling Nationalist government later intent on their extinction.

The city is now dotted with a patchwork of memorials at the homes of early Party members and on the sites of historic Party meetings and offices, with new attractions and exhibits opening all the time. While these sites are admittedly a bit of a propaganda exercise, their historical value makes them interesting nonetheless if one looks past the smattering of slogans and treats them as an exercise in the search for the soul of the Communist Party.

In an effort to see a bit more of this side of the city, I paid visits to 2 of the newest celebrations of the Party spirit during the long October 1 National Day holiday, one at a recently opened memorial to the Fourth Meeting of the CCP in the Hongkou District; and the other an exhibition at the city archive museum on the Bund chronicling the work in the 1930s of foreign journalists in China, who were some of the biggest Party supporters in its earlier and more idealistic days.

I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but I did find it interesting that both of these sites were closed on the day I first tried to visit them during the height of the National Day holiday, in a strange but perhaps fitting reflection that none of these attractions is meant to be too commercial. When I finally managed to visit both sites after the holiday, neither was particularly crowded. Just a handful of people were present at the Fourth Meeting memorial, and only 1 other person was at the foreign journalist exhibit, again attesting to the fact that operators of the sites aren’t really interested in attracting big crowds. They certainly aren’t interested in making money either, as both sites were free of charge — a rarity in an increasingly commercialized China these days.

Aesthetically speaking, the presentation at both sites was quite well done, including copious photos and explanations not only in Chinese but also in reasonably good English. I was a bit disappointed that the Fourth Meeting memorial, which opened last month, was in a nicely landscaped new building in a park near North Sichuan Road rather than at the original site. It turned out that original site nearby was destroyed by the Japanese during World War II.

The memorial itself was surprisingly conciliatory in its presentation, lauding the cooperation between the Communists and ruling Nationalists in the 1920s and early ’30s. That included plenty of photos and praise for Sun Yat-Sen, who headed the Nationalist Party and is widely revered in Taiwan and increasingly in the mainland as the founder of modern China. Also not surprisingly, there was little mention of Chiang Kai-Shek, who in all fairness was a relatively minor political figure during the CCP’s early years and later engaged in aggressive campaigns to wipe out the rival party that ultimately went on to defeat him and the Nationalists. But somewhat surprisingly, Mao Zedong also wasn’t featured very prominently either, in a relatively correct reflection of his minor position in the Party during its early days.

The foreign journalist exhibit was much smaller, containing biographies and memorabilia from about a dozen western reporters in China in the 1930s and early ’40s. China buffs would recognize names like Edgar Snow, author of the famous “Red Star Over China”, and Agnes Smedley among the field that came from a range of countries, including the US, Britain and the Soviet Union. The first part of the exhibit is dedicated to the reporters themselves, their backgrounds and their works, while the second part is devoted to their chronicling of the Communist Party during its exile period in the Yanan area of Shaanxi province in the late 1930s.

Mao was much more present in this era, doing frequent interviews with the reporters alongside other top CCP brass like Zhu De. I’m always fascinated with early images of Mao, whose photos in the exhibit presented quite a young and handsome man mingling with the foreign reporters, a stark contrast with more common images from his his later days. While the stories of each reporter were interesting by themselves, the most intriguing part for me was the broader sense of optimism and hope that many of these idealistic young reporters held out for China and the vision that Communists held for the country in those days.

Of course, the exhibit ended with the requisite call to support the Party, which was certainly expected though a tad disappointing for what was otherwise a fascinating look back at the idealism of the CCP’s early days. But on the whole, I certainly came away from both of these events with a sense of the idealism and trials that filled the Party in its early days, as well as a certain nostalgia for many of those dreams in a current era when most have quietly taken a back seat to more practical pursuits.