Visiting Splendid China (Theme Park)

It’s hard to take it seriously. Or is it?

On the first day of our trip to Shenzhen, China, my partner and I had a few hours to spare before dinner with friends. It was thus that, on a whim, we ended up in a golf cart together, dodging wandering tourists as we watched some five dozen young Chinese people performing an ethnic Polynesian dance with widely varying degrees of skill and enthusiasm.

Splendid China Folk Village, and more specifically the “China Folk Culture Village,” is a very particular theme park. Unlike the nearby Windows of the World (which contains to-scale miniatures of foreign places: the Eiffel Tower, Tower Bridge…) or its other half, the “Splendid China Miniature Park”, (which contains to-scale miniatures of historically significant buildings from Chinese history), the Folk Village is dedicated not to buildings but to ethnic groups of China.

When my partner and I showed up, we were at first nervously giggling at the poorly translated signs:

But soon we were made disoriented, amused and unsure what to think by the ethnic dancing (which was likely not performed by members of that actual ethnic group).

Splendid China provides a tour that takes you past an area dedicated of each group, with a small sign explaining what each group believes in, where it lives, and how large it is (I am always in awe of the many groups that, in my ignorance, I’ve never heard of and which contain many more people than my own ethnic group, Ashkenazi Jews). People are employed not only to perform dances but to make and sell crafts, although again I strongly doubt those who are employed tend to belong to the groups they are representing. Tibet is included, as is Taiwan, for of course, the Chinese state lays claim to these.

It is wild, tacky, cute, fun, weird. It feels like a mind-melting mix of diversity-and-inclusion messaging, Chinese Communist Party propaganda about One China, and Disneyland, because that is what it is.

And I won’t lie; I enjoyed it. Not only because of the golf cart.

I enjoyed it because it catered to exactly my rather pathetic knowledge of Chinese history, because I could zoom past a huge variety of cultures in just a few minutes, because I felt almost as if I was being educated (indeed, in some way I was). Because I was entertained and amused, intentionally and otherwise.

I also felt guilty about all this immediately, as my long complex training in academic analysis would predict.

Surely, I mused to my partner, there is some better, wiser way of understanding China, some critical perspective to be taken? Sure, he agreed. But as an electronic engineer, not a critical theorist, he pointed out that most of the folks in Shenzhen will never travel all that much around China anyway. For them, much of this probably was novel information, however simplified or biased.

Shenzhen is a former fishing village. When China made it into a special economic zone in 1980 (in part to create a neighboring city to Hong Kong that could soak up the same economic growth) it rapidly ballooned over four and a half decades to an estimated 17.5 million people. Those who live in Shenzhen are disproportionately of working age. They come to work the factories that create everything from electronics to clothes, and also to run the many, many other industries that have grown up as the city exploded outwards. They work hard and long hours, often a 9-9-6 split (9 to 9, 6 days a week). This is a tour for them of parts of the country they will mostly never see, a celebration of the history of a country they have built so rapidly that parts of it are being constructed in the background of most of the photos I took.

the buildings in the front are model size

I don’t doubt that those who attend the park who are Chinese (and it is mostly Chinese people) often enough have a better critical grasp of the experience than I do; I also do not wish to imply that the denizens of Shenzhen are all blind dupes to whatever messages the state passes on in a theme park. But it’s also possible to imagine that, for all its curious dancing and claims about Taiwan and Tibet, the park might in many ways be a chance for visitors to appreciate, enjoy, explore, to think about and “experience” their country as a varied whole in a way they might never do any other way.

In any case, to turn the lens around: whatever other visitors might have experienced, at a certain point, I found I had little to offer in further analysis as a critical theorist. I could only consider myself critically in that moment. This reversal allowed me to contemplate the questions that I usually think about not as an audience member but as a writer: how much simplification is too much? What is offensive? Are there instances where fun and ease are enough, and complexity can be put on old?

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In truth, much of the writing I do for the public works a bit like a theme park. I write about something and, frankly, I know that only 20% of my readers are likely to have read, or go read, the original text. I am giving them a tour of an idea and they are unlikely to visit it themselves. I also generally feel I’d better make the whole thing fun or else very directly relevant, or else they’ll check out (my agent always tells me: make sure you are good company on the page!) If I’m very lucky, I add a bit of my own analysis somewhere, I “complexify” an idea after I present it, I peel back a bias, I add an unexpected twist or teach a concept. But also, a lot of the time, I’m just giving a tour of an idea, and a quick one at that. And I know it.

