Defending the Correct Ideology
In May 2012, the Writers Publishing House in Beijing republished a high-quality edition of Mao Zedong's (1893-1976) famous 1942 speech “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art”
hereafter Yan'an Talks).
This speech by the former chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (henceforth CCP), delivered to the intellectual elite while he was residing in Shaanxi Province (1935-1947), is known for having shaped the work of artists and writers throughout the Maoist era. The 2012 republication was not merely a copy of an old text that had lost its power in the market-oriented reform era, nor was it an invitation to remember the once cherished innovation in formulating a Chinese style of literature and arts conforming to socialist ideology. Rather, with the explicit support of the government's official China Writers Association (ψlWy^⅛∙⅛), the publisher asked one hundred individuals to each contribute one handwritten passage to the One Hundred Writers’ and Artists’ Hand-Copied Commemorative Edition of the Yan’an Talks of Comrade Mao ZedongThe contributors included Mo Yan, later a Nobel Prize laureate in Literature; He Jingzhi, who was a Yan'an veteran; Jia Pingwa, known for writing about folk culture in Shaanxi Province; the former Minister of Culture Wang Meng, who weathered most of the cultural movements in Maoist China, and Mai Jia, a bestselling author of the 21st century. Rewriting by hand a speech that, under Mao, had played a key role in persecuting and executing artists and writers for their deviation from the right cultural politics was a performance choreographed by the state. More an exercise of power than an apotheosis of Maoist ideals, it reminded authors that in the contemporary era, literature and arts still had to follow the Party line (Chinawriter, 2012).
Outside elite circles, however, performing the memory of Yan'an proved to be a far more demanding burden for a party that could no longer rely so easily on direct propaganda.
After the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Chinese society had experienced not only staggering economic growth but also a liberalization in cultural industries, which started toDOI: 10.4324/9780429445668-9 weaken the belief in socialism (Callahan, 2010; Muller, 2007; Wang, 2008). In 2004, facing the growing level of hedonistic materialism and increasing demands to pursue individual happiness—particularly, but not only, among the younger generation—the Central Committee of the CCP and the General Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China announced the first National Red Tourism Development Plan (2004-2010
In so doing, the government actively supported the development of destinations where tourists could travel to historical sites of the Chinese Revolution, tour museums presenting 19th and 20th-century history, or visit birthplaces or tombs of revolutionary heroes and martyrs. The plan combined the need to strengthen the tourism industry via commodification of the revolutionary past—as the success in generating revenue in the local economy strengthens the party’s legitimacy—with the urgently felt need for political education (Li et al., 2010; Liu, 2018; Rioux, 2007; Zhao and Timothy, 2017). Since Xi Jinping took over the position of general secretary of the CCP and president of the People’s Republic of China in late 2012, new attention has been dedicated to red tourism sites in order to regain ideological hegemony by commemorating China’s revolutionary past (Xinhuawang, 2015).
Yan’an, the cradle of communist revolution, is one of the most significant sites in red tourism. It has long been known as the sacred land of revolution (geming shengdi ^⅛⅛⅛) and the sacred land of democracy (minzhu shengdi ∣⅜⅛⅛⅛), which are designations used both in communist historiography and in Yan’an’s tourism advertisements. This chapter analyzes the staging of Yan’an as a revolutionary site, asking how the Party’s use of various strategies in performing the revolution shapes the re-narration of the past in the consumption-oriented present.
In Yan’an—as much as in other sites such as Shaoshan, which is Mao Zedong’s birthplace, and Jinggangshan, where Mao set up his first peasant Soviet (Cai and Xiao, 2011; Liu and Yu, 2015; Zhu, 2008)—reenactments of important battles that took place before the founding of the People’s Republic, the reconstruction of a material past of the 1930s and 1940s, and the opportunities to experience a foregone past aim to reinvent a revolutionary site in the post-revolutionary era. This is, however, not simply the result of a top-down propaganda strategy, as earlier studies on state-led efforts to foster a nationalist education via memorial tourism have argued, such as Timothy (1997) and Pretes (2003). It is rather owing to a selective use of the past that elsewhere allows the noncontradictory coexistence of sites of mourning, sites of sacrifice that spark feelings of pride, and sites of amusement (Denton, 2014, p. 10). In the case of Yan’an, the combination of touristic strategies results in the creation of a sense of the past that conforms to the political necessities of the present while no longer being equated with the trauma of the revolutionary violence for which Yan’an has long been known (Cheek, 1984; Gao, 2018). Making sites of the Maoist past—and especially Yan’an, where the revolution had achieved its first breakthroughs—meaningful to contemporaryReenacting the Revolution 127 society is no easy task when class struggle and revolution are no longer considered the central driving force of history and when acknowledging the traumas of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) and the Cultural Revolution remains contested (see the discussion in Veg, 2019, pp. 1-20, as well as Denton, 2011). I argue, however, that at several sites, the state-cum- party has developed strategies in red tourism to circumvent the resurfacing of these traumas by relying on a complex interplay of individual consumption and ideology that has turned the revolutionary spirit into something tangible and consumable.The following observations were made during a field trip to Yan’an in the summer of 2018 when I visited state-run museums, historical sites where Mao Zedong and the CCP leadership of the 1930s and 1940s had been residing, and the red tourism performance “Remembering the Battle Defending Yan’an,” a reenactment of an important battle against the army of Chiang Kai-shek in 1947. Unless otherwise noted, the observations are mine.1