“And while it is a serious and meticulously researched history it is also genuinely gripping with ‘Blimey! I didn’t know that!’ moments on every other page. Really terrific stuff.”
Over on Russell Hogg’s wonderful podcast Subject to Change, I discuss the history of Taiwan, with reference to an unexpected appearance by the Daleks, things to do with a dead deer, genocidal acts, the pirate king, the Zombie Ming dynasty, a “racist excuse”, “the most shameful thing the British have ever done” and a bunch of other things to be found in my book Rebel Island. Part one can be found at this link.
And then there is part two: How to take over an island chain by invading somewhere else; a world-class stamp-collecting scam; the “uncrowned king” of Taiwan; the Musha Incident reconsidered as a high-school shooting, the rise and fall of the Takasago Volunteers; uses and abuses of Triad assassins, and the rise of the “outside the party” movement.
Mr He has nut-brown skin, burned like the Tibetans by the hot sun in the thin air of the Himalayan foothills. He is wearing the ankle-length scarlet robes of a Dongba shaman, and a five pointed cardboard crown decorated with visceral images of deities and animal spirits. There is a long necklace of coloured beads around his neck. He carries a sprig of mountain fir, a tambourine-like shamanic drum, a necklace made of bones and an ancient book of Naxi spells, written in tribal hieroglyphs. He is sitting in the back of the Buick, next to another Mr He, who is also nut-brown but with a dark, piratic moustache, clad from head to foot in army surplus camo gear. He is wearing a single leather glove, and perched on it is a hawk… which is also in the back of the car, occasionally flapping its wings in the shaman’s face.
Mickey is crammed into the passenger seat with all his sound gear, including a large fluffy boom mike that the hawk keeps mistaking for an otter. Luckily for us, there wasn’t enough room in the car for the three hunting dogs, because it already feels like I am driving down a bumpy mountain path with the cast of a Fellini film in the back. All we really need is a couple of dwarves and a pantomime horse’s head protruding from the sunroof. The glassy lake beneath us is called Yuhu, and we bump and jostle along a track that is usually reserved for ponies and quadbikes. It is the oddest and least enthusiastic session of carpool karaoke yet devised, as Mickey starts to sing Bohemian Rhapsody.
Just as a confusing week with the Kam was ultimately saved by a mud fight, our lacklustre showing with the Naxi is pinning all its hopes on a day on the mountain heaths with a bunch of falconers. Mack the fixer has asked Big Li to fix something up, and Big Li has reached outside the Li circle to the He family, who have rustled up some men with birds of prey and Swiss army knives, and a wizard. The idea is for the Dongba shaman to perform a ceremony to the gods of mountains and hunting, and for us to then go looking for pheasants among the rock-strewn meadows beneath the snow-capped peak of Jade Snow Mountain — original inspiration for Shangri-La and alleged home to the many couples from Naxi history who have committed double-suicide rather than submit to the pressure to marry their cousins.
But somewhere in all the fixers fixing with other fixers, something has been lost in translation. We wanted the hawking party for the whole day, preferably with a menagerie of spare pheasants we could release into the meadows for their own little version of the Hunger Games if the wild ones wouldn’t cooperate. For some reason, the bunch of dodgy-looking Naxi have shown up armed with little more than excuses. The hawk isn’t hungry enough. There are too many people on the hillside. The hawk is scared of Mickey’s boom mike. And they have only turned up with two spare pheasant-like birds as possible prey.
The hawk resolutely flies in precisely the opposite direction from any wild birds that the dogs faithfully root out, and is literally unable to grab a pheasant when one is held up in front of it. The director glumly gets some footage of me holding it (its talons remarkably gentle on my wrist, as if it is afraid of leaving a mark), and of Mr He the army-fatigues guy blowing his whistle and largely failing to get it to return. After half an hour, the pheasants have caught more prey than the hawk, and He the Hawker has resorted to using his GPS locator, which beeps angrily whenever it works out where the transponder on the back of the eagle is.