What matters most to you as a reader, then? Simplicity? Accuracy? Fun? Seriousness? Many readers claim they want something sophisticated. But I always think about what Ash Sarkar noted about Novara Media readers—who tend to consider themselves critical or even intellectual. These readers always claimed they wanted fewer hot takes and more in-depth critical pieces. They did not, however, click on those longer pieces or read them. They kept to the gossip and snarky takedowns. Ah well.

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The next day, my partner and I took a 6 hour high speed rail train north to Zhangjiajie, the hanging mountains of China. (These are the mountains that are in the movie Avatar). Tourists now in non-model-China, we were frankly impressed and alarmed in turns by the way we could board the train without actually collecting our tickets, for the state already had our faces registered, and the machines recognized us as passengers on the train. I also learned one can have food delivered at each stop by ordering on one’s phone, an experience I’ve never had in any other country.

We expected a nature-based experience, and didn’t know what else to expect. My partner is the sort who does 3-day camping trips with everything on his back, and even for this day out he carried a Camelbak backpack full of water. I worried a bit about the degree to which I’d face a fear of heights.

This all proved entirely unnecessary. For Zhangjiajie is a breathtaking piece of nature but also a shopping mall (to only one degree less than Splendid China). One arrives at the top of the massive, awe-inspiring mountain plateau in a glass elevator, and immediately enters an area with roasting meat, souvenirs of every kind including 3d printed dragons and toy guns, ice cream, and vaguely coercive system of photo-taking-for-profit.

This sounds like whining or snobbery, but in truth, we kind of loved it. We simply did so with all the dissonance one might imagine between our expectations and reality. It was at no point a hiking experience in the way one might expect as a naive American tourist, which is what I am. In America, where I grew up, many of the national parks have an easy access area somewhere, but also a great many “hard” modes. One might find a trail that provides a many-days hike where one must bring all one’s own food and water and is expected to “leave no trace”. There are bears, there are rattlesnakes. I’ve seen both on the same hike. My parents once took me to a national park in Oregon where, if you step off the path, you might put your foot through the earth’s crust and into boiling sulfuric acid.

The upside, I suppose, of all this toughness and inaccessibility is that many of these paths are solitary adventures, and it is somewhat rare to encounter other people. Nature is in some sense “preserved”, or made to appear so. The fantasy as a hiker is then that one is a lone individual, slowly achieving something painful and difficult, and one at last arrives at a point of view no one else can attain. It reminds me of the liberal ideal of the “independent thinker” that I write against in my forthcoming book (out this week!). It appeals to me, this fantasy of the long uphill hike on one’s own and the summit. And it’s kind of silly.

In any case, the Chinese tourists (and it was nearly all Chinese tourists, with some Koreans and Russians thrown in, and then very rarely a Westerner), were not engaged in anything like this. One could barely pass anyone to walk any faster on the paths. At one point we were fenced in for a kilometer so on a straight paved path with a security camera every couple meters (that pace of cameras is common in China, really). Every 20 minutes or so all day long, there was another station in the path with fast food, some of which was KFC or MacDonalds, and lots of which was the tasty street food that Chinese people adore: stinky fermented tofu, sausages wrapped in omelet, dumplings with no specified fillings. There were more photo stations, some with ethnic dress of the region for rental. There was a station where you could wear first-person-viewing glasses as someone flew a drone off the cliffs and around the most impressive rock formations.

We enjoyed it and felt uncomfortable about it, often in equal measure. The next day, on a neighboring mountain, my partner, still in his intensive hiking gear, mused to me “I dislike this less than I thought I would.” Which is impressive, because he also was clearly and truly annoyed by the way one could hardly weave one’s way around the loud, chatty, endlessly-on-their phones Chinese tourists, some of whom were live-streaming seemingly random parts of the park (the chairlift landing?) to what were presumably a number of followers online.

There are, obviously, at least two questions at stake when it comes to my touristy Western ambivalence. One is about a cultural gap too wide to bridge, not only in a Substack post, but to some degree in a lifetime. Who are we (well, which we? Who am I specifically) to judge how the Chinese should visit their most beautiful mountain peaks? (or, as it turned out, the Buddhist temple at Tianmen mountain, which was full of reverent worshippers bowing and kneeling, but which also mysteriously contained a ping-pong table?). How should I, or anyone, understand the tomb of a Maoist general that is now accompanied by an extensive McDonalds that sells McFlurries out the front window?

