NEW SCHOLARSHIP

BOOK REVIEW

LENGTH DOES MATTER

Julia Lovell, The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000BC-AD2000, London: Atlantic Books, 2006; and, Sun Shuyun, The Long March, London: HarperCollins, 2006.[1]

That great sculptor, time, can also diminish. The scale of grand landscapes, Herculean undertakings and monumental structures is all too often reduced by the passage of time, the eroding effect of familiarity, as well as by the corrosion of the elements. But the authors of these two books—one on the Long Walls (chang-cheng) of China, also known as the Great Wall, the other on the Long March (chang-zheng)—tell stories about how, if anything, the stature of dynastic China's engineering marvel, and that modern nation's communist 'creation myth' have, if anything, grown in stature in recent decades.

At the start of the Cultural Revolution, which marks it 40th anniversary this year, the first, more idealistic, Red Guards would take a lead from the Long March, that ignominious and then heroic flight of communist forces through China's hinterland.

Many of those early Maoist rebels were the progeny of old party leaders who had been on the original march. But the youngsters believed that their parents had grown corrupt and lazy with their success. When they rebelled, rather than looking toward some future communist idyll, they drew inspiration from the Long March of the mid 1930s. In China, even revolution took its lead from the past.

Sun Shuyun provides a sympathetic account, and retracing, of the Long March. In her travel narrative she combines a personal diary and interviews with an impressionistic rendition of the Long March as it was supposed to have enfolded, and as it has entered China's official and popular folklore. Not for her the dyspeptic debunking of a Chang Jung and Jon Halliday, the author's of the mega-selling Mao: the Untold Story who find naught in the march but deception and hype.[2] Sun's tale is all the more refreshing because of the grit of her own travails.

In Chinese, a considerable body of populist, not necessarily propagandistic, writing on the Long March has grown up in recent years. As the local tourist industry has flourished what is dubbed 'Red Tourism', too, has experienced a boom. People of all ages now retrace the steps of celebrity revolutionaries through provincial backwaters and rugged terrain. A mini-library of guidebooks provides everything these DIY Long Marchers might need: itineraries, details of regional delicacies, historical incident (and colourful fables), hostels and local colour. And, forgive the pun, stealing a march on Sun Shuyun's latter-day voyage of discovery is that intrepid pair of English travellers, Andrew McEwen and Ed Jocelyn. They retraced the route of the Long March some years ago, and their heavily illustrated account is available in all major Beijing bookstores.

Sun tells us that one of the things that sustained her through an arduous retracing of the march was the old army slogan: "Your suffering is nothing compared to the Red Army on the Long March. Your weariness is naught compared to that of the Old Revolutionaries." Another slogan, still used by pitiless drill sergeants on rookie recruits to the People's Liberation Army is: "Pack your hopes in your rucksack, and turn yourself into part of the Great Wall."

It has well long acknowledged that what is promoted in China as a contiguous length of wall, thousands of years old, and thousands of kilometres long, supposedly constructed to divide nomadic barbarians from the areas of cultivated Chinese centrality, is in fact a series of disjointed walls, tamped mounds, earthy eructations and trenches. Some do indeed form an obvious line of division, others veer off tangentially or double up creating something of patchwork along the northern territories of modern China.

In her The Great Wall, Julia Lovell captures some of this sense of strategic cunning, military desperation and vainglorious endeavour of rulers, as well as of the personal isolation, frustration and folly experienced by so many who patrolled these borders in dynastic times. However, one must ask whether a barrier-centric view is an efficacious, or readable, way to tell the story of an extraordinarily complex and vibrant civilization?

In his The Great Wall of China: from Reality to Myth (Cambridge, 1992), to which Lovell refers to unstintingly, Arthur Waldron gave a succinct and erudite account of the walls and the tales told about them. The author of the present book rehearses much of that material and, although we have our knowledge updated by being told about China's famed new electronic firewalls (which are even less effective than the old walls of bricks and mortar), what we have here is a long and dispirited tale, one all too often told in a breezy, mock-journalistic style that ill serves the author's serious intent.

Lovell's remarks on recent propagandistic uses of Chinese walls are of interest, especially as we live in an age when barriers, walls and exclusion zones both real and virtual increasingly mar the landscape. But so earnest is this account that the author overlooks the often more colourful and intriguing non-official Chinese obsession with the Great Wall. There is no mention of the artist Xu Bing's playful use of the wall, or such popular websites as www.thegreatwall.com.cn, founded in 1999 and run by a husband and wife team in Beijing.

Towards the end of the book, Lovell quotes a lugubrious poem by the Guangzhou dissident Huang Xiang. It is an example of the underground literature of despair that appeared as a result of the scarifying years of the Culture Revolution. But perhaps it is the succinct 1935 meditation on the Great Wall by the abiding genius of 20th century Chinese letters, Lu Xun that sums up the enigma of China's 'petrous girdle':

I have always felt hemmed in on all sides by the Great Wall; that wall of ancient bricks which is constantly being reinforced. The old and the new conspire to confine us all.

When will we stop adding new bricks to the Wall?

The Great Wall of China: a wonder and a curse.[3]

Lovell also overlooks my favourite example of late-dynastic wall fetish. The nomadic and warlike Manchus gained access to China through the wall at the invitation of the Ming general Wu Sangui in 1644. This was the most egregious example of the failure of that hugely-expensive barrier. Some two hundred years later, and in emulation of earlier Manchu-Qing rulers, the imperial clan delighted in building castellated follies in their garden palaces. The diminutive gates, walls and passes were an obvious, and to my mind pointedly ironic, reference to the Great Wall, its grand purpose and its magnificent failure.

A number of such wall-like passes can readily be found at the Empress Dowager Cixi's Summer Palace in north-west Beijing; while in the heart of the city, near the booming bar area at Hou Hai, Prince Gong's Mansion, from circa 1860s, features a lavish garden, entry to which is gained through a crenelated wall. Named the Elm Pass (Yuguan), it is an overt reference to the Great Wall, through which Prince Gong's imperial forebears had entered China in triumph.[4]

If the official ruins of the Great Wall to the north of Beijing prove to be too much of a trudge for the visitor, I suggest that you could always pop over to Prince Gong's mansion and see in miniature the folly that failed to protect China. [GRB]

Notes:

[1] This review was originally published under the title 'Another two bricks in the wall', The Times, 18 March 2006.

[2] See the four reviews of Chang Jung and Jon Halliday's Mao: the Untold Story in The China Journal, No. 55, January 2006. The author's review, 'I'm so Ronrey', was reprinted online by China Digital Times at: http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2006/04/im_so_ronery_geremie_r_barme.php

[3] Lu Xun, 'Changcheng' in his Huagai ji, translated in Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience, Barmé and John Minford eds, New York: Hill & Wang, 2nd ed., 1988, p.3.

[4] For more on Prince Gong's Mansion, see the chapter 'Prince Gong's Folly' in The Great Wall of China, Sydney/Canberra: Powerhouse Publishing and The China Heritage Project, 2006.