Daniel the cameraman is in a filthy mood. The director says it is because he has a cold, but I suspect it’s because of the crushing weight of wasted opportunity. Today’s set-up, if the fixer’s fixer’s fixer had got his ducks in a row, would have offered any cameraman a shot at an international award — wizards in the forest, and hawks coming out of the sky. But the prey won’t run, and the hawk won’t hunt, and the rare moments when there’s some action or chasing, Daniel invariably has the wrong lens on his camera, or ends up focussing on the wizard having a fag behind a tree. Then the hawkers reveal that this last half hour is all they have scheduled. Far from spending the day on the mountain, they have another hawking party to go to, and are ready to pack up and run off, observing with something of a hungry glint in their eyes that maybe we can come up with something better the day after tomorrow. The hawk has been so hapless at chasing the pheasants that we still have both of them alive, staring at us with what only can be described as avian sneers. We have barely seconds of footage, which causes Sohkiak to suggest that before the hunters go, we set up a scene where I drive the Buick across the mountainous landscape, with a camera stuck to the front of the car for a good view of our mad passengers.
The hunters all bugger off to a more interesting hunt somewhere else, and we are left with the Dongba shaman. He is as friendly as any wizard might be when offered a week’s wages to set fire to some twigs on a hillside, and gamely talks me through the career path of an exorcist and sometime children’s entertainer. He lights a pile of fir branches and intones dour prayers in Naxi to the gods of the mountain. He is much too polite to suggest that we might have avoided a lot of palaver if he had asked the gods’ permission before we started chasing a couple of pheasants around a lake, and that in terms of prioritising wizardry, we might have got what we deserved.
On the original, terrestrial broadcast of Cowboy Bebop, the disgruntled production team signed off with the message: “This is not the end. You will see the real Cowboy Bebop someday.” Shinichiro Watanabe’s vision had been trammelled by a series of restrictions, including timid broadcasters still reeling from the 1997 Pokémon epilepsy incident, and a jumpy censorship regime hyper-sensitive after several widely publicised real-world incidents of supposedly media-inspired violence.
As this book recounts, Cowboy Bebop existed in two versions – the defanged, episodic 12-part light version as first seen on TV Tokyo, and the uncut, adult-focussed 26 episodes with a complete story arc and more mature content that was broadcast four months later on WOWOW. It’s this latter version that was exported abroad, most notably to the United States.
The Cartoon Network had been waiting for months. The Cartoon Network, in fact, had bought it purely on the strength of the opening credits, and in the words of producer Jason DeMarco, “didn’t even know what it was about.” As episodes began to drift in, channel buyers knew it was too racy for the daytime slots, and the arrival of Cowboy Bebop helped propel CN into creating a new late-night block of animation: Adult Swim. Cowboy Bebop closed out the first night’s broadcast, and stayed on the channel for over a decade.
If you were watching the Cartoon Network in the 2000s or the 2010s, at some point you were going to see Cowboy Bebop. You might only catch a single episode, but you’d be sure to remember it. With little merchandise to cash in, its US following was not immediately obvious. The ratings remained a trickle in the graveyard slot, but whereas the average terrestrial anime comes and goes in thirteen weeks, Cowboy Bebop lived on Adult Swim for thirteen years.
Watanabe’s vision was sufficiently retro to be future-proof. The animation didn’t suffer from shonky turn-of-the-century CG or Digipaint. The sci-fi diaspora was suitably diverse to weather changing attitudes. As each fresh crop of viewers identified as anime fans, Cowboy Bebop was one of their gateway anime, not just for them, but for the parents who asked what this anime thing was, and could be shown something that wasn’t cringeworthy.
Even within the industry in Japan it was widely understood that Cowboy Bebop was lightning in a bottle — a fantastic synergy of creative talent that you couldn’t explain with a spreadsheet and copy with a focus group. Cowboy Bebop wasn’t something that you could cynically recreate, and that’s part of its classic status, suffused with, as Yoko Kanno so memorably put it: “the smell of fermentation, like natto.”
This book delves into the whys and hows of such a phenomenon came about, and the nooks and crannies of its various spin-offs. It’s a fantastic account of a show that is now demonstrably older than its current crop of new fans on Netflix. It’s been a long wait, but Cowboy Bebop finally has a critical appraisal that delves deep into its inspirations and effects.
