Flâneur’s Diary: Living on the Edge

The history of the People’s Republic of China was something I have wanted to learn about for a long time. This was the primary reason why I chose Beijing for this project. Yet this project required me to go further than passively learning about the history of a different country. While being a “virtual flaneur” did give me the history lesson I sought, it provided me with so much more.

One of the first lessons was about the shift in historical perspective among the Chinese Communist Party. According to Jeffery N. Wasserstrom and Maura Elizabeth Cunningham's book China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (2018), Mao Tse-Tung and other communist leaders wanted to distance their revolutionary society from philosophies that they felt were archaic, including Confucianism. Yet, the opening ceremony to the 2008 Beijing Olympics included a quote from Confucius. The modern CCP did not view Confucianism in the same light as they did during the Mao era. Wasserstrom and Cunningham explained that the modern CCP was less interested in advancing a revolutionary ideology that furthers communist ideals, and more interested in advancing an ideology that reflected China's greatness, regardless if it was an ideology from the past or the present.

Wasserstrom and Cunningham also explained that this shift in views about China's past went beyond the arena of philosophy and enters the arena of architecture. For example, during the Mao-era, the CCP did not keep good care of the Forbidden City - the ancient Chinese imperial palace. After the Mao-era the CCP renovated the Forbidden City, making it into an attractive tourist destination and historical monument.

Another intriguing distinction between the Maoist-era and post-Maoist-era was how neoliberal capitalism developed within a supposedly socialist country. During the Mao-era a welfare system was instituted. This system was called "hukou" and people could only get benefits if they remained where they were born or applied to have their household transferred (Goodkind, & West, 2002). This system was instituted to control migration from rural villages to cities. Yet after the neoliberal reforms, there was a demand for more labor in cities, plus as the CCP developed rural villages, many rural workers had no choice but to forgo their welfare benefits and move to the city in search for work (Li & Wu, 2013). Unfortunately, these migrant workers struggled to get by. On average, the rent in Beijing was 1.2 times their monthly wages (Ross, 2017) and this lead to the rise of slums in Beijing.

Additionally, while Mao has been characterized as a despotic ruler comparable to Hitler because of the “massacre” of the Great Leap Forward, Wassterstorm and Cunningham (2018) argue that the Great Leap Forward was not comparable to the Holocaust, but rather it was an ill-conceived and ideologically driven program meant to lead the PRC closer to the full realization of communism. This program led to poor crop yield, poor quality in steel, and the Chinese proletariat being literally worked to death. On the other hand, the post-Mao-era has been characterized by growing Chinese national wealth that is not being distributed in any way that can be characterized as socialist. Foreign investment and business connections with CCP party leaders has lead to immense wealth being concentrated in the top stratum of the population, accompanied by the development of opulent gated communities that exclude the poor, or as Mike Davis puts "evil paradises." These paradises are "evil" because they are exclusive and predicated on the exploitation of the "have-nots" (Davis and Monk, 2011).

This project has taught me that as the People's Republic of China becomes more prominent on the world stage, it is imperative that the citizens of both countries try to judge each other's government as objectively as possible. After all, the United States has certainly experienced income inequality and corruption. Perhaps we have more in common with the people in the PRC than we do with our own government, and vice versa.