Chinese Tourists Choose The Mummy Over Mao

Mao Zedong and followers during the Long March

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.

(First appeared in Asia Times, April 27, 2005)

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