But enough from me. I think it’s time we blow this scene. Get everybody and the stuff together. Okay…
“Hong Kong is so crowded already. Where do ghosts live?”
Asian psychiatrists learn their trade in English. Like Dr Jim Law (Leslie Cheung) in Inner Senses, the books on their shelves are in a foreign language, as are their lessons and interactions with their peers. They have a scientific, westernised outlook that differs from the countrymen they often treat. Jim takes this to extremes, reducing even happiness to simple terms of chemical secretions.
His patients, like the audience for Inner Senses, are steeped in folklore and movies, such as Dracula and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with which Jim taunts his fellow psychologists at a conference. When Yan (Karena Lam) says “I see ghosts”, her words echo not only The Sixth Sense, but also its Asian imitators, particularly The Eye.
Inner Senses is concerned with the spinning of tales and the active imagination. Yan only seems to see ghosts after she hears scary stories; she is primed to believe. A failed writer who must subsist as a translator, she retains a writer’s readiness to be spooked and inspired by what goes on around her. And yet Jim tells stories, too. In their first meeting, he lies about his belief in ghosts, and helps her construct an alibi for her attendance, ostensibly to placate her cousin, but actually to lure her back for further sessions.
Inner Senses teases its audience with false trails of movie folklore. Its early moments invoke Dark Water or The Amityville Horror with creepy scenes of house-buying. Jim alludes to a wartime graveyard below his building – an Asian variant on the old “Indian Burial Ground” cliché. Even the leads’ first meeting seems contrived along B-movie horror lines, with a new patient dumped on Jim by a vacationing psychologist. But there is a reason for everything, and the bad lie of Jim’s fellow doctor is the white lie of Chinese match-making – even though he risks breaking the rules of psychiatry by encouraging a relationship with a patient, the deceptive doctor is still doing what he can to set up his wife’s cousin with a suitable spouse.
Inner Senses places so much value on stories because its leading man believes in the power of suggestion. It is not spirits that bother Jim, but the people who believe in them, for their hysteria can be contagious. Jim speaks like a psychologist, but also like a filmmaker, of inspirations and memories that write and draw themselves. Part of his planned therapy involves a video camera, the chance for Yan to exorcise demons by proving they aren’t real on film.
There are two films within Inner Senses. Its first hour relates the case of Yan, before turning on the case of her therapist – Jim’s own inner Scully telling him that there must be a perfectly rational explanation. But his inner Mulder wants to believe that there are ghosts, for such a romantic decision would mean that Yan was sane, making her more of a potential mate.
But even the calm, rational Dr Jim Law has skeletons in his closet, and whether he believes in ghosts or not, he is certainly being haunted by something, something not from the spiritual world at all. Inner Senses takes an hour to set up Jim’s relentless rationality, and then confronts him with a terror born of the mundane world. Despite its obvious parallels to Sixth Sense, it is part of a psychological horror tradition that goes back to The Shining and beyond, of men who haunt themselves.
If one is truly mad, one is often too mad to tell. Therapists pity the mild or worsening cases, aware that they are losing their minds but unable to stop it. Leslie Cheung himself wrote of “experiencing emotional difficulties” in his personal life during and after the filming of Inner Senses. Shortly after his haunted performance in this movie garnered him a Best Actor nomination in the Hong Kong Film Awards, Cheung went into the 24th floor café of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and asked for a notepad. He wrote a brief message thanking his own psychotherapist for his efforts, but complaining of a year of suffering. He then jumped from the balcony to his death.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. This article originally appeared in the sleeve notes to the Tartan Video release of Inner Senses.
For fans of epic fantasy and supernatural battles between gods and demons, this manga will take you on an epic quest, as the young boy Tsuchimaru acquires a powerful sword for a mysterious artisan and joins the gods to fight fiends himself.
In a time when gods and humans live and fight together the young boy Tsuchimaru was helpless, a mere child in the face of those mighty struggles… until a mysterious wandering artisan came by with a sword they had forged and gifted it to the child, enabling him to take up arms in the titanic conflict!
