Chaguan – Pink tourism in Xi’s China | China

March 6, 2021

IAs it is today in the 1960s and 1970s, Dazhai Village was known as the Place of Miracles. Millions of revolutionary pilgrims came to hear how local farmers carved terraced cornfields and reservoirs from their rocky slopes, armed with little more than hand tools and the love of Chairman Mao Zedong. Dazhai’s poorly educated Communist Party secretary, Chen Yonggui, was called to Beijing and appointed to the Politburo with the rank of deputy prime minister. At that time, Liang Jiwen was a student, the son of a Dazhai officer. He remembers dignitaries who arrive every day in his corner of Shanxi Province in the dust-dry Taihang Mountains. He and his classmates waved flowers and sang red hymns by the roadside. “We didn’t learn much,” he recalls.

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Then came autumn. In 1980, official Communist Party newspapers labeled Dazhai a fraud as part of a broader ultra-left purge that followed Mao’s death in 1976. Investigators said the miraculous grain harvests were invented. They described massive monetary subsidies that were passed on to the supposedly independent village and thousands of soldiers sent to build its engineering marvels.

Now Dazhai is attempting a third act. Local officials have drawn up plans to include their village in a China-wide official campaign to promote “red tourism” and teach party history to the masses. They have high hopes for their former “People’s Congregation”, a well-preserved complex of cave dwellings from 1966. An impressive place whose entrance gate is still adorned with Maoist slogans and which was included in a national register of protected areas in 2013. It still is Closed to the public, but plans are underway to buy out the current residents. Among them is Jia Cunlian, a widow who has lived in a cave house there for 30 years. She remembers Chen, the chief of the Mao era, as “the best of men” who shared exotic gifts he received with villagers such as melons and raisins. Nevertheless, she prefers the present and says: “Life was hard back then.”

Since the 1990s, most of the visitors to Dazhai tourism have been elderly. The village has tried to woo them with nostalgia: family-owned restaurants that serve country fare, including tree bark noodles that were once eaten during times of famine. But local leaders now have greater ambitions as to what Dazhai’s political rehabilitation would mean. To achieve this, officials are ready to offer a dose of candor. Shi Yonghong, head of the cultural relics bureau of surrounding Xiyang County, admits that Mao’s call to learn from Dazhai led to excesses in the mid-1970s, for example when communities in other parts of China dug terraced fields out of apartment plains Fear of obeying the chairman. Mr. Shi accused the officials at these locations of misinterpreting the policy, adding that Dazhai never asked to be a national model. But even the reluctant admission of bygone problems is offset by his claims that Dazhai not only fed himself in the hungriest years of the 1960s, but “sold surplus crops to the state.” He does not offer any further details to support this long debunked claim. Instead, he talks vaguely but grandly about the “dazhai spirit,” which he defines as hard work and not asking for government handouts.

In an office full of cigarette smoke overlooking a snow-covered village square, Dazhai’s deputy party secretary Li Huailian interferes. She tells the story of the village it takes to understand what President Xi Jinping means when telling congregations that the good times today did not fall from heaven. Dazhai is wealthy because its people have always been diligent and obeyed party orders, she explains. “Where the party tells us to go, let’s go.” At the first hearing, this is a rather bland summary of her village’s tumultuous past. But these local officials know what they’re doing. They want Dazhai to be a celebrated red tourism site advertised alongside revolutionary bases on the Long March route. To do this, they need to grasp the role that history plays in the Xi era. For Mr. Xi and his team, the past has been to provide reasons to admire the party and not to provide evidence of judgments about their rule.

Not just popes who want to claim infallibility

Real history is dangerous stuff. The previous worship of Dazhai and his boss Chen – a zealot who ordered 141 political executions and said revolutionaries could grow crops on sandy beaches – is a reminder that for Mao the party government was a faith-based project. Often ideology has been put above expertise and common sense, with terrible results. Dazhai’s denunciation in 1980 reflected the efforts of the then supreme leader of China, Deng Xiaoping, to create a rational, technocratic state. Deng’s gamble was that the party didn’t need personality cults to maintain support. Instead, he sought a mandate based on making China strong and successful. In order to advocate for market-oriented reforms, which he considered important for this project, he was pragmatic ready to allow the naming of Maoist errors.

Mr. Xi advocates a synthesis of these two approaches. As the party nears its 100th anniversary in July, its leaders urge the public to contrast China’s economic rise and social stability with economic decline and political chaos in the West. This is a Deng-style appeal to the legitimacy of the achievement. However, this goes hand in hand with the booster talk of “the brilliant achievements and valuable experience that our party has gained”. Maoist catastrophes are not mentioned. In the Xi era, when Chinese scholars ponder past mistakes, they are guilty of “historical nihilism,” an end-of-career crime. When foreigners remember old horrors, the charge is that they are trying to overthrow communist rule. Last month, Mr. Xi gathered high-level leaders to emphasize the importance of properly studying party history and passing on “red genes and revolutionary fire” to future generations.

Mr. Xi seeks a mandate that is both pragmatic and faith-based. The common thread is absolute loyalty. According to the logic of the Xi era, the Chinese today can benefit from the rule of the wise party because they have always trusted the party even when it was wrong. Objectively, Dazhai doesn’t deserve to be a place of pilgrimage again. Still, it can happen. In China, what the party needs is the past. ■

This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the heading “Red Tourism in Xis China”.