Capitalist Celebrations in Communist
China—On May Day
By M.P. Prabhakaran
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. From the protectors of the proletariat that was to be expected.
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 as a holiday in celebration of spring.
May Day’s association with labor happened centuries later. It happened as a result of the prolonged struggle by workers of the United States and Canada demanding reduction of workday to eight hours. May 1, 1886, the day they struck work at various industrial centers, was a turning point in that struggle. Its nerve center 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 whether one of the police’s own agent provocateurs did it. Eight trade unionists were arrested and, after an infamous show trial, four of them—Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engle and Adolph Fischer—were executed.
Communist Co-option of May Day
The foregoing meandering into history 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—a working class holiday. The gusto with which the Communists have been celebrating it should not make us 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 adopted a resolution declaring May 1 as an international working class holiday. The First International did it in memory of the martyrs of Haymarket Square.
When the Soviet Union was still around, the May Day parade at Moscow’s Red Square used to be an annual feature which the Communists around the world proudly talked about. The leader of the Communist world used the day to show off its military might and superiority of its form of government, which was supposed to be 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 that, China became the unchallenged leader of the Communist world, or what was left of it.
When I found myself in Shanghai, China, on May 1, 2002, I was excited. I was excited at the prospect of watching May Day celebrations in the only Communist country of any clout left in this world. And Shanghai’s status as the business capital of China 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, determined to capture all of the activities. The first scene that caught my attention was a makeshift stage in front of a huge Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) restaurant. China has more than 600 KFC outlets. McDonald’s, another American fast food chain, is fast catching up.
Loudspeakers were blaring from different corners of the stage, and I could not tell from the distance I was at what it was all about. The smiling, goateed Colonel Sanders on the KFC billboard behind the stage did make me wonder for a moment: “Could those guys on the stage be shouting ‘Down with imperialists and their running dogs’?” Mao was fond of mouthing that slogan.
As I came closer, I realized that they were not. In fact, they were celebrating what Mao would have condemned as part of decadent bourgeois culture. They were conducting a fashion parade. The background music added to the bourgeois flavor. It was American, Whitney Houston’s “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 dresses, nightgowns included. The only Communist restriction on this capitalist penetration was that there was no scene promoting bathing suits. I was disappointed. Maybe they needed some more time to get over that restriction. After all, both Whitney Houston and capitalism arrived in China pretty late.
Celebration of Cellphone
On the other side of Cao Xi Road was Hui Jin Department Store. In terms of variety of goods and their tasteful display, the store could easily rival Macy’s. On the sidewalk in front of it, another group was celebrating China’s successful entry into another area of the capitalist world economy—mobile phones. Little children were distributing fliers announcing the arrival on the market of cellphones manufactured by Lucent Technologies. The American telecom giant might have suffered enormous losses globally in the past few years. But its operations in China have been reported to be lucrative. It has succeeded in cornering a significant part of the country’s cellphone market, which until recently was dominated by Motorola, another American company, and Nokia of Finland. 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 flier-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 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 might have something celebrating their cause on a day like this, I said to myself while boarding the train.
At People’s Square, men and women hang out in large numbers, doing nothing, making love, taking a nap, gossiping, roller-skating or just daydreaming. All those activities were going on at the time I reached there, too. Perhaps, there were more of them, May 1 being a holiday in Communist China. But none of them could even remotely be interpreted as in celebration of the working class. By now, apart from being frustrated, I was also exhausted. I sat on a concrete bench, musing: “Wouldn't Mao be disappointed, too, if he were to visit Shanghai today.”
[Published on August 18, 2003]
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