Out tomorrow from Titan Manga, volume one of Kishidashiki’s Sword of the Titans, a fantastically bonkers re-reading of ancient myths as borderline sci-fi, translated by Motoko Tamamuro and me.
Liisa Harju (Lea Joutseno) is a quick-witted, vivacious girl from Savo who has been posted to Ostrobothnia, the uppity west coast of Finland where the locals think that she is no better than she ought to be. She thinks she is just being friendly to the handsome local doctor Eino Korpinen (Tapio Nurkka), but their increasingly flirtatious interactions meet with umbrage and annoyance from local womankind, who regard Eino as theirs to fight over. In particular, her arrival seems to irritate the school principal Mr Iipo (Eino Jurkka), whose snooty wife Kristiina (Elli Ylimaa) expects Eino to propose to her insufferable daughter Ester (Rakel Linnanheimo, sister not only to the more famous Regina, but also to the woman who is playing her own mother!).
We have, in a sense, been here before. The tensions and conflicts in Varaventtiili are almost exactly the same as those in Suomi-Filmi’s earlier The Women of Niskavuori (1938), and indeed, Niskavuori’s fearsome matriarch Olga Tainio has a far less substantial role here as a sulking matron. Both films are based on novels written two decades after Finnish women won the right to vote in 1907, grappling in their own way with the impact and attitudes of the first generation to grow up in such an environment. Whereas The Women of Niskavuori ultimately presented its go-getting lady teacher as a clueless, home-wrecking hussy, Safety Valve is more sympathetic to the fact that times are changing. True enough, Liisa doesn’t turn up and steal another woman’s husband, but in the eyes of the townsfolk, she pretty much steals another woman’s potential fiancé. The difference is that Eino is there for the wooing, and if the local girls don’t like it, they’d better up their game and bring something to the party.
Safety Valve wonderfully encapsulates the town-versus-country issues that lie beneath many a Finnish movie of the era, here landing firmly on the side of urban urbanity. The Ostrobothnians think of the people of Savo as uncultured hicks, whereas the Savonians find themselves in close proximity to the growing new towns of Kuopio and Tampere, and Jyväskylä, the “Athens of the North”, the site of the first Finnish-speaking teacher-training college, and hence the engine that churned out thousands of women like Liisa to go out into the world and force gurning farmers’ children to learn about stuff.
The children are the low point of the film – listless child-actors bored by their own lines in the scenes where Lea Joutsena is obliged to pretend to be teaching them. Meanwhile the locals harp on about “traditional values” and the “way things are done” to a ridiculously obsessive degree, acting as if they are preserving the heritage of Western civilisation, but coming across like drunken tramps fighting over a cardboard box in a skip – much of the drama circles around whether the teaching staff are allowed to use the school sauna.
An intriguing subtext of the film revolves around the application of reading and writing. Eino’s true love is destined to be the woman who reciprocates his bizarre interest in “a volume of Chinese poetry, translated into German”, while Liisa’s constant companion is her “safety valve” – the diary that allows her to blow off steam about some of the outrageously dismissive things that the local women say to her.
At least Liisa isn’t left alone to face the yokels. Her fellow teacher Rauha is played by the lovely Irma Seikkula, still displaying the vim and poise that brought her fame as the similarly pro-active Juurakon Hulda (1937). There are moments when the film threatens to break out into genuine humour, with Liisa and Rauha as a pair of icon-busting jokers, like Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock telling everyone to go eff themselves, but sadly that potential never quite manifests.
Safety Valve was based on Hilja Valtonen’s debut novel The Safety Valve of the Young Teacher (1926), a roman à clef about the life of a young woman transplanted to a distant Ostrobothnian town, that had somehow made its way into eight reprintings. This adaptation by scriptwriter Yrjö Kivimiehen sets the action in a timeless rural setting entirely untroubled by the rumblings of the Continuation War that clearly concerned the production team. While the cast of Valentin Vaara’s film go about their business without a care in the world, the backstage crew are dashing feverishly to get the film in the can and into cinemas before wartime austerity bites again – a behind-the-scenes panic that can largely be held responsible for some rushed shots, shaky camera work from a moving train, and substandard location work, clearly shot on cloudy days.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.
