Capitalist celebrations in Communist China – on May Day (Travel with MP Prabhakaran)

(This is Chapter 9 from Mr. Prabhakaran’s book, An Indian Goes Around the World – I: Capitalism Comes to Mao’s Mausoleum, which we have been serializing in this space. Chapter 10, “How a Shanghai Neighborhood Got an Indian Name,” will appear next week. Read the series every Monday. – Editor)

 For workers around the world, May 1 is an important day. It is celebrated as May Day with pomp and pageantry. And communist countries, when communism was a major force in international politics, used to add a revolutionary zeal to it. That’s something one would naturally expect from the champions of the proletariat.

The origins of May Day had nothing to do with communism or the proletariat, though. They can be traced to pagan Europe, which observed May 1 as a holy day celebrating the first spring planting. Even now, many countries observe it in that tradition. They observe it in celebration of spring. In many countries, it’s also a declared holiday.

May Day’s association with labor happened centuries after it originated as a holy day. It happened as a result of the prolonged struggle by workers of the United States and Canada, demanding reduction of the workday to eight hours. May 1, 1886, the day they struck work at various industrial centers, was a turning point in that struggle. The nerve center of the struggle was Chicago. There, the police attacked the strikers, killing six of them. Three days later, at a demonstration held in the city’s Haymarket Square to protest the killing, a bomb exploded, resulting in the deaths of eight policemen. It has not been resolved to this day whether the bomb was thrown at the police by the workers or by one of police’s own agent provocateurs. Eight trade unionists were arrested and, after a perfunctory trial, four of them – Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engle and Adolph Fischer – were executed.

Communist Co-Option of May Day

The foregoing digression is done for a reason. It is done to drive home the point that the working class in capitalist America had sacrificed a lot to make May Day what it is today. The gusto with which the communists have been celebrating it should not make anyone overlook that fact. The communists’ association with, if not co-option of, May Day took place at the Paris meeting of the International Working Men’s Association (the First International), on May 1, 1889. The meeting passed a resolution, declaring May 1 as a holiday for the international working class. The First International did it in memory of the martyrs of Chicago’s Haymarket Square.

Before the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the May Day parade at Moscow’s Red Square used to be an annual event that the communists around the world proudly talked about. The leader of the Communist World, which the Soviet Union was at the time, used the day to show off its military might and the superiority of its form of government. The form of government, as professed by the communists, was the dictatorship of the proletariat. In time the world came to know that it was only a show. The dictatorship of the proletariat could not keep up the show for too long. It collapsed under its own weight. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, China became the unchallenged leader of the Communist World, or what was left of it.

I was in Shanghai, China, on May 1, 2002. I woke up in the morning, excited at the prospect of watching May Day celebrations in the only communist country of any clout left in the world. And Shanghai’s status as the business capital of that country added to the excitement.

Armed with a camera and lots and lots of films, I stepped out of my hotel on Cao Xi Road, a thoroughfare in Shanghai. I wanted to record for posterity all of the activities associated with May Day.

Fashion Parade

The first scene that caught my attention was a makeshift stage in front of a huge Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) franchise. China, at the time, had more than 600 KFC outlets. McDonald’s was fast catching up. “Capitalist penetration in Communist China?” I wondered. Loudspeakers were blaring from different corners of the stage. I could not tell from the distance what it was all about. On a huge billboard behind the stage was the KFC logo – the picture of smiling, goateed Colonel Sanders, the founder of KFC. The picture made me wonder: “Could those guys on the stage be shouting ‘Down with imperialists and their running dogs’?”

As I came closer, it became clear that they were not shouting Mao Zedong’s favorite slogan. In fact, they were celebrating what Mao would have condemned as something associated with the decadent bourgeois culture. They were conducting a fashion parade.

The background music added to the bourgeois flavor of the event. It was very American. They were playing Whitney Houston’s famous song, The Greatest Love of All. Swaying to the rhythm of “I decided long ago never to walk in anyone’s shadow…,” young Chinese girls, slim and pretty, ambled onto the stage in all kinds of costumes, nightgowns included. The only communist restriction on this capitalist encroachment was that there was no display of swimsuits. I was disappointed. “Maybe the Chinese needed some more time to get over that restriction,” I said to myself. After all, both Whitney Houston songs and capitalism arrived in China pretty late.

Celebration of Cell Phone

On the other side of Cao Xi Road was Hui Jin Department Store. Going by the abundance of goods and by the tasteful way they were displayed, the store could easily rival Macy’s, the giant American department store. On the sidewalk in front of the store, another group was celebrating China’s successful entry into another area of the capitalist world economy – the area of mobile phones. Tiny children were distributing flyers announcing the arrival in the market of mobile phones manufactured by Lucent Technologies. The American telecom giant might have suffered enormous losses globally in preceding years. But its operations in China at the time were reported to be lucrative. It had succeeded in cornering a significant part of the country’s cell-phone market, which until recently was dominated by Nokia of Finland and Motorola, another American company.

According to Joseph Kahn of The New York Times, by the end of 2002, “China had registered more than 200 million mobile-phone users.” The flyer-distributing children were wearing T-shirts, with the logo of Lucent Technologies prominently printed on them. “Workers of the world, unite,” I was tempted to shout, “you have nothing to lose but your old-fashioned rotary phones!”

Anxious to see an authentic May Day event, I walked, and walked. There was none. Disappointed, I decided to take the subway to People’s Square, which was only a few minutes’ ride from where I was. “A place named after people may have something celebrating their cause on a day like this,” I said to myself while boarding the train.

The place was once the venue of the Shanghai Racecourse. Now it is occupied by the Shanghai Museum and People’s Park. The museum, designed to look like a ding, the ancient Chinese vessel symbolizing power, was built in 1994, at a cost of 570 million yuans (about 83.5 million U.S. dollars). It has an impressive collection of Chinese art and takes one through the pages of China’s history.

At People’s Park, men and women hang out – doing nothing, making love, taking a nap, gossiping, roller-skating or just daydreaming. I could see all those activities going on, when I arrived there. In fact, there were more of them, May Day being a holiday in Communist China. But none of them could even remotely be interpreted as celebratory of the working class.

Tired and disappointed, I sat on a concrete bench in an isolated part of the park. I asked myself: “Wouldn’t Mao be disappointed, too, if he were to visit Shanghai today?”

Photo captions:

The author, in front of the statue of Chen Yi, at the Bund, Shanghai, China. Chen Yi (1901-1972) was one of the Communist Party leaders and Communist military commanders, who steadily rose in power, after he joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1923. But he fell from grace during the notorious Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The statue is a testament to the fact that he has since been rehabilitated. People of Shanghai remember him for the reforms he introduced when he was the city’s mayor (1949-1958).

A fashion parade in Shanghai, on May 1, 2002. The author came upon it during his all-day quest all over the city for a true May Day celebration, one that celebrates the working class. He couldn’t find any.

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