Sunday, July 1, 2007

Predestination in China?

Today, the official birthday of the CCP, a group of us metroed downtown to visit the site of the founding of the Communist Party in one of Shanghai's preserved Shikumen ("stone entranceway") houses. The first communists were clever to meet in that particular place in 1921, as now it is the site of Shanghai's most fashionable development project (called XinTianDi) that houses all of Western capitalism's finest shops, restaurants, and bars. We were disappointed to find the museum all but empty of homage-paying citizens, and we were in fact the only people looking at the exhibits.

The exhibits started with the above plaque, tracing the struggles of the working class to overcome foreign imperialism and bourgeois influence and to triumphantly achieve socialist egalitarian utopia. Unfortunately most of the exhibit plaques and photo captions lacked English translations so I was left to assume that they contain a rather slanted portrayal of the century's events.

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