Mr Wang’s studio is literally next door to our hotel, which gives everybody a lie-in. I start to wish, however, that I had never got out of bed, since Mr Wang’s studio appears to specialise in pictures of pets. Why UNESCO accorded him intangible cultural heritage, I’ll never know, because his output seems to include funny pandas, twee scenes of traditional mountains-and-water, and the silk-weave equivalent of a painting of two dogs playing billiards.
The people in Mr Wang’s studio are heartily sick of film crews, and would really much prefer to be left to get on with their work. Mr Wang makes himself scarce when we arrive, thereby depriving us of the chance to interview anyone but his flunkies. But they tsk and tut and bend over their looms as I wander around them, enthusing to camera about the not-particularly-lost art of kesi, in a single 45-second speech that I manage to get right more often than not.
We drop in on a dye factory for more B-rolls, and then stop off at a water-town to send up the drone to get pictures of little pagodas and winding, flagstoned streets. This particular one, Shantang, stretches along either side of a seven-mile stretch of canal, and is infested with pushy rickshaw drivers and people who want to shout hello and/or stand behind the camera peering into the viewfinder.
The day finishes up back in Suzhou proper, next to another picturesque canal populated by fan shops, ice cream parlours and dumpling shops. We’ve come to see Chen Yingqin, a lady whose kesi is way, way better than Mr Wang’s. She seems to spend most of her time telling clueless customers in her shop that, no, the “watercolour” on the wall is not a watercolour at all, but actually an image composed of thousands of silk threads. She also does calligraphy, replicating everything from the pressure of the ink brush to little imperfections in the characters. I ask about one picture, of a Chinese landscape, and she confesses that it took her nine months.
The prices reflect this. A square embroidered image of a single Chinese character, (Chan, which is to say, what the Japanese call Zen), the size of an LP, retails at a steep £3000. She also makes wallets at £100 a throw, and similar luxury goods for the super-rich.
A neatly “printed” series of characters on gold silk is recognisable to me from the simple layout, even before I get close enough to read it, or its title.
“Is that the Heart Sutra?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says, flabbergasted. “I am slightly disconcerted that you know that.”
She is giggly and vivacious in her interview, which makes a nice change from stage-struck old men, and seems genuinely sorry to see us go. She even laughs along when the producer and I have a fight about the statue on the mantelpiece, with her maintaining that it is Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, and me maintaining that it is Buddha himself.
“If it’s Guanyin,” I protest, “then where are her tits?”
Apparently it is Buddha. Although Guanyin is also Buddha. It’s complicated.
To Japan, where four twenty-something university buddies have been charged with a new type of crime – illegally selling anime production materials from Strike Witches. To be clear, they weren’t ripping Blu-rays or scanlating manga. They were making copies of sketches, in-between drawings and backgrounds, and then flogging them online, racking up around 10 million yen (£52,000) over the last eight years.
According to the Yomiuri Shinbun, one of the defendants argued “It’s not a copy, so its not a violation” (Fukasei de wa naku, ihan de wa nai), which is, I might note, a use of the Japanese plain verb-form in front of the police, where the polite form might have been a better idea.
Production materials used to be regarded as industrial waste – something the companies couldn’t give away. Carl Macek famously took a container-load of Akira cels and sketches off the hands of its producers, to give away as freebies with the VHS release. Now we’re living in an era when production materials are not only valued in film criticism, but bought and sold as collectables, and now, it seems, even faked by would-be entrepreneurs. The copyright implications of the case, in terms of the notional value of scrap paper and literal bin-ends, is going to be fascinating.
