2015 China

25 March, Shanghai
Blue Mountain Youth Hostel 200CNY

In July 1921, in the French Concession in Shanghai, Mao Zedong was one of 13 communists to congregate in secret for the first ever Communist Party of China (CPC) congress, marking the official birth of the Party. The group met in the basement of a shikumen, an alley lane building of red and grey brick, now preserved and housing the Site of the 1st National Congress of the CPC museum. The original meeting room has been restored with fittings replicating the exact conditions of the time and in the museum are displayed various artefacts documenting the history of the CPC. To my untutored eye, most of the museum seemed merely factual with little propaganda. I was disturbed, however, by a posed photograph showing starving Chinese, their visible rib cages testament to their appalling hunger over an extended period. The photograph’s caption reads “Famine refugees struggling for survival”. The placement of the photograph in a section of the museum dealing with conditions in the foreign concessions implies starvation rife in the concessions. While I concede that Chinese were treated like second-class citizens in the concessions, and that their lives were probably pretty grim, I don’t think the famine, a result of failed crops, was “business as usual”. I don’t know enough, but came away feeling the photograph was disingenuous.

We spent the rest of the afternoon strolling the impressive city streets, all modern skyscrapers and designer stores, in search of a place to do some printing and photocopying in preparation for our visa extension application, which we will lodge in Suzhou tomorrow.