As part of its patriotic education effort, the Communist Party has rolled out star power in its attempts to mythologize its own creation myth. In the lead-up to its 60th anniversary in 2009, it produced two blockbuster movies, using hundreds of the country’s most bankable stars, who donated cameo performances to this propaganda epic for a new age. It was no surprise when The Founding of a Republic smashed box office records, bringing in more than $65 million, helped along by audiences of students and government workers who were strong-armed into attendance by their institutions.
In line with current political dictates, class struggle is barely mentioned in the film. Instead, Chairman Mao is seen bemoaning his inability to buy a cigarette, which he attributes to a lamentable lack of capitalists. “If there aren’t any businessmen, I can’t even buy cigarettes,” he says, “let alone talk about market prosperity. We have to invite them back.” Of course, he never uttered those words. This film and its 2011 sequel The Beginning of the Great Revival are filled with scenes that never happened, including one moment when in 1919, the young Chairman Mao appears on the docks with his suitcases, about to board a boat for France with 16-year-old Deng Xiaoping, when he suddenly changes his mind. Such attempts to spin the country’s history were much mocked online. Yet the constant rewriting of history has made untangling truth from fiction ever harder.
The patriotic education campaign has not only transformed history books and popular entertainment, it has also reshaped domestic tourism. In 1994, a Red Tourism policy began to subsidize “patriotic education bases.” Two decades later, there are 10,000 Red Tourism destinations in China, Communist Disneylands that memorialize a manipulated version of the country’s past. Their success can be measured in numbers. In 2011, more than a half billion visitors went to Red Tourist sites, accounting for one-fifth of all domestic tourism.
One town entirely transformed by Red Tourism is the mountain base of Yan’an, where the Communist Party ended the Long March in 1935. It was in the hillside caves of this dusty little place that Chairman Mao and his fellow revolutionaries cloistered themselves for the next dozen years, hammering out the party’s ideology. When I first visited Yan’an as a student in 1991, it was a down-at-heel town whose main attraction was a few dank caves scooped out of the hillside. There were so few shopping opportunities that in one deeply embarrassing misunderstanding, we ended up being shooed out of a funeral shop after attempting to try on burial clothes meant for corpses.
Two decades later, the town has been rebranded the “Holy Land of China’s Communist Revolution,” somewhat of an oxymoron in a state that remains officially atheist. A cavernous Revolutionary Memorial Hall was built in 2009 at a cost of $80 million in which such relics as a lilac-colored metal soapdish once used by the Great Helmsman are lovingly displayed. A gigantic statue of Chairman Mao, arms akimbo, dominates a huge, empty square that has been leveled in front of the hall. On a recent visit, the Memorial Hall’s lobby was filled with people dressed up as Red Army soldiers in brand-new pale-blue cotton jackets and pedal-pushers. I had assumed they were government officials or perhaps staffers from a state-owned enterprise on a state-sponsored freebie. In fact, they turned out to be China’s top Amway salespeople, who had earned themselves a Red Tourism holiday for their prowess in selling skincare products and protein powders. Lining up for the obligatory group photo, they enthusiastically shouted chants that I couldn’t quite decipher. I assumed it was a Communist slogan until I was informed that this new Red Army was shouting out the name of that year’s bestselling Amway product.