Walking the Wall

In our first story on slogans, our friend Andy McEwen said that he hadn’t seen many practical or specific slogans – merely abstract exhortations to love the mother country and so on. And we were compelled to agree. Chinese wall slogans are interesting for what they reveal about the government’s priorities, but they don’t make for especially enlightening reading.

There’s a first time for everything, though, and recently we came across a few slogans we have no trouble getting behind.

This first one reads “Protect the Great Wall, love Zhongwei.” A bit insipid, perhaps, but you can’t really disagree with the sentiment.

It also alludes to an interesting episode in recent Great Wall history. In September 1984, Deng Xiaoping launched a political campaign known by a slogan almost identical to the one above – “Let us love our country and restore the Great Wall.” The campaign had its practical side, and huge sums of money have been spent in the decades since restoring the wall (sometimes quite clumsily) and establishing tourist facilities. Just as importantly, the government began promoting the Great Wall as one of the foremost symbols of contemporary China, a use that continues today.

This symbolic importance, along with the wall’s very real heritage value, explains why, in the words of this slogan, “Damaging the Great Wall will be punished severely according to law.” What that punishment might be is left unstated, but it doesn’t sound good.

And what kinds of damage might the sloganeers be worried about? According to the third slogan, “Digging, removing sand and construction within 50 metres of either side of the Great Wall are strictly prohibited.”

Incidentally, just last week Hongji Landbridge Investment Development Inc, a Chinese company, was fined 500,000 yuan ($63,000 US), for demolishing sections of the Great Wall in Inner Mongolia for a highway project (see “It could be Greater with a road right about here”). The fines were levied under the new national regulation protecting the Great Wall along its entire length (see Great Wall Gazette, Vol. 1, No. 1).

And the meaning of this is what?

A few days after we posted our first story on this website, our friend Andy McEwen wrote in asking us to “take some pictures of any dull or interesting Chinese slogans” while we walked. We had no idea what he was talking about.

So we asked. Here is Andy’s story:

I began collecting slogans while hiking with Ed Jocelyn on the New Long March, our 6000 kilometre walk following the route of the Red Army’s epic escape from Chiang Kai’Shek’s Nationalist forces in 1934-35. (Note from e&b: Andy and Ed have published two books on their trek; for more info, see the bottom of this post.)

I got the idea from our friend Lu Sitao when he marched with us in Jiangxi province, at the beginning of the New Long March. One day near the village of Xinfeng, he suddenly bent over double and started giggling like a madman. Sitao has a great eye for the weird, but I couldn’t see what was so funny about yet another “planned birth” slogan. He pointed out a slogan daubed on the white wall of a house:

“Growing oranges is more important than having children.”

In this orange-growing area it perhaps didn’t seem so funny, but taken out
of context we found this entertained all the folks back in Beijing.

Political slogans have played an important role in modern Chinese history from the May Fourth movement of 1919, through the rise of the Chinese Communist Party, the Cultural Revolution and Democracy Wall movements, and more recently the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

Political slogans still fill the walls and skylines of mainland Chinese cities and villages, especially “planned birth” slogans. Most slogans are dreary exhortations for the Chinese people to love the motherland, behave in a more “civilized” (translation: obedient) way and so on.

I have yet to see anyone suggest anything practical such as “Keep China tidy”. It tends to be much more abstract – “Building for a high-tech future”. Maybe it’s a bit like your local council back home spending your tax money on a junk mailing with the words “We are Working for You” up top or something like that.

Our experience has been much like Andy’s. We see slogans everywhere – on schools and billboards, on people’s houses. As Andy says, they are less than inspiring. Mindless patriotism, paeans to education and family planning are the most popular subjects.

But even if they don’t give much insight into what everyday people are thinking about, the slogans do say something about what their rulers in Beijing think they should be thinking about. And we find that in itself interesting, so we thought we’d post a few from time to time.

This first one, from the heart of Hexi Corridor irrigation country, should strike a chord with everyone back in Australia, not only because we’re in the midst of a nationwide drought, but also because you can find our own Australian versions of this slogan on the cover of every government water plan in the last 20 years and in just about any irrigation area. Now if we (those of us in China and Australia) could just figure out how to use less.

Shui shi shengming zhi yuan: Water is the source of life

By the way, the slogan at the top of this post translates to “The Three Represents are the foundation of the (Communist) Party.” Still don’t know what it means? Don’t worry, neither does anyone in China.

Ed Jocelyn and Andy McEwen walked the route of the Long March in 2002 and 2003. They have published two books in English on their journey, The Long March (London: Constable 2006) and Red Road (Beijing: China Intercontinental Press 2005). You can read about the New Long March online at www.newlongmarchers.com.

Ed Jocelyn and a Chinese friend, Yang Xiao, are currently walking the route followed by the little-known Second Red Front Army on the New Long March 2. They are only about 50 days from finishing this year-long trek. You can read about their adventures at www.newlongmarch2.com.