Now, you may be wondering what it is about a newly resurrected nineteen-year-old franchise that excites such activities at all. Well, Strike Witches isn’t just your average under-dressed-girls-with-guns-and-rocket-feet-fighting-alien-invaders anime, because it also takes place in an alternate universe World War Two, in which the nations of the world stop trying to kill each other and instead use teenage magical girls to hold off a global threat. Its reimagining of real-world war heroes as spell-casting schoolgirls in their underpants led to some wonderful real-world situations, such as queries to the Finnish embassy in Tokyo in 2012, asking whether or not the ambassador was aware that the veteran “Terror of Morocco”, Aarne Juutilainen (1904–76) was now a 21-year-old cat-girl in the manga spin-off.
The Finnish embassy merrily played along, wishing Juutilainen’s aerial ace sister Eila a happy birthday on its Twitter feed, and taking the opportunity to educate social media about how to say it: “Hyvää syntymäpäivää Eira Ilmatar Juutilaiselle!” Ah yes, said the enthusiastic embassy tweeter, whose switch from r to l in the character’s name implies a familiarity only with the Japanese materials: Juutilainen transforms to Juutilaiselle when it’s in the allative case, one of the Finnish language’s many exciting grammar forms. Let me tell you all about… [That’s enough – Ed.]
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #243, 2024.
Kiyomizu-dera, Kifune Shrine, and Adashino Nenbutsu-ji — to most these places are merely tourist hotspots in the busy city of Kyoto… but each is hiding a dark history, tales of ghosts and bloodshed! In this volume come and hear the true stories of these haunted places, and the creatures that lurk just out of sight…
Out tomorrow from Titan Manga, Yumeya’s Shadows of Kyoto, translated by Motoko Tamamuro and me.
At a loose end in Shanghai, I dropped by the site of the first congress of the Communist Party of China, a nondescript building at what used to be 106 Rue Wantz in the French Concession. A small museum inside chronicles the various individuals and events that literally got that Party started, although most of the Chinese visitors were keener to have their photograph taken by the entirely everyday front door with its “106” nameplate.
I was more excited by the presence of a bona fide First Congress of the Communist Party of China gift shop, where I shopped in a frenzy for my First Congress of the Communist Party of China umbrella, my First Congress of the Communist Party of China pen, my First Congress of the Communist Party of China tote bags, and my First Congress of the Communist Party of China fridge magnet. There was even an I’ve Been to the First Congress of the Communist Party of China frame outside, where I had my photograph taken, loaded with First Congress of the Communist Party of China swag, while Chinese onlookers giggled nervously and said: “Heehee, foreigner.”
For author Lin Chunfeng, I am one of millions of people taking part in the subject of his new book, Red Tourism in China: Commodification of Propaganda. I have always been interested in some of the big Communist displays of statuary and commemoration, such as the Martyrs Cemetery in Shanghai and the Martyrs Park in Guangzhou, but Lin’s book examines such sites as part of a growing and, in some sense, relatively recent phenomenon, as the Communist Party attempts to merge the disparate disciplines of education, propaganda, national cohesion and social harmony. Today, Red Tourism is a massive component of Chinese leisure travel, amounting to 540 million visits a year, or 20% of all domestic Chinese tourism. To put this in context, private investment in tourist experiences in Mao’s old base at Yan’an has topped 50 billion yuan, ten times the amount spent to build Shanghai Disneyland.
Not every venture is a resounding success. Lin recounts the folly of the great golden “Mega Mao” that was erected by an earnest entrepreneur in Henan province in 2016, only to be pulled down at the orders of the authorities shortly before it was completed. The precise reason is unclear – possibly, the Trumpish extreme of the golden Mao was too much even for garish Chinese pop culture, with social media commentators archly commenting on its evocation of Shelley’s Ozymandias. Others pointed to the bitter irony of a statue glorifying the Sun in Our Hearts in the province that arguably suffered the most at the hands of his social experiments. The truth probably lies somewhere in between, tied up in complex issues over patriotic land use and the unsanctioned rezoning of an agricultural area.
A large chunk of Lin’s book is taken up with a discussion of the history and culture of tourism and propaganda in China. He points out that ancient progressions by emperors and princes around the country were often ostensibly undertaken as acts of religious pilgrimage, although the “long, grand journey of the monarch to the ceremony site was often just as propagandistic as the ritual ceremonies for legitimating monarchical power.” And Lin points out that it’s not just the monarchs who are putting on a performance. “Tourism at the grassroots,” he suggests, “has gone mostly unmentioned in both historical records and modern retellings, or at the most, framed as celebrations of holidays along with other rituals and ceremonies that somehow involved travel.”