I honestly cannot venture a take here, not for all my fancy degrees. (My Hong Kong friends, however, admonish me gently: surely there might be different things at stake between when one is sharing an idea through a piece of writing and when a country is deciding how it should present and frame major items of cultural and often contested heritage! The friend is right, of course; I hope someone else closer to the matter produces this critique, though.) What I take from this analytic impossibility on my end is that, much though I use the universal “we” in much of my writing, no such “we” can be counted on. What it means to appreciate something truly and seriously, or even truly and un-seriously, is not the sole domain of any culture and it is certainly not the domain of those who mostly wield concepts for a living. I have often suspected the same is true in other areas: are those who write fanfiction any less reverent than religious converts? Does the makeup artist appreciate the human form more, less or just differently? It seems to me that where appreciation or taste lies is always more varied or dependent than allows for quips and witticisms can allow.

Each culture and class position has its intuitions about matters of aesthetics and taste. My partner, having lived in China a long time, mused that perhaps the “cool” that is often made a part of Western marketing—a product itself a so many marketing campaigns and consumer aspirations—simply doesn’t translate over in any obvious way in China, instead dissipating, fracturing and transforming on impact, which is why one sees (for example) so many more people dressed in something bordering on cosplay just as part of their daily life. Bourgeois people like me take museums seriously and the theatre but look down upon whatever they see as tackier or less educational. Yet it remains to be seen if their pilgrimages are really any more holy or wholesome for all that they add a few more facts to the mix. A Chinese company invented TikTok, which is simultaneously one of the tackiest platforms on earth and one of the most popular and influential educational platforms in the world.

Which brings me to the second question at stake here, one that is perhaps less culturally specific, and not about a cultural divide per se, of any kind. It is a question about the presentation of ideas to the public; it is a question on which I remain eternally divided: that of the task of popularization.

All my years working at The School of Life, people gently sneered about the work we put out. He’s a popularizer, they scoffed. Not real thinking. I have been turned down from academic funding and later told it had to do with The School of Life, by those who knew the committee members. (Whatever. Academic life and writing for the public truly are two separate things, for better or worse.)

But, I keep finding myself returning to this point over the course of my career: almost no one has ever read my academic work. Millions of people saw the TSOL videos. Ease of access through entertainment and simplification lets in so many more people who otherwise do not encounter an idea. On what basis should those of us who love ideas insist that we effectively drive large groups out as we make material hard?

Yes—I think it is worth asking the question this way around where having material feel difficult is a choice. I’d rather always do that than assume that a dumping of as much information and detail as possible is the “natural” way to present ideas. For otherwise we might fall victim to a fetishization of the difficult for its own sake, in hiking and in education alike. My partner mused that, when he once climbed Mt. Snowdon, he reached the top and discovered a bunch of older people were already there, comfortably drinking tea in a cafe. They had come up the mountain by a train on the other side. He felt somehow cheated—he had worked so hard to reach the top! (He had expected a view of the top by himself!) But also, he mused, how else would these older people ever have seen this view? And shouldn’t they get to see the view?

We couldn’t help but feel the same about the tourists of Zhangjiajie sometimes. There were so many, and they were so loud and so in the way of what we imagined our ideal pace and path to be. But it was their mountain, after all, wasn’t it? China is a country of nearly one and a half billion people, why should it be anything but easy for thousands of them to be there each day?

I don’t have any particular answers in this post, not about the amusement park or the national park or even about writing. In other moments, I love and value difficulty, and feel worried about the ease with which AI replaces (for example) the difficulty of formulating one’s own thoughts in an essay.

Nevertheless, visiting a very foreign place brought me back to these questions I ask myself when I set about writing for the “public.” There are, of course, really many publics. Some of my Substack posts are more for one public, some for another. In each case I can almost think of myself as building a different size boat. The smaller boats I craft in some pieces can bring fewer people along. A smaller boat tends to go farther and show people a more specialized, theoretical niche part of the world during a possibly choppier ride. The larger boat brings everyone, and it’s slower and steadier. Maybe the view isn’t as good, or maybe it is, in reality, for those who board. But being in Splendid China and Zhangjiajie made me think again: who am I to deprive the larger group of folks of the view or the boat or the journey? Why is a smaller boat better, really? Is it, most of the time?

For most things I write about, for most things I care about, I have yet to be able to justify the smaller boat. Maybe not all writing is or can or should be an amusement park, perhaps some of it must be harder work than a gondola ride to a KFC. But, I suspect, the reasons for difficulty and obscurity rather than ease and simplicity are less common and less obvious than anxious writers and academic-types, or foreign tourists, might believe.