cgschina's blog

After you’ve seen your third or fourth Maserati cruising the streets of Shanghai, it can be easy to forget that this place is run by something called the Communist Party.

The view from a tenth-floor men's room at Fudan University

And then, one day, you do something mundane, like visit the restroom in the university building where you work.  And when you look out the restroom window, Chairman Mao is glaring back at you.

In terms of economic life, almost nothing in 2013 China feels socialist.  But when it comes to political power, there’s no question about who is in charge.

In 1911, citizens of Shanghai hung five-color republican flags along Nanjing Road, in support of the revolution.  In 2013, B.U. students drink coconut milk out of--what else?--coconuts on Nanjing Road.  The street is now mostly pedestrian-only, and it functions as a bustling tourist and shopping destination in downtown Shanghai.

The five horizontal stripes on the flags of the republican era were meant to represent the supposed five major groups of people in China: the Han, the Manchu, the Mongolian, the Muslim, and the Tibetan.

That was the address of this house when Dr. Sun Yatsen lived here, in the beautiful section of Shanghai known as the former French Concession. It's now a museum, and the street is now known as Xiangshan Lu.

Since we will be discussing the 1911 Revolution in class Monday, I thought I might pay a visit to Sun's former house this weekend.  While Sun was out of the country at the time the revolution took place, he is usually cited as the main inspiration for the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and China's revolutionary twentieth century.  It's a small, pleasant museum, filled with memorabilia from Sun's life and career.

It is interesting to note the way Sun is portrayed in this museum.  In Taiwan,  the national reputation of Sun is straightforwardly  heroic; there, he is seen as the founder of the Guomindang and the father of the Chinese republic.  Here in the PRC, however, Sun doesn't fit as neatly or easily into the Communist Party's hagiography of revolutionary heroes.

As the tablet pictured at left indicates, the museum emphasizes his "laying the foundation" for cooperation between the Nationalists and the Communists in China, was well as his anti-imperialist call to end the infamous "unequal treaties" that were imposed on China by western powers in the nineteenth century.

Sun's desire to create a functioning Chinese republic never materialized, and when he died in 1925, China was riven by internal divisions and had fallen into a period of control by regional warlords.  Yet his memory and career still command respect in both Taiwan and the PRC, though in different ways, and certainly to a different degree.