In part, this performance of pilgrimage can be laid at the feet of Confucianism, which Lin terms an “anti-leisure” philosophy that early tourist companies in China had to wilfully fight among the middle classes, convincing them travel for fun was both desirable and appropriate. Paramount among such entrepreneurs was Chen Guangfu (1881-1976), the Ivy-league alumnus who founded China’s first locally run travel agency back in his native Shanghai, the China Travel Service (CTS). It was Chen who came up with the idea of giving away 20,000 travel pamphlets at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, hiring the journalist Edgar Snow to knock up five different accounts of travel tips, framed as anti-Japanese polemics.
After the end of WW2, tourism was first pushed by a professor from the Department of Foreign Relations of the University of Politics, who argued that it was “not merely a form of education, but a very important part of education in general.” Here, Lin tracks the interests in education and propaganda (a word that he carefully argues has nowhere near as negative an implication in China as it does in the West) of both the Communists and Nationalists, particularly when it came to promoting the commemoration of the war against the Japanese, and pointedly celebrating 1950s China as a melting pot of multiple ethnic groups. Lin identifies some of the mass movements of the Cultural Revolution as a prototype of today’s “Red Tourism”, noting the swift declaration of the Great Rally – a series of sites with revolutionary importance, which no true Red Guard should miss out on. Such fanatic pilgrimages of the Party faithful were eventually shut down by the Party itself in 1967, after several people suffocated on overcrowded trains on their way to lay wreaths at sites like Yan’an and Jinggangshan.
As China “opened up” following the death of Mao, tourism was one of the first topics on the mind of the reformer Deng Xiaoping, who had his beady eye on the potential of a permanently renewable resource of American hard currency. “If each foreign tourist would spend $1000 in China,” he argued in 1978, “with a total of 10 million tourists visiting China every year, China could earn $10 billion.” But Deng’s vision, of course, was a more traditional form of leisure travel – the Great Wall (which was soon opened to visitors on multiple locations), the Terracotta Army, the Forbidden City and whatnot. For many foreigners, the experience of China would be a once-in-a-lifetime whistlestop fortnight of bussing, banquets and an overload of temples.
Official endorsement of tourism as a patriotic and educational Party phenomenon, would not come until 1991, two years after the Tiananmen Square protests caused the authorities to question if modern youth was on-message. Lin smartly relates it to a generational conflict, not only over a young China that had not experienced the formative conflicts, but of the “Little Emperors” born after the instigation of the One-Child Policy, regarded by some sectors as snooty snowflakes with no recollection of true hardship. The actual term Red Tourism (hongse lüyou) is first seen in a magazine article in 1996.
Lin has some great number-crunching on the economics of Red Tourism, which is often counter-intuitive or unexpected. He notes that many sites are piously free-entry, which disincentivises everyday tour guides from bringing their groups there in search of the usual rake-off. Conversely, a suitably high-level Redness in local sites can hoist the local economy way above its expected height –bringing in amenities usually reserved for much higher-tier cities. Apparently, the average Baskin-Robbins franchisee will not get out of bed for a third-tier city, unless it is guaranteed to have a regular influx of middle-class tourists. Tutting over his noodles in Yan’an, Lin observes that they have cost him three times as much as they would in the major metropolis at Baoji.
Lin’s chief case study is the city of Yan’an, the site of Mao’s 1930s guerrilla resistance, once favoured because it was remote, inhospitable and inaccessible. Now it is a mecca of Red Tourism, blessed by ultra-modern transport links – starting in 2025, it will be just 2.5 hours from Xi’an by bullet train – where the economic impact leisure travel has outstripped agriculture in the local economy. As is true all over China, out-of-work farmers form a huge labour pool for the tourist trade, which is one of the reasons why female soldiery is over-represented in the local re-enactment shows.
