Walking Kunming (China)
China keeps on China-ing
(This is my fifth piece on China, with the prior four here: Shanghai, Beijing, Xi’an , and Beijing versus Shanghai.)
All Chinese cities are remarkably similar; that, after all is the goal of the party, which is to modernize away the messy, embarrassing past, and the blueprint for those aspirations is place-independent. It is a communist’s capitalism, a shared embrace of material wealth that doesn’t favor any one location — all of China is in this together, so all of China will look alike because all will benefit from this new world of immaculate metros that whoosh you from your thirty-story apartment building to the lustrous eight-story mall, the ones bedazzled in lurid lights, garish signs, and three-floor-high jumbotrons flashing sexy models, for a night of shopping, rock-climbing, and hotpot with your friends.
That vision of another age of Chinese greatness, defined by the height of its towers, length of its metro lines, and reach of its highways, is unambiguous, and the pursuit of it relentless. China will be an economic titan, the world’s greatest, and nothing this time, no amount of foreign meddling, no amount of internal dissension, will stop it.
It is a very human-centered vision, a statement that the Chinese people know no bounds, no constraints, and will build upwards and onwards, regardless of what nature has put in their way. No river, mountain, or desert will stop them, because nothing in nature can’t be tamed, and we, China, will be the nation to do it, and in the process lift our people higher, out of filth into a new golden wealth, and show the rest of the world what we can do. We are not the dirty backward peasants of your movies, but a great people finally freed from the choke of external forces, finally able to show the world what the collective strength, intelligence, and will of one billion people looks like.
China is also unconcerned about the past, except as a motivation for the future, treating it like the ornate traditional paifangs plopped down in gleaming outdoor shopping malls—totems for (local) tourists to pose in front of, because that’s what their grandparents also did. The past is an occasional aesthetic, not a legacy to be constrained by.