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Chinese tourists choose 'The Mummy'
over Mao
By Fraser Newham
SHANGHAI - In the empty corridors of the
museum now occupying the Shanghai site of the
First National Congress of the Communist Party, it
is at first glance hard to believe official claims
of 2,000 visitors a day. But then the buses pull
up outside the main gate, decanting a
hundred-strong tour group into the lobby, noisy
and primed for the whistle-stop tour.
The visitors are a group of Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) members from the distant southwestern
city of Chongqing, and most are visiting Shanghai
for the first time. This is "Red Tourism" - a
five-year 
central government initiative
designed to promote tourism at sites across China
associated with the CCP's early history.
Its promotion has been timed to coincide with the
70th-anniversary celebrations of the Long March, when
the CCP broke out of a Nationalist siege of its
base in Jiangxi province in October 1934, arriving
370 days later at remote Yanan in Shaanxi province
some 8,000 kilometers away.
The central government hopes to promote about
100 "classic red tourist areas" around the
country together with 12 "select traveling routes", hoping
in all for a 35% increase in tourist numbers
over the five-year period. Money will come from
the State Development Bank, which last month agreed to provide
loans to local governments and state-owned
companies to facilitate the modernization and
development of appropriate sites.
Planners
hope the initiative will serve both ideological
and economic ends. Wang Xinyong, director of the
Hebei Tourist Administration, brought a three-day
exhibition of Hebei's Red Tourism sites to
neighboring Beijing last Friday. "The hand-picked
sites, which are mostly in remote, mountainous
areas, will not only make visitors know more about
the CCP's glorious history, but boost the economy
in these areas," Wang told the official Xinhua
news agency.
In other words, the
initiative is designed first to complement the
current emphasis on patriotic education in
schools, and second, because many of the sites
are in western China, to contribute to the drive
to spread the economic prosperity of the east
coast into the stagnant western interior. To this
end, State Council planners predict the creation
of 2 million Red Tourism jobs by 2010.
While the five-year plan calls for the
development of new sites, Red Tourism mainly will
mean the upgrading of existing facilities already
designated as patriotic education centers. The
marketing of these sites is to be rationalized and
professionalized, and tourist infrastructure is to
be developed to accommodate more visitors coming
from further away. While most of the visitors will
be domestic, the central government hopes that at
least some of the sites can acquire an
international reputation.
Ranzhuang in
Hebei province is one of the sites that Wang
Xinyong was promoting in Beijing over the weekend.
This dusty village, some three hours from the
capital by high-speed coach, was a center of
communist-led resistance during the Japanese
occupation, and was made famous by historical
dramas and war movies, most famously Didao
Zhan ("Tunnel War") from the 1960s. Today
visitors can explore the still-intact tunnels,
clamber in through concealed entrances and peer
through sniper holes.
It may be a lot of
fun, but at present the tourist infrastructure is
very basic - for all but those with spartan
facilities, visitors must be based in the nearby
city of Baoding. Nonetheless the ideological
message is clearly and forcefully expressed - the
local guides who lead visitors through the tunnels
are the granddaughters of the original resistance
heroes and their commentary is unapologetic in its
use of wartime slang, referring to the Japanese
invaders as guizi, meaning "devils". The
guizi, they said, pumped poison gas into
the tunnels.
Photo stalls, meanwhile,
allow customers to borrow both Chinese and
Japanese uniforms to re-create war scenes, and the
gift shop is stocked with badly printed
guidebooks, souvenir key chains, a wide selection
of toy guns and copies of Tunnel War on digital
video
disc (DVD).
Liang Zhiguang works for the Tourist
Office in Baoding city, responsible for the
Ranzhuang site. "The film from the '60s is very
well known," he told Asia Times Online, "and this
brings tourists to Ranzhuang. But now with Red
Tourism, more companies are organizing trips for
party members to visit the Red Sites. Visitors are
coming earlier [in the tourist season] than
before, and they are coming from faraway
provinces, like Guangdong and Sichuan. This is the
big difference."
Liang reported that as a
result of the Red Tourism initiative visitor
numbers at Ranzhuang are up at least 200% over
this time last year. Elsewhere, the site of the
Jiangxi Soviet in the Jinggang Mountains (the base
from which the communists broke out to begin the
Long March) reported an eightfold increase in
visitor numbers for this time of the year. With
Air China's announcement this month that it will
run direct flights to Jinggangshan twice a week,
these numbers will increase further.
China's National Tourist Office
has reported that domestic tourist receipts in
2004 totaled 417 billion yuan (US$50.2 billion),
a 36.87% growth over the previous year. With
this increased investment and concerted
marketing, intrinsically attractive sites like Ranzhuang
and Jinggangshan (climbing the mountain is said
to bring good fortune) can expect a larger share
of these revenues in the future. Less glamorous
sites will at least benefit from increased tour
group traffic as organizations associated with
the Communist Party heed the call to visit. The
most significant effect may turn out to be that
party members in some local parties find
themselves under pressure to replace their annual vacation in
Sanya, a popular and quite sleazy resort on Hainan
Island, with a more edifying destination.
For large segments of the
population, however, Red Tourism will be a hard
sell. As China gears up for the Golden Week May
holiday (modeled after the May holiday in Japan),
the big event in Shanghai this past weekend was
the opening of "The Mummy Returns Live", an
"attraction" in Zhongshan Park, where organizers
hope for the next three months to attract 12,000
customers a day. Tickets for the 15-minute show
are retailing at $10 each. The show itself
incorporates temporary installations that showcase
Egyptian artifacts. Small groups are led through a
specially built maze by actors who play parts from
the film The Mummy - zombies leap out and scare
visitors, for example. Corporate sponsors include
Pepsi and KFC.
Louie Zhu, a 22-year-old
employee in a Shanghai-based trading company,
loved the "Mummy" show, which she felt was well
worth a day's salary. And she is representative of
many in her generation when she says that by
contrast Red Tourism is a turn-off. "The First
National Congress museum is only for school trips
and organizations. It's not so exciting," she told
Asia Times Online. "People want to experience new
things."
The ideological impact of Red
Tourism is therefore uncertain. Widespread
sympathy for the recent anti-Japanese
demonstrations certainly brings out the level of
popular interest in China's wartime history, and
some of the sites can certainly tap into this; but
there is considerably less enthusiasm for the
party's own history, and the as yet unseen
marketing campaign will have to be very slick if
it is to appeal to the large proportion of Chinese
for whom local party life seems ever less
relevant.
Fraser Newham is a
freelance writer based in Shanghai.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd.
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