Off the Page: The Harvard Press Author Forum

Painting Over Mao

—Notes on the Inauguration of the Beijing Olympic Games

PARTICIPATING AUTHOR: GEREMIE BARME

Geremie R. Barmé is Professor of Pacific and Asian History at The Australian National University. His latest book is The Forbidden City from the Wonders of the World series (HUP, May 2008).

Read the Bldg Blog interview with Mary Beard about the Wonders of the World series (Part I and Part II)

Read supplementary material prepared by Geremie Barmé

A shorter version of this article appeared in Sydney Morning Herald on 11 August 2008

The ancient city of Beijing was literally turned on its head to help achieve the effects of the Olympic opening ceremony on Friday 8 August 2008. Six hundred years ago the city was designed around a north-south axis that runs from the south of the old city through the Forbidden City and on north. Along this axis the spectacles of imperial times would unfold (including the imperial "Tours of the South" or nanxun that were a major feature of the reigns of the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors in the Qing dynasty). Since the 1910s, however, Chang'an Avenue, now a multi-laned highway that runs east-west through the heart of Beijing, became the focus for military parades. From the 1950s, mass rallies organized by China’s ruling Communist Party have paraded along the avenue past Tiananmen, the most recent of these grand demonstrations being held in 1999 to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic (see my online essay "Let the Spiel Begin". http://www.danwei.org/2008_beijing_olympic_games/let_the_spiel_begin_by_geremie.php).

As part of the makeover of the city in the last decade the long-disused north-south imperial axis has been revived with a rebuilt city gate far in the south and a new park at Yongding Men, as well as a lengthy shopping mall at Qianmen that abuts Tiananmen Square. On Friday night as a prelude to the start of the Olympic opening ceremony a line of fireworks exploded in a series of ‘footprints’ along this axis describing a path to the Bird’s Nest National Stadium.

Far in advance of this the ceremony designers created a digital mock up of the fireworks so that TV viewers in China and internationally could see an idealized version of Beijing’s central axis. To achieve the desired effect they even edited out the pollution-haze that generally covers the city despite years of effort and billions of dollars. The show that followed was also one of canny artifice, stunning design and digital wizardry. Zhang Yimou, the renowned filmmaker and overall director of the show, used a quotation from Mao Zedong to describe the thinking behind the opening: "using the past to serve the present and the foreign to serve China."

Most observers noted that Mao, the Party Chairman who founded the People’s Republic in 1949 and led the country until his death in 1976 (launching the disastrous Great Leap Forward in the late 50s and the decade of disruption of the Cultural Revolution from 1966) was entirely absent from this paean to China’s past civilization. Of course, they might have missed the pregnant absence of the dead leader in the heavily rewritten "Song to the Motherland" (Gechang zuguo), in which he originally featured, that was sung by nine-year-old Lin Miaoke that opens the show. However, in reality, the Great Helmsman did get a look in, if only obliquely.

On the unfurled paper scroll that features centre stage early in the performance, dancers trace out a painting in the "xieyi", or impressionistic, style of traditional Chinese art. Their lithe movements create a vision of mountains and a river, to which is added a sun. It is a something of a stock scene of the kind seen in countless Chinese ink paintings. However, to my mind at least, it is an image that also evokes the painting-mural that forms a backdrop to the statue of the Chairman in the Mao Memorial Hall in the centre of Beijing (another version of this image hung prominently in the Great Hall of the People from the 1960s). That picture, designed by Huang Yongyu, a noted artist persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, is, in turn, inspired by a line from Mao’s most famous poem ‘Snow’ (February 1936) that reads ‘How splendid the rivers and mountains of China’ (jiangshan ru ci duo jiao). The poem lists the prominent rulers of dynastic China and ends by commenting on how all these great men fade in comparison to the true heroes of the modern world: the people. The poem is generally interpreted as being about Mao himself, the hero of the age (for a discussion of this, see my book Shades of Mao, 1996).

In their opening ceremony design, what Zhang Yimou and his colleagues achieve (among many, sometimes too many, other things), be it intentional or not, is a rethinking of this reference. Eventually, the painting is coloured in by children with brushes and the sun becomes a jaunty ‘smiley face’. In the remaining blank space of the landscape the athletes of the world track the rainbow of Olympic colours as they take up their positions following their entry to the stadium. Thus, a Chinese landscape, with its coded political references (after all, what does a sun usually mean in modern-style guohua?), is transformed into something that is suffused with a new and embracing meaning by the global community. It offers a positive message for the future of China’s engagement with the world, not only to international audiences, but perhaps also to China’s own leaders, who, apart from Premier Wen Jiabao, for the most part sat stony-faced through the extravaganza. It is also significant that many of the high-points of the opening ceremony were the result of a collective collaboration of designers working closely with Chinese artists who have returned from long years overseas, as well as with British and Japanese creators.

