Beijing, Tiananmen at Sunset: Little Red Cook Book! Little Red Cook Book!

This is from the second day of my trip to Beijing. You may want to start at day one.

That night, I decided to return to Tiananmen Square to take one last look at the various monuments, maybe watch the flag changing ceremony, and buy a few tacky souvenirs. Sure enough, the moment I emerged from the subway station, I was beset by souvenir sellers. Most of them were selling kites or postcards, but I had heard that the Square was somewhere where people go to sell copies of the Little Red Book, and that's what I wanted. It only took a minute for someone to wave a book at me, and a little bargaining and it was mine.

The book, full title Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, is probably the best symbol of Mao's cult of personality. Once Mao was squarely in control of China in the 1950s, he began a series of agricultural reforms aimed at collectivizing Chinese farms. As it did everywhere, this led to famine, and when in 1957 Khrushchev acknowledged the failure of the Soviet Union's collectivization efforts, Mao was pressured to end collectivization. He responded with the Great Leap Forward, a five-year plan to industrialize the nation. Mao decided that steel was the key to prosperity, and so steel production would have to be doubled within a year, most of the increase to come from backyard steel furnaces. Hundreds of millions of people were forced to smelt every scrap of metal they could find--pots, farming implements, doorknobs, anything--to meet wildly unrealistic quotas. Millions of workers were diverted from harvests to iron production. The result was tons of worthless pig iron and unharvested crops rotting in the fields. The Great Leap was abandoned in 1961, by which time thirty million people had starved to death.

Mao was severely criticized for the disaster. He responded by purging his critics and their supporters and then began a massive program to reorient society along Maoist lines. This campaign, called the Cultural Revolution, centered around the creation and mobilization of the Red Guards, composed of eleven million students and young people. The Red Guards ransacked the nation searching for signs of disloyalty to Mao and of "reactionary" tendencies. Millions of people were purged. Many artifacts and other objects of China's cultural heritage were destroyed by the Guards as they attempted to annihilate anything not "revolutionary". Mao was idolized, and posters of him and copies of his books flooded the country.

The most popular of the books was the Little Red Book. During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards were known to beat or imprison anyone found not to have at least one copy on their person (most people carried at least two). Hundreds of millions of copies of the book were printed (making it the second-most-common book in the world, after the Bible). The book was studied not only in schools, but in workplaces--it was common for offices to set aside time each day for group discussion. Every piece of writing produced in China was expected to quote extensively from the book--including scientific papers.

Today Maoism (or, as China calls it, Mao Zedong Thought) remains official doctrine, but it's not emphasized (especially in terms of economic policy). It's no longer necessary to carry the Little Red Book to avoid being beaten up by the police, and most scientific journals can get through an entire volume without quoting Mao more than once or twice. But the books are still around, and so old ones are everywhere.

Mine is not one of the Cultural Revolution survivors--it was printed in 1996. It's helpfully bilingual and has some poorly printed color photos of Mao at the front. I like.

Incidentally, when Mao was first criticized for his agricultural policy, he clamped down on dissent. But when there was protest, he responded with the Hundred Flowers Campaign, which encouraged intellectuals to openly criticize the government ("Let one hundred flowers bloom; let one hundred schools of thought contend."). In retrospect, it's unclear whether this was a deliberate trap or whether Mao truly believed what he claimed, that if intellectuals discussed the matter, they would see that socialism was the only possible way forward. Either way, once a sufficient number of intellectuals had criticized the Communist Party, Mao had them rounded up, tortured, and executed (half a million people disappeared).

Unfortunately, buying the books marked me as someone in the market for souvenirs. I had to flee from the four or five vendors who noticed and assumed that I would want more copies of the book, a kite, some postcards, a little wooden ball that made noise when thrown in the air, and all sorts of other random stuff. I ended up at the northern end of Tiananmen Square, where a large crowd had gathered.

It was just about sundown, and the crowd was massed around a large flagpole. Each morning at sunrise, a troop of soldiers marches in and raises the flag, and they return to lower it at sunset. Lonely Planet says that the crowds are too big at sunset and the only way to see it is to go at sunrise, but they didn't bargain on it being 15 degrees Kelvin outside. I was only in the second row, and didn't have to wait long--it wasn't even that dark when the police stopped traffic on the road between the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, and twenty or so soldiers marched across the street and up to the flag.

It's impressive to see because the soldiers are very well-trained; they march in two rows, precisely ninety centimeters apart, and each footstep is exactly seventy-five centimeters. Of course, they walk in perfect unison. The lines split up, surround the flagpole, and then a couple of guys ceremoniously lower the flag and attach it to a smaller pole. Then they return to the line and march it back into the Forbidden City. The whole thing takes maybe five minutes.

After the ceremony, I headed back to my apartment. As usual, I got into a few conversations with people who wanted to practice their English or just meet westerners. One girl asked where I lived, and when I said Cambodia, she asked if that was in Africa--this made me hopeful about the state of the United States education system.

You may want to continue to day three, where I go to the Great Wall at Simatai.