(Zhongnanhai, Beijing) The red sign reads “Long live the great Chinese Communist Party”. A similar sign on the other side reads “Long live the undefeated Mao Zedong theory”
When I was in Washington DC last summer, I really wanted to join a White House tour, but it never materialized – our internship coordinator put one together before I had joined the think-tank. Instead I got to see the Capitol and various congressional buildings through the course of the summer. The closest I got to the White House was with all the other tourists on the South side of the park, peering through the fence, trying to identify which little speck in the distance was the oval office.
Zhongnanhai is China’s equivalent of the White House, part of the Forbidden City that was occupied by various warlords after the last emperor’s abdication and now serves as the headquarters of the Communist Party – it is where Mao and Deng lived. Now that tourists can flow in and out of the palace museum, this is effectively the new Forbidden City of modern China.
My academic and somewhat personal interest in the nature of autocratic regimes makes me curious about what lies beyond those high walls. In the two school terms before this summer, I turned my curriculum to the study of modern Chinese history, politics, and foreign relations – which all revolve around decisions made there. I always imagine it as a quiet palace courtyard, with mandarins sipping tea while playing chess, while aides scurry back and forth with reports of the state of the middle kingdom written in calligraphic poetry. Others imagine it to be a more interesting place.
(Zhongnanhai, Beijing) The interior sign is hard to read but it says “Serve the People”… which people exactly?
Since I am in Beijing this summer, I hoped to catch a glimpse of this mysterious world myself, and planned it into my itinerary. The southern entrance, the Gate of New China (新华门), is just one block to the left from Tiananmen Square, but unlike the White House, there are no crowds of tourists gathered outside snapping photographs. I was the only one who wandered that far from the tour track around the Forbidden City entrance. I waited for a bit hoping to see some central committee cadre arrive in a motorcade of black limousines, escorted into the compound by waiting attendants, but no one came. Later a schoolmate informed me that Hu Jintao and other leaders don’t actually use this entrance, which is purely decorative. (They use the one on Fuyou street)
I walked around the side streets to look for more insights into the top leadership, but it was very quiet. All I saw were uniformed guards standing behind iron gates. The only place of interest was a foreign language school, presumably for the children of top cadres. Several RMB1 popsicles later, I decided this was far too much walking for me, and decided to meet my friends. I sent out a few texts to my schoolmates here over the summer, and I got one back from a Mandarin class buddy about a birthday dinner in Sanlitun, an expat playground known for… excess. I didn’t have any other dinner plans and opted in.
I thought it would be a guys night out with other schoolmates (the text didn’t say very much), so I arrived in shorts, sandals and a funny t-shirt from a previous summer camp. I ended up sitting next to the ambassador’s son at a posh dinner party full of socialites and power brokers. Oops. I tried as best I could to make up for my gross disregard for dress codes with my witty conversation, and got invited along to the afterparty, which was at a chill hangout on the rooftop of some building out in 3rd ring, where I heard more English than Mandarin.
(Club in Beijing) Count the number of expats!
Amidst the house beat and dancing, I realized that this was the center of gravity I had been searching for all day. This was where a new ruling class of nouveau riche elites and their foreign friends sealed friendships and deals. And I wondered what I was doing here: middle-class public-school/transport me barely getting by on grant funding, next to people to whom money is not an issue. They spent more in that evening that I did in my entire time in Beijing.
It occurred to me then that my schoolmates from the mainland (at least among the undergraduates) all come from particularly privileged backgrounds. Not those closely related to the top party leadership, as one such friend later told me while sipping tieguanyin at a Houhai teahouse, because those would supposedly consider studying in the US (or be considered as) a security risk. Rather, they tend to be the scions of business empires, and go to the same few preppy international schools that feed into the Ivy+ machine.
Another friend, one who went to one such preppy international school in Shanghai, noted that the concentration of extreme wealth among the undergraduate mainland students is due to a confluence of factors in Ivy+ admissions (need-sensitivity, country/diversity quotas, number of competitive applicants etc) that effectively exclude applicants from China who require financial aid – which in purchasing power parity terms means that someone is very privileged. This phenomenon is less noticeable at the masters and PhD level. Granted, all playing fields everywhere are tilted to the rich, and the difference is in degree.