But after the spectacular highlights of traditional China that feature the Four Great Inventions (the segment on moveable type, in particular, is a triumph), powerful images jostle with each other, or appear momentarily only to be crowded out as one mass scene after another presses in, or some vignette comes and goes in a flood of fleeting glitz. The Chinese voice-over on CCTV1 spoke repeatedly about traditional aesthetics and the language of understatement and elegance, but after an enthralling and uplifting introduction and paean to the achievements of dynastic Chinese civilization, as the show enters the present age a certain failure of artistic coherence becomes increasingly obvious.

Thus, one could argue that the extraordinary landscape painting contains another, quite unintended, message. The ‘xieyi’ style of Chinese art particularly values emptiness or lacunae (kong  or xu): those pregnant spaces untouched by the brush that bring the composition to life, the ‘vacuum’ in which meaning finds full expression. In the second half of the show that inaugurated the XXIXth Olympiad with its increasing number of rapid highlights—the problematic use of the intense close-up drowned by the massing of performers—there is scarce room and an unsteady rhythm in what could have been, and in parts still is, a breathtaking work. The exciting promise of the opening sequences remains sadly under-realised.

While Zhang Yimou had overall directorial authority for the design and staging of the opening ceremony, Zhang Jigang deputy minister of propaganda in the PLA General Logistics Department who had worked on the Chinese ceremony at the Athens Games, was in charge of the first half of the show. The second half (including the entrance of the athletes and the torch-lighting ceremony) was overseen by Chen Weiya , artistic director of the generally stodgy Song & Dance Ensemble of the East. He has also designed the closing ceremony. Chen is known for the designs he has made for Tiananmen Square mass gatherings, the 2001 World University Student Games and the opening ceremony of the 2005 East Asia Games. Apart from the push-and-pull of directorial intent created by this leadership team, there were other expectations that had to be met. For example, the Beijing Olympic Games is also a vehicle for the promotion of the au courant Party line of ‘harmony’ (hexie , be it local or global. The original show was to feature a scene comprising a massed army of huge ‘piying'(screen puppet) Terracotta Warriors made in the style of Shaanxi Qinqiang  Opera puppets. Images of these figures featured in the media following the first rehearsal of the show in July this year. Recalling not only the era of the First Emperor of the Qin, but also Zhang Yimou’s 2002 film ‘Hero’, the phalanx of puppets was designed to perform a victory march in the stadium. They were cut from the show on advice from the Beijing Olympic Committee who deemed that they were too martial in tone. The internationally recognized Qin Warriors were replaced at the last minute by puppets made up as Beijing Opera performers. They feature in a lacklustre scene that has been widely derided by Chinese bloggers and Beijing viewers.

So, to my mind, while there was much to commend the performance in terms of scale and synchronized collective performance, after we leave the retrospect on pre-modern China (one in which the narrative about millennia of peace, exchange, harmony and friendship is problematic in other ways) coherence is sacrificed for the sake of a number of designed-by-committee themes. Meanwhile, the sardonic wit, irony and general raffishness of Beijing humour is noteworthy for its complete absence from the festivities.

The general busyness of the action and the overall bling that detract from the moments of magic in the show contain perhaps a significant cultural message in their own right. Quotations from Confucius or the repeated talk of harmony do little to disguise a paucity that is not about either ‘xu’ or aesthetic restraint, a vision in which less is allowed to be more. At least China has the wherewithal to talk about the value of pregnant pauses and the richness of the empty space, in previous Olympic opening ceremonies, such as those held in the US and Australia, there was simply too much clamour and horror vacui. 

Immediately after the Beijing ceremony one Chinese web blogger commented, ‘We’ve been waiting for this banquet for a long time. Instead what we got was hot-pot in which all the flavours have ended up confused’. People will debate the contents and significance of this particular visual banquet for some time to come. Despite all this what does remain is a Chinese painting in which the whole world, through its athletes, has helped co-create.

Beijing opening ceremony

What was missing from the opening ceremony?

PARTICIPATING AUTHOR: MICHAEL DUTTON

Michael Dutton is author of Streetlife China, the prize-winning Policing Chinese Politics, and Beijing Time (HUP May 2008) with Hsiu-Ju Stacy Lo and Dong Dong Wu. He is Professor of Politics at Goldsmiths University of London.

The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was a theatricalised depiction of China’s own account of itself..It was a history lesson. Like a Chinese history textbook, the performances at the opening ceremony staged a China of the future (with the pyro-techniques, stadium structure and the high tech visuals) that was built on an ancient venerated culture. The greatness of the past was now about to be rekindled.  But what of the period in the middle that actually comes to define so much of this contemporary China?  Here was a period that, in many respects, reorganised China and "morphed" these ancient customs into newer and more socialist habits. This difference is even etched onto the surface of Beijing’s urban landscape but more importantly, it has been central to the constitution of new post revolutionary communities that have come to represent what is now being called, "Old Beijing." Now torn down under the once ubiquitous character "Chai"--that is, the character meaning ‘demolish’ written on walls just before their destruction--these traditional neighbourhoods may have had pre-revolution housing stock, but the occupants, are in the main, a product of the communist period. It was when the communists came to power that these neighbourhoods filled up. They produced certain types of affect, judgement, and modes of thought, that were built on the logic of life of the system economic reform has swept away. This is the bit of history that the opening ceremony didn’t address. That which is repressed, Freud once noted, is not destroyed, only encrypted.

