Getting beyond Beijing's creepiness

Author: By Michael Grunwald, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, October 26, 1997

Page: M11

Section: Travel

I know this because I visited the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park, where I learned that China values the ``unique and important'' contributions of all its ethnic minorities. Why, the park even features an imitation Tibetan village, complete with a colorful fake Buddhist temple complex, and smiling Tibetan people who wear exotic Tibetan costumes and perform elaborate Tibetan dances.

``China good,'' one of them told me. Which was odd, because I hadn't asked him what he thought of China.

That surreal little interlude was quintessential Beijing, especially when you consider that Mr. China Good did not look very Tibetan. If you don't think about the dark side of this place, it almost seems normal. In Tiananmen Square, you can watch all the old men flying kites, kids playing soccer, and tourists posing for photos, and almost forget that Chinese soliders slaughtered innocent civilians there just eight years ago. (They must not have read the signs prohibiting ``activities in any way which damage the honor of our country.'')

At the Yonghe Gong Lama Temple, a real Tibetan shrine, you can learn all about the 1951 agreement between China and the Dalai Lama ``on measures for the peaceful liberation of Tibet,'' an ``agreement'' essentially signed at gunpoint to confirm the violent occupation of Tibet. In the Museum of Chinese History, you can read a stirring tribute to ``the students who demonstrated for democracy and the abolition of autocracy'' -- in 1945. Funny, they don't mention the students who demonstrated for democracy in 1989.

Beijing can get creepy that way. But while you can't ignore the weird authoritarianism below the surface, exemplified by the Orwellian China Daily, you can't obsess about it, either. Human rights abuses are an awful part of the story of modern China, but they are not the whole story, any more than budget deficits or serial killings are the story of modern America.

A rush-hour bike ride with no brakes -- you stop Fred Flinstone-style -- is just as crucial to the Beijing Experience as a visit to Tiananmen. And no matter what you think of the government -- the other day, it honored the unique and important contributions of its Uighur minority people by arresting 40 of them for ``illegal religious activities'' -- Beijing has some of the world's coolest attractions. Sure, they're mobbed with tourists, but that's because they're worth seeing. There's a reason it's not called The Pretty Good Wall of China.

Badaling is the cheesiest of the three main sites of the Wall, a mecca for overpriced tour buses and T-shirt vendors, completely rebuilt for tourism. Simatai is the most authentic, for the people who call themselves ``travelers'' and sneer at ``tourists.'' I went to Mutianyu, which falls in the middle. Some but not all of it has been restored, and the climb is steep but not too steep. As for the wall itself, well, words fail me. It's great. It's not overhyped. I don't care if it's a symbol of oppression; it's still beautiful.

Funny, though, even my trip to the Wall turned into a Beijing Experience. I didn't want to shell out $50 for a hotel tour, and I had heard a Chinese tour bus covered the 112-mile round trip for three bucks. As it turned out, it did more than that. It took us to Mutianyu, where we had three hours to wander around the Wall, but then it whisked us to the Hongluo Temple Tourist Area, a bizarre mix of traditional architecture, natural beauty, and megatacky sculptures of huge red snails.

Then we were off to some lake, which I had to skip because I hadn't eaten all day. Instead, I spent a half-hour trying to explain ``beef with green peppers'' at a nearby restaurant, until they finally brought me chicken with zucchini. We didn't get back until nightfall.

Actually, the Wall is just the most famous of Beijing's Big Three attractions. The second jewel is the massive governing complex of the Ming and Qing dynasties just behind Tiananmen, known to the Chinese government as the Palace Museum, and to everyone else as the Forbidden City. An audio tour narrated by Roger Moore guides you through the buildings on the center axis; you can tell he was much more interested in the imperial concubines than the yin-yang architectural principles.

