Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution 中国人民革命军事博物馆
复兴路9号
Part of A Better Guide to Běijīng’s coverage of West of the Imperial City
Only a short walk west of the modern Capital Museum, the Military Museum is nevertheless 50 years back in time in architecture, atmosphere, and manipulative propaganda.
Despite a continuing refurbishment programme, the classic materials of communist self-promotion are all here — marble, gilt, and gloom — together with one of the last remaining statues of Máo. Large portraits of Marx, Lenin, and even Stalin that lined the entrance hall have now fortunately disappeared — but only to be replaced with modern ghouls: Dèng Xiǎopíng and Jiāng Zémín in Red Flag limousines. Depressingly, the Chinese can be found photographing their small sons and daughters in front of field artillery and dusty tanks, and buying them midget military uniforms at shops both around the courtyard and on the museum’s upper floors.
The weapons range from First World War-era to relatively modern rockets, and indeed, leftovers from China’s space programme tend to end up here rather than in science museums, which sits oddly with frequent claims that the programme is part of the country’s ‘peaceful rise’ — an official set phrase particularly popular with ex-President Hú Jǐntāo.
Otherwise the main galleried hall holds pistols, machine guns, torpedoes, shells, swords, grenades, and rockets, including a V-2-like missile called the DF-1 (Dōng Fēng, 东风, East Wind) that lacks only a red-and-white chequered paint job to be ready for a role in Hergé’s Tintin. Nothing, from sabres to supersonic fighters, is labelled in English. The red star on the rear wall is the one that you’ll see on cap badges of the military, the bā-yī (八一) on it referring to the (actually inaccurate but nevertheless official) 1 August founding date of the People’s Liberation Army.
‘War is a matter of vital importance to the state; the province of life or death; the road to survival or ruin. It is mandatory that it be thoroughly studied,’ according to the Warring States-era strategist Sūn Wǔ (孙武), now adopted as a guru by the kind of businessman who likes to read management theory books rather than actually get anything done. But if Sūn is right the Military Museum, unprepared to tell the truth about any of China’s military history, is the last place to look for enlightenment. Up broad marble stairways of gimcrack grandeur, halls on five floors are keen to set out in two languages a carefully spun version of China’s military history and in particular the heroism of the Chinese Communist Party. The Party has never been slow to use ordinary people as cannon fodder and is more than happy to claim as the climax of a stream of lies about the Long March that it was a victory, despite 90% of those who joined it dying en route. There were no noted leaders among the dead, of course.
The token balance creeping into at least some other museums is completely lacking here. This is hard-line, hard-nosed, closed-minded, grey-haired, jowelly communism at its worst, with displays setting out every major modern war, giving the Party a leading role if possible, blaming foreigners for every ill, and adopting even the most unlikely earlier uprisings such as the Tàipíng Rebellion as proto-communist.
One hall on the fourth floor is dedicated to expressions of appreciation from fellow travellers, such as an extremely kitsch clock in the form of a star with hammer and sickle behind it, ‘Presented to the song and dance ensemble of our army by executive committee of the capital people conference of Romania, November 1954.’ [Sic.] Forget Doctor Who: real-world time travel is available here.
There’s plenty on China’s ‘heroic’ resistance to foreign invaders during the two opium wars, and it’s claimed the second of them was lost only because the Qīng chose to give up. Apparently, the Tàipíng Rebellion failed (in 1868) only because of foreign military assistance to the Qīng, whereas in fact it was the Tàipíng failure to link up with the Nián rebellion and its own internal squabbles that played the largest roles — the foreign assistance to the Qīng was in leadership and training, not in troops.
There follows much complaint about independence movements in Xīnjiāng (described as a ‘puppet regime’), Russian activities there (1871), French activies in Yúnnán (1884), and defeat at the hands of the Japanese (1895), much of it justified if only it were presented truthfully. Since they praise as revolutionary any domestic force attacking the Qīng, it’s hard to see how the Chinese can justly complain about losing the northwest’s Xīnjiāng region, which became part of the Manchu Qīng empire only under the Qīng Qiánlóng emperor. But in this and in many other ways the accounts in the museum want to have their cake and eat it.
It’s the coverage of the War Against the Invasion of Eight Power Allied Forces, usually known even to the Chinese as the Boxer Rebellion, that brings perhaps the most jaw-dropping statement. Apparently the forces relieving the Siege of the Legations of 1900 came on the pretext of protecting their embassies.
Resistance Against The Czarist Invasion of Northern China gives the Chinese view of border disputes around the Amur river that continued until a treaty was finally signed in 2001. Oddly enough this area was the subject of the first treaty what is now China ever signed with a foreign power, the Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689 (negotiated for the Kāngxī emperor by the Jesuits), which temporarily slowed Russia’s eastwards expansion, remaining in force until the 1858 Treaty of Aigun (Àihún) established the left bank as Russia’s when the Amur was agreed as the border.
But in the detailed listing of every slight meted out by foreigners, any account of China’s own disastrous invasion of Vietnam in 1979, when the vastly more numerous and better-equipped PLA took large losses and was driven back across the border, is curiously missing.
At a time when China at least sometimes presents a more smiling face to the world’s gaze, and when much foreigner-bashing content has recently been removed from various sights far more popular than this one, this museum accurately reproduces what has been force-fed to schoolchildren for so long now without discussion and without any alternative viewpoint being presented that it is now widely believed to be true even outside China’s borders.
Some familiar black-and-white photographs are here: the 1860 storming of the forts outside Tiānjīn, encampments from 1858, and the ‘Old’ Summer Palace before and after its destruction in 1860, showing how, even after the Anglo-French forces had finished the buildings were much more complete than they are today. See Architecture and Xenophobia.
▶ Zhōngguó Rénmín Gémìng Jūnshì Bówùguǎn, Fùxīng Lù 9, t 6852 9647, www.jb.mil.cn, 8.30am–4.30pm. Free. nb passport required. m Military Museum (Lines 1 & 9) exit B. b to 军事博物馆: 1, 21, 65, 68, 78, 99, 308, 320, 320专线, 337, 388, 728.
Shops in the museum sell toy guns, model helicopters, model tanks, and aircraft kits, plus bits of army surplus equipment and even the odd bomb casing, fins and all, and very heavy. There are also military uniforms on sale.
The Capital Museum is a short walk east on the south side of the road. The Běijīng World Art Museum is right out of the museum and immediately right.
Next in West of the Imperial City: Běijīng World Art Museum
Previously: Capital Museum
Main Index of A Better Guide to Beijing.
For discussion of China travel, see The Oriental-List.