The opening ceremony might have been a history lesson from "spin city," but out on the street there are different lessons to be learned. Out on the backstreets are the little old lady or man of the neighbourhood committee. These days, they may be campaigning for a clean neighbourhood or a secure Olympics, but in the past they were the conveyor belts of everyday socialism in China. All too evidently there is another China and another Beijing that is lived but was not performed at this opening ceremony. <em>Beijing Time</em> takes the reader to these neighbourhoods and tries to understand the dynamics of these communities in a period when market development is destroying them.

Our future and our evolutionary history

PARTICIPATING AUTHOR: JACK HAILMAN

Jack P. Hailman is Professor Emeritus of Zoology, University of Wisconsin, and Research Associate, Archbold Biological Station. He is the author of Coding and Redundancy: Man-made and Animal-Evolved Signals (May 2008)

Ever since popular literature and media began dealing with the subject of sex, there has been explicit recognition that the so-called hourglass figure of women is an important, if somewhat idealized, sex attractant. Even before popularizations, of course, women knew this at leastimplicitly, which fact gave rise to devices of exaggeration such as bustles and "falsies."  The higher tech equivalent of the latter, surgical implant, is still popular despite some health risks it entails. The interesting question is not what the signs are but why large buttocks and breasts are attractive to men.  The long-known likely answer is that these traits once signaled important survival and reproductive conditions.  Fat reserves of the buttocks, for example, could see one through times of famine, and ample milk production is critical to survival of infants.  Males were selected to mate with females who would most likely produce successful offspring, thereby perpetuating the male's genes.  These feminine traits no longer predict the likelihood of reproductive success in a modern, developed country yet the ancestral masculine preference persists.

Natural selection shaped behavior of our evolving hominid species to its particular ecology, but if selection is still working at all today, it has not keep pace with demographic trajectories and technological advances.  Explosive population growth overwhelms selective forces, and technology isolates us from many problems so that our behavior is not so closely adapted to the brave new worlds we have created.  For example, people still crave carbohydrates and fats as if they needed to identify scarce energy-rich foods in a harsh environment.  Partly as a result of this preference--€”and, probably, also pollutants that disrupt endocrine and metabolic functions--€”obesity is epidemic.  These victims of our evolutionary history don't have to outrun lions to survive.  And modern medicine prolongs the lives of many that in an ancient age would have died young of heart failure or a variety of other problems exacerbated by obesity.

Our evolutionary history affects our perceptions and behavior in many subtle ways.  I have neighbors who have surrounded their house with gorgeous horticultural plantings including rare and expensive tropical varieties.  Not a blade of grass grows on their property so the annoying sound of mowing machines never emanates from their surrounds.  Yet some other neighbors have let slip occasional snide remarks.  Why is that? Psychologist Charles Snowdon told me of an unpublished study in which subjects rated television commercials that included outdoor scenes.  The favorites were those where the scene resembled a typical suburban yard of trees providing less than a full canopy and with lawn beneath.  The natural habitat most closely matching these characteristics is savannah, such as on the plains of Africa where Homo sapiens originated.  We seem to try unconsciously to replicate our ancestral environment in suburbia, and as a result alternative yards (no matter how tasteful) may seem strangely inappropriate to us as places of habitation.

A recent study that was summarized in a health magazine found a new benefit of time in the out of doors, adding to the many we have all heard.  Autistic children improved in many ways, including their communicative behavior, as a function of spending time outdoors.  One factor in the mechanism may be higher production of vitamin D, which is created by radiation of sterols, although there may be a whole complex of factors.  In my generation, mothers urged their kids to "go out and play," which wasn't entirely an attempt to get them out from under foot. The motivation included an unconscious awareness that growing children need to be outdoors, thus paralleling many home health remedies that have proven their worth when investigated experimentally.  Ancestral children grew up in the out of doors; it is the environment to which their development is adapted.

The Executive Director of the Rocky Mountain Nature Association, Curt Buchholtz, relates the following anecdote in a recent newsletter. He was showing friends (a couple with two sons) around Rocky Mountain National Park.  The boys had their faces buried in battery-powered electronic game machines and could be persuaded to look up only once during the whole tour--to note briefly a herd of elk near the car. The child and family psychiatrist Douglas Kramer recently published an essay reminding us that an individual emerges from childhood as a result of complex interactions of genetic and environmental factors.  He points out that if the environment is abnormal--i.e., not the one the genes were adapted to interact with—then the product will also be abnormal.

In sum, many things about human behavior make little sense except in light of the species' evolution.  Failure to take seriously the fact that we are products of natural selection can have adverse consequences. Among other things, we must strive, in my opinion, to "leave no child indoors."  People will want to save the planet and its biologically diverse riches if they grow up having frequent contact with the natural world.  It is, after all, our real home.