Oh baby, the socialist realism

On a whim we went to Nanjing on our way back. Naturally, this involved a detour through Bengbu, which is apparently the Las Vegas of Anhui: Within three blocks of the train station we encountered half a dozen glitzy hotels with neon hearts encircling their doorways and filtering through acres of gauze and other kitschy wedding paraphernalia. Weird.

But we met a group of Qi Gong practitioners marching in a public square. For reasons I still don't undersand they were delighted to see us and sorely disappointed when we wouldn't let them massage our kidneys. One man had a photo of himself and Vladimir Putin in his robe pocket; he was very pleased when we recognized the former KGB dude.

In total we had about 20 hours in Nanjing. It's a lovely city--smaller and more comfortable in its own skin than Shanghai, it feels more like a city you would live in rather than a city you would develop at a breakneck pace in order to do business in. Of course there are soaring skyscrapers and construction sites galore; but there are more small neighbourhoods and, of course, oodles more historical sites.

The former capital of the Ming dynasty and the Guomindang has been transformed into a hub of CCP nationalist iconography. Our first stop, the memorial museum of the Rape of Nanjing, was (just our luck) closed. But the arresting sculptures outside, which depicted victims of the 1937 massacre by invading Japanese troops, were beautiful and harrowing in and of themselves and made clear just how tender this wound still is. It doesn't take a psychological mastermind to figure out that a lot of Chinese people just don't like the idea of Japan (especially because Japan has never been all that eager to own up to some of its less-than-honourable actions during the Second World War). I'm still confused as to how this translates into business transactions; I'm pretty sure it doesn't.

In the south of the city, the memorial to CCP martyrs slain in the Guomindang's purges brings out more traditional socialist realism. The sprawling park is chock-a-block with granite sculptures and friezes depicting stoic citizens with--literally--chiselled abs, gazing in equally stoic adoration at Marx who, of course, is the sun. Hordes of Chinese tourists thronged to have their photos taken posing beside an enormous phallic memorial and stone slabs engraved with the national anthem.

In a small restaurant a few blocks away from the suffocatingly touristy Confucius Temple, we tried to eavesdrop on a heated debate between blinged-out older men--heavily ringed fingers madly gesticulating as they downed one bottle of Tsing Tao after another. Apart from references to the economy and, at one especially tense point in the conversation, Mao Zedong, we had no idea what they were saying. But they seemed to like us: They kept nodding in our direction, and one of them decided what we really needed was some of the cigarettes the half-dozen of them were chainsmoking like it was going outta style (which, in China, it isn't). So the man sitting nearest to me began chucking cigarettes at us. It was a friendly if disconcerting gesture. We bought them a couple bottles of beer before we made our exit into the blinding, bustling Nanjing sunshine.

I never ended up smoking the cigarettes; I get enough tar from the second-hand smoke that pervades just about every public space here. Carcinolicious.