China is being brought to focus even more clearly in its capital. In Beijing, the peoples of the world will be China’s guests. This is completely unprecedented; historically, the Chinese have been more accustomed to outsiders invading their country than visiting it. Foreigners such as Marco Polo were entertained by the courts of the ancient emperors, but these early visits were sporadic and of limited value to the Chinese.
The Olympics, on the other hand, are all important for the New China. The entire world will show up in Beijing as honoured guests, not hungry invaders or colonizers. The world will thus recognize China and pay it homage. The games will be a celebration of unity and a demonstration like no other of the prominence Chinese society has now achieved on the world stage.
Hospitality is the greatest luxury one can offer. Hosting others testifies to one’s wealth, to one’s command of one’s home. By hosting the entire world in its capital, by overwhelming that wide world with its majesty and its dominion, the New China—for so long reviled, rejected and outcast—will declare its oneness, its might and empire.
The city has already begun its metamorphosis. A new national symbolism is being put on display. Buildings surpassing even the greatest halls of Red China are being quietly erected across the city. The immense new Olympic Stadium, woven together with countless spidery steel girders, is both beautiful and slightly terrifying. An enormous bubbly and translucent box will house the Olympic swimming pool. For the moment, these monstrous buildings are totally inaccessible. They are phantom structures, seen only from a distance, veiled in smog. Legions of unknown workers from the far reaches of the land have been brought in to toil anonymously in their construction. The vast sites are forbidden cities whose power has not yet begun to radiate. Yet already they strike awe across the capital.
In many ways, the Forbidden City proper sits outside of China. It is now a pen in which to hold foreigners. They are driven through it like so many heads of cattle. Is it possible to see the Forbidden City properly? Can the past be seen in the present? The Palace of Knossos, the Karnak Temple, the Forbidden City, these monuments were all built with a purpose. In their day, they were deeply useful. The visitor can still marvel at their surfaces but cannot really penetrate them without feeling the power of their purpose—and this is long gone.
The Forbidden City was a supremely orderly place. It was a tool of obedience and worship. It was also far more important from the outside than from the inside. The Forbidden City was so powerful because it was closed. It was the unattainable nucleus at the very heart of the Middle Kingdom, itself the centre of the Earth. And it was never meant to be open for contemplation. Pedestrian access to the holy sanctuary would have been a fatal breech in its sanctity.
Those who had access to the City—and then, only to its majestic outer courtyard—marched into it in strict formation, through a long tunnel under the massive fortress at the southern end. In ranks and columns, the summoned were lined up on the immense cobbled square beneath the appropriately named Hall of Supreme Harmony. There they awaited word from above. This was a place to be stripped of one’s particulars, one’s name, a place to receive orders to march into battle or enact a new imperial policy. Here stood the tools of Empire, not individuals or men but peons whose very lives and destinies were selflessly subsumed into the higher cause.
Almost a prisoner of the City himself, the Emperor was born into celestial servitude and bore the heavy mantle of a heavenly mandate. In his servitude to harmony, he was no different from his subjects. Harmony meant being at peace with one’s station, embracing it wholeheartedly whether you were the Emperor or the lowliest peasant.
On a cold and rainy day, you may still be able to march into the empty City and feel its old soul pulsing in the solitude and silence. But the modern soul of the Forbidden City is elsewhere. Beijing is still the seat of power, and the centres of power in the capital are as inaccessible as ever. The Forbidden City is now open, but the real centres of power are still closed.
Today, the mysterious face of Mao gazes out impassively from the main gate of the Forbidden City. More than anyone else, they say, Mao changed the nature of power in China. In truth, he didn’t so much change it as move it. Through the first decades of the twentieth century, the Chinese had already begun rejecting the imperial rule that had ended in such decadence and humiliation. The country became polarized into two distinct political outlooks: Communism and Nationalism. Both proposed a break with the decrepit practices of imperial China. The Nationalists wanted to form a government that would represent the modern aspirations of the emerging Chinese bourgeoisie. If the elites took the lead towards modernity and progress, they argued, the rest of China would eventually follow. The Communists proposed something far more radical. They dreamt of a government that would reach out immediately to the entirety of the Chinese people, the wretched and the poor. They hoped to replace a cruel, closed, fragmented and hierarchical society with a levelled-off nation belonging to all.
The Communists came together as a party slowly, over a generation. The party formed as a collective of individuals from all over the country, all moved by this radical idea of a people’s republic. The first leaders—daring, dissatisfied, inspired—came from the educated bourgeois classes of the big cities. With time, sons of landed peasants joined the movement. The brilliant and ruthless young Mao Zedong was one of the latter. Groups began to multiply and grow across the countryside. The rarefied Chinese establishment, dominated by the Nationalists, immediately saw them as a threat, and a long period of clashes and battles began. From 1927 to the final victory of the revolution in 1949, Mao became ever more successful at winning these struggles.
Under pressure from the Nationalist armies, a number of the emerging Communists gathered in the south. Pursued, they walked and fought their way north, halfway across the country, absorbing followers from the heartlands as they went. This was the legendary Long March.
Throughout the thirties, the Japanese had been aggressively encroaching on Chinese territory. They occupied Manchuria in 1933, and with the advent of the Second World War they began to express their violent designs for the whole of China. Working their way down the coast, they pushed the Nationalist armies south. As they moved further inland, the Japanese then encountered the Communists, who formed a wall of guerrilla resistance for eight years. So long as the Communists wore away at the Japanese, the Nationalists let them be. And from the Communist point of view, so long as they had to fight the occupiers, they left the home-grown oppressors alone.
With the end of World War ii, the Nationalists and the Communists resumed their fierce struggle. The big showdowns took place in Manchuria. By the time the opposing armies faced off in the north, the Communists had grown substantially in number. On the battlefield, hundreds of thousands of Nationalist troops deserted and joined the Red Army. The Communists dealt the Nationalists a crushing blow. With this momentum, the Communists swept across the country, absorbing the whole of the Chinese people.
With such a long and convoluted path to victory, it cannot really be said that the Communists were easterners or northerners or southerners. They had picked up members from all over the country. The Communists, vast legions of them, were Chinese. And by the time they acceded to power in 1949, their uncontested leader was Mao Zedong.
To institute the radical reforms and nationwide restructuring measures that he believed would propel China towards inexorable self-sufficiency and social harmony, Mao came to believe that a strong central governing body was necessary. Almost sixty years later, communism, the original ideology of the revolution, exists in name only. But the central governing body—that tremendous unifying power, the Communist Party—remains. This is the real legacy of Mao’s reign. The government Mao created is the new Forbidden City of a one-party dynasty. Its true location and form are as mysterious now as they were when the Forbidden City still struck awe across the land. Today as ever, no one can say from where China is governed. No one knows where the real decisions are made. It is even hard to gauge the actual power of the president and the premier. They stand at the top of a hierarchy of appearances. What lies beneath is forbidden and unknown.
TRUDEAU AND HÉBERT visited China in the fall of 1960, smack dab in the middle of the Great Leap Forward. Mao had concluded that peasant force alone would not safeguard China from its enemies. He had also decided that China must be able to satisfy the entirety of its various appetites on its own. He thus enacted a series