...And this week's award for most unconsciously ironic proclamation goes to...Cui Lianqing, of the PLA airforce meteorological staff. Cui is one of the gentlemen charged with blasting any offending clouds from the sky as waves of carnival floats and military vehicles file through Tiananmen square on the upcoming 60th aniversary of the People's Republic.
When asked if he could guarantee clear skies for the celebrations, Cui had this to say:
"Sometimes, you just cannot change the way nature governs itself. But we will do our best."Now just steady on! Can you verify this? Are you sure? This sounds like heresy to me, and from the mouth of an official of state to boot!
In a lot of ways, it seems fitting that man-made control of the natural world should form a part of China's national day festivities. The efforts of successive rulers to restrain and manage the country's waters are an important subnarrative in its history; the mythical sage king Yu was famed for building the nation's first network of canals, halting a decade of floods and winning his crown on the back of it. A millenium and a half later, it was the expansion of that same system that helped China's first emperor Qin Shihuang outmanoeuvre his rivals in his bid for supremacy.
Perhaps it was the weight of such precedents that fuelled the ambition of Mao and his successors. What is certain is that since the founding of the People's Republic, China's leaders have busied themselves with waging a virtual war against nature which has fundamentally altered the landscape of large tracts of the country.
As early as the 1950s, Mao was championing the cultivation of vast tracts of desert and scrubland in the country's western provinces; the image of industrious Chinese peasants coaxing green fields from sand dunes seemed to sum up the recently triumphant revolution in a nutshell. This was followed by the blossoming of a dam-building fetish that has persisted to this day; of Chinas major watercourses, only one (the Brahmaputra or Yarlong Tsangpo) now remains unimpeded by walls of concrete.
Although undoubtedly committed to improving the lot of its population, the administration has also displayed an unhealthy tendency to cast itself in Yu's mould - a miracle worker, above the laws of the natural world, and, most importantly, an unquestioned master of all it surveys. This almost adolescent 'because it's there' attitude has found its fullest embodiment yet in the Three Gorges project, and shows little sign of abating. Plans are currently being floated to use 'peaceful' nuclear weapons to blast a path through the Himalayas as part of a project to transport water from the headwaters of the Yangtze to the drought-stricken north.
The planned festivities for national day are a telling embodiment of Beijing's continued fixation with embodying its legitimacy through displays of total control (think the Olympic opening ceremony bereft of any lightness of touch). It will be interesting to see if the next major anniversary is played out with similar pomp, or whether, like the Han ruler who scaled down his own version of the Terracota army to a collection of soft-faced minature fiugines, the administration will come to realize that scale and spectacle are not the only measures to success.
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