And what shows! Lin zooms in on Yan’an Defence, an explosive military spectacular re-enacting life in the Communist bolthole, interrupted by a sudden assault by Nationalist bombers. Originally performed four times a day to appreciative and occasionally fearful crowds, it was one of the lynchpins of the Yan’an experience, unwisely boasting in its advertising of featuring “real guns and real bullets” – one of which killed a performer in 2010. Lin gets to see Yan’an Defence at the height of its glory days; today, apparently, it is only put on once a day, with a reduced complement of “one horse and three donkeys.”
A similar celebration of the Battle of Taierzhuang requires so much explosives per performance that it cannot possibly operate without government contacts. Lin reports on multiple daily onstage injuries for the performers, who must wade through the pyrotechnics of 800 blanks and 80 explosions per show, rattling their eardrums and scorching their costumes. In 2014, preparations for a re-enactment of the Liaoshen Campaign are marred by an unscheduled explosion which claims the lives of two pyro-technicians, two workers, and three Party officials who happened to be walking past.
Lin’s reporting is not only a captivating glimpse of the lives of such performers, often uneducated, unemployed surplus labourers, exposed to the elements, replaying traumatic military actions several times a day without holidays or injury pay. He also delves into the way that such disasters were “handled” through the use of “soft news” (ruanwen), paid newspaper content that is now largely discouraged in China, although certain Chinese institutions are happy to throw money at it overseas, outside the Party’s jurisdiction.
In such remote areas, Lin smartly follows the money, investigating the way in which the authorities will happily help foster a Red Tourism site as long as their grants return double the investment. They will hand over a million dollars for Famous Pond Mao Once Looked At experience – not as frivolous as it sounds; such a site is one of the barrel-scraping 82 locations in the Chairman’s Shaoshan birthplace – but only if they see two million returned in the form of local infrastructure, transport links, job creation and businesses.
Lin’s book is an engaging introduction to the topic of Red Tourism, and presents a long view of it, dropping back in on his Yan’an case study to observe how it evolves over the years. This is a much overlooked element of so many studies in tourism, which tend to regard each phenomenon as fixed and unchanging. He returns late in the book to sample Golden Yan’an, a new “old” town built on expropriated farmland, and seemingly offering employment to the former farmers by getting them to dress up in a multi-faceted Chinese history experience.
Lin points out the economic issues that are associated with this, as policy wonks neglect to mention to the farmers that the very prosperity they are promised is fated to push up local prices, and devalue the compensation they received for their land, as well as the wages they might earn working on the site. He also has a stern critical eye for Golden Yan’an as a modular experience, with one street evoking the Song dynasty, and another the Qing, while a third recreates the era of Yan’an as a revolutionary headquarters. Shrewdly, Lin points out the difference that the visitors themselves can bring as participants, noting the contrast between an almost deserted street populated by pious statues, versus a vibrant marketplace thronging with cosplaying visitors.
It’s difficult to get the visitors to provide their own entertainment, of course, but sometimes it pays dividends. In its heyday, Yan’an Defence would even charge visitors $2 to dress up as revolutionaries and cower from the bullets onstage, rather than in the bleachers. In a perfect world, the visitors can bring their own passion – one of the most moving sites I have visited outside China is Ellis Island in New York, not for the museum to be found there, but for the emotional reaction of the many visitors, confronted with the fact that they are standing on the very spot where their ancestors became Americans.
In the case of Lijiang, famously lampooned by Chen Qiufan as a site of ersatz memories, I have witnessed its rapid transformation from ancient town into classy shopping mall, and as the initial franchises pulled out, into a glorified theme park like everywhere else, that charges an admission fee to the town itself, as if admitting there is nothing worth buying there. But even then, there are hacks and subversions. In 2017, I heard that Lijiang had become the hook-up capital of China, with travelling swingers cheerfully buying their three-day town admission, uncaring about the lack of night-time entertainment, because they were lighting up dating apps like a Christmas tree and meeting each other for sordid orgies. So, at least, I was told by a girl in a bobble hat, halfway up a mountain in Guizhou. Is it still true, seven years on? A lot can change in the world of Chinese tourism.
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