German and Japanese colonialism may have shaped Qingdao's past, but sailing promises to reshape its future, writes Fintan O'Toole
The man in the dark brown suit with gold-rimmed sunglasses is standing behind the wheel of a small ocean-going yacht. Even though the boat is tied up in the marina at Qingdao, one of China's best natural harbours, the Pacific swell rocks the floor beneath his feet and he flexes his knees like a veteran sailor. Beyond the harbour is the Yellow Sea and the cooling breezes that roll in with the waves promise a new kind of luxury, a new image of freedom. The appeal is summed up in the brochure that the sharp-suited salesman from the Seago Yacht Company holds under his arm:
"Yacht is a new thing in China. What is yacht? Not only the boat with engine but also the villa on the sea. It is private place for the family party or business convention. It trend of 21 century for rich level and high quality life to owning a yacht. Flying with the yacht in the rays of morning sun. Experience a different version of your life and a new way to enjoy your life. When enjoying a happy trip on the sea, you can relax your nerve and soul and finally you will gain the new power and inspiration." (sic)
The man in the brown suit is a member of China's new rich, a disproportionate number of whom are to be found in this pleasant, prosperous city of three million people in the central coastal province of Shandong. As close to Seoul as it is to Beijing (each city is an hour's flight away), its openness to Korea has made Qingdao one of the emblems of the Chinese economic miracle. In 1980, the city and its hinterland - containing seven million people altogether - had a GDP of just €480 million. In 1984, Qingdao became one of the first cities to be opened up to foreign investment by Deng Xiaoping's reforms, but by 1990, the GDP was still only €1.75 billion. Last year it was €27 billion. In 2005 alone, the city approved more than 2,500 projects funded by foreign investment. Of the world's top 500 companies, 77 have invested here.
BY FAR THE largest source of investment has been Korea, and the effects can be seen in the wide, well-planned streets, the slick corporate skyscrapers, the lovely seafront walkways and the yachts in the harbour. The man in the brown suit may have decided not to buy one on the day I saw him, but the chances are that he will soon. Having been chosen as the host city for the Olympic regatta in 2008 (Beijing, of course, has no coastal area in which to stage the events), Qingdao is happily re-branding itself as China's Sailing City. What makes this more than just another exercise in cheesy regional marketing is that the new image as an emblem of Chinese wealth is finally banishing Qingdao's old status as the ultimate emblem of Chinese humiliation. For most of the 20th century, Qingdao meant one thing only - the burning sense of shame that fuelled all the radical movements, nationalist and communist, that contended for control of China's destiny.
Looking out from a high vantage point in the seafront office of Li Fengli, deputy secretary general of the Qingdao Olympic Committee, over the majestic curve of a harbour that sweeps between two clusters of green hills, it is hard to imagine that one of the first battles of the first World War began here in September 1914 with the appearance of Japanese warships on the horizon. That battle is largely forgotten in the West, but it would be remembered for a very long time in China. What made it unforgettable was not China's involvement, but its lack of involvement. As definitive evidence of national decline, two foreign powers - Germany and Japan - fought for control of Qingdao.
You don't have to look too hard to be reminded that Qingdao began life as a German city.
First, there's the beer (known by the old transliteration Tsingtao) that dominates the Chinