Mao who? Youth look to the future

BEIJING: On a balmy Sunday morning in August, Beijing’s Beihai Park is teeming with tourists. Spread over 70 hectares in the heart of the city, the park is an enchanting place, with walkways lined with weeping willows, and giant lotuses blooming out of the Beihai Lake.

Centuries-old history breezes through with every sway of the trees. It was in this park, for instance, that Mongol ruler Kublai Khan built his palace (in what was then known as the Round City), where he received Venetian explorer Marco Polo in the 13th century. And it was in Beihai in the early 20th century that Mao Zedong, then a budding Marxist and a voracious student of world history, courted the woman who would later become the second of his many wives. 

Walking me around the park, Fiona Li, a frisky 24-year-old who works for an e-commerce firm, says in her endearing ‘Chinglish’ that she thinks of herself as a product of China’s ‘Happiness Times’. She grew up in Anhui, one of the less-developed provinces in eastern China, but came to Beijing years ago on a student scholarship, and stayed on to start up her career and live with her boyfriend Roger Xing. Fiona says that unlike her parents, who had had to go through “difficult times”, life for her has only been beautiful. 

China’s rise as an economic superpower in the post-Mao era has of course created limitless economic opportunities for youngsters like Fiona. And given the Chinese media’s thumb-rule of bao xi bu bao you (reporting only the good news, not the bad), life must sure look rosy for China’s blinkered generation. Even high-school curriculums today are geared more at preparing China’s youth to erase contentious issues of history from their mental hard disks, and instead focus on the future.

I ask Fiona if she could sing for me Dong Fang Hong (The East is Red), a paean to Mao that became a virtual national anthem during the Cultural Revolution, and was sung by students at the start of every day. Although a recording of that song is still played every hour at select spots across Beijing, I expect that as a product of ‘Happiness Times’, Fiona won’t know the lyrics, but she surprises me by reciting it unfalteringly.

“Everyone in China knows it, even today,” says Fiona, but acknowledges that for her the song perhaps lacks the poignancy that it holds for her parents. “My parents can’t sing it without crying.” And, yet, for just a fleeting moment, her eyes moisten with held-back tears. Evidently, even those who haven’t personally experienced the Cultural Revolution have been scarred by it. 

Across Beijing, in the entertainment district of Sunlitun, a Cultural Revolution of another kind gets under way in the late evenings. This is the watering hole of the substantial expatriate community in Beijing, and by evening, the bar street resonates with music from the live bands performing indoors.

Young girls in skimpy outfits warble Chinese and English pop tunes, or perform sinuous belly dances. Waitresses work overtime to keep the crowds plied with drinks, and tot up undrunk rounds of alcohol on to the bills of unsuspecting patrons. When challenged, they trot out limp excuses: faulty arithmetic, faulty communication… the works.

Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping famously liberated his countrymen from stodgy socialism with a ringing exhortation: “to get rich is glorious”. As China rushes headlong into the future, a new generation of Chinese youngsters are finding ever more inventive ways to seek out that glory in double-quick time.