China Diary: Fighting Talk

For the past year I’ve been visiting China on an average of once a month on business. These are my impressions


I visited the Beijing military museum during my recent stay in the city. It was a Saturday during summer holidays and the museum was packed with school children and organized groups. But I was the only Westerner I saw, though the city itself was awash with tourists. The military museum is clearly not on the standard tourist itinerary.

That is a pity because, while it might not be everybody’s cup of tea, the military museum gives a fascinating perspective on China and one that is difficult to experience in the sterility of the Forbidden City or the down-market consumerism of the Silk Market. I would venture to say that it is impossible to begin understanding China and the Chinese people without seeing them from the perspective of their recent history – and that history has been dominated by war to an extent that few of us realize.

The building itself is a typical Soviet era edifice, concrete and granite grey and built in layers like a square wedding cake. Incongruously, it is topped by a soaring needle which resembles a church steeple, though the symbol at its peak is not a cross but the hammer and sickle surrounded by the five Chinese stars. Inside, it’s a pretty gloomy place. Though there are ample chandeliers hanging from the high ceiling, very few of them were actually lit when I was there. I very much doubt that was to save electricity, as the rest of Beijing was on a summer electricity binge. I guess it was simply the required atmospherics.

Another possibility is that the lights have to be kept dim because most of the exhibits are behind glass of unusual reflectivity. The end result is that what little light there is reflects off the glass, while the detail of the exhibits (particularly the photographs, of which there are many) is difficult to see in the murkiness. However, the light is just right for highlighting the handprints left on the glass by the streams of children who are no doubt bussed to the place against their will.

Most of the museum is devoted to the wars of the 20th Century. The homeland of Sun Tzu could not ignore its rich martial history from the distant past, of course, and the author of “The Art of War” gets his fair due. But the bulk of the exhibits are devoted to the virtually constant combat that lasted from the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 until the end of the Korean War in the mid-Fifties.

That is probably the most significant perception which a student of China takes from the museum. The leaders of the country from 1949 onwards spent close to 30 years fighting for their cause and the Communist state was baptized in blood. It is a legacy from the not-so-distant past which permeates the fabric of modern China, however remote it seems from the cell phone-toting, hipply dressed youth of Shanghai, Shenzhen and the other major cities.

First, in the Twenties, the Communist cadres formed an alliance with the Kuomintang against the reactionary remnants of the Imperial court. In 1927, the two allies turned against each other, precipitating a long and bitter struggle that lasted until the Japanese invasion in the mid-Thirties. It was a period of immense hardship and deprivation which culminated, for the communists, in the Long March, which saved the communist First Army from decimation. With the arrival of the Japanese occupation forces, the erstwhile enemies joined forces again to fight the invader, only to turn against each other once again after the Japanese had been defeated.

In 1949, the communist forces succeeded in driving the Kuomintang out of mainland China and communist rule was established. That seminal event in the history of modern China is also the prism through which the museum’s exhibits are displayed. Anyone expecting a dispassionate presentation of Chinese military history has come to the wrong place. The overt purpose of the Beijing Military Museum is to provide a communist version of the past; the Kuomintang gets very short shrift. This is the history of the winning side.

Interestingly, while the bulk of the exhibits are adequately labeled in English, the hall dealing with the Korean War is entirely bereft of English. Not a word can be found. I have no idea why that is so, though I assume that, in an age of rapprochement with America, the authorities didn’t want to highlight a war fought between the two countries.

The hall dealing with the struggle against the Japanese, which is called the Great Patriotic War, gives a visceral underpinning to the antipathy which many, probably most, Chinese have for Japan. The small exhibit dealing with the massacre that has become known as the Rape of Nanking is particularly disturbing. The inhuman treatment meted out by the Japanese still rankles in the Chinese psyche – particularly the fact that, unlike the Germans, say, the Japanese have never acknowledge or apologized for their war guilt.

A Chinese friend of mine, an ostensibly educated and modern person who has spent considerable time in the US and Europe, is of the firm opinion that China should wipe out Japan. He has his doubts (though he does not express them publicly) about the legitimacy of the mainland’s claims to Taiwan and Tibet, but when it comes to Japan he is a bloodthirsty warmonger. And he is not alone in that.

China is a complex and anomalous place, with deep national traumas rooted in its colonial and more recent past. The Beijing Military Museum brings that home. Despite its clear ideological slant and the rather stolid displays, it is well worth visiting.