It's fun to hear 007 discuss which emperor overindulged which passions, but when he's done, it's even more fun to roam around the sides of the complex, where there are excellent museums and gardens, and more pavilions and palaces. Again, the grandeur is tough to describe: 9,000 brilliantly adorned rooms, a pair of cypress trees locked in a 400-year-old embrace, a 250-ton marble sculpture. There are also a host of signs for exhibits that do not appear to exist; this is, after all, Beijing.

The last of the Big Three is the new Summer Palace, not to be confused with the old Summer Palace, a lame set of ugly ruins and gardens. The ``new'' complex is where Empress Dowager Cixi, one of the nastiest, greediest, and oddest characters in Chinese history, kept the Qing emperor hostage at the end of the 19th century. You can still see the wall she built to lock him in the Hall of Jade Ripples, her gilded throne in the Hall of Great Fun, even the marble banquet boat she built with the actual navy's money.

Hey, you can't blame her for wanting to eat her 30-course meals on Kunming Lake -- it's a terrific lake, graced with lovely pagodas and elegant stone bridges, framed by beautiful temples in the surrounding hills. The grounds truly are fit for a king, even if Cixi was just a glorified concubine with an eye for power.

You could easily spend entire days at the Wall, the Forbidden City, and the Summer Palace, and there's more. The renowned Temple of Heaven is a graceful must-see, as is the splashy Lama Temple, despite its unnerving spin on history and its unfortunate plaque hailing ``the largest lame temple in Beijing.''

And you have to love the 500-year-old, 23-foot-tall, 63-ton Yongle Bell, a rusty Ming Dynasty relic inscribed with 230,000 characters. The Great Bell Temple's literature admits that Russia has a 193-ton bell, but notes that it cracked during the casting process. ``If that dumb bell is rated the biggest in the world, the Yongle Bell come the 5th,'' it complains. ``The real King Bell doesn't seem to care such a lineup.'' Which is true.

There are plenty of other touristy things to do. You can see traditional Beijing opera, although it's mostly awful screeching. You can check out the Underground City, a strange 20-mile network of 1960s air-raid shelters accessible from a few shops tucked in alleys around Tiananmen Square. You should hit at least one shopping mall to see the growing pains of capitalism here, but be warned: Even the official Travel China guide had to concede that ``according to Chinese and foreign tourists, Beijing's souvenirs lack variety, originality, and fine workmanship.''

And you might want to visit the so-called Maosoleum, if only to make sure the maniac is still dead. (I can't confirm that. When I was in Beijing, his corpse was out of town for maintenance work.)

Oh, and don't forget the Ethnic Culture Park. Sure, it's Disneyesque, but it's incredibly exotic, all those sexy Miao dancers and birch-bark Oroqen tents and slabstone Buyi houses. No wonder hordes of visitors to the park were desperate to take pictures of . . . me. That's right. The Ewenki yurts were no big deal, but they had never seen an American before. Another Beijing moment.

Still, Beijing is becoming a modern city, with fast-food joints and high-tech firms sprouting all over town, and cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou are even farther down the capitalist road. But it's still important to remember that the four massive portraits at the entrance to the Military Museum honor Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, gathered around a statue of Mao, near an enormous photograph of a nuclear explosion.

Western companies may be flocking to China to do business, but visitors still must register with the police, and the China Daily can still include the following humdinger of a sentence in a purported news story: ``Some people in the European Parliament, still with the Cold War mentality and the old colonialist ideas, hate to see China develop and grow strong, and they have repeatedly instigated the Parliament to adopt anti-China resolutions, thereby interfering in China's internal affairs, damaging China's image and hurting the feelings of the Chinese people, in a premeditated but vain attempt to confront China and obstruct its development.''

As long as the government keeps spewing such laughable propaganda, with such abominable syntax, it's going to be hard to agree completely with Mr. China Good. But it's possible to take a more nuanced view, like the one the Chinese government takes on the architect of the Cultural Revolution. These days, the official line on Chairman Mao is 70 percent good, 30 percent bad.

That's off by about 65 percent when it comes to Mao. But it's about right when it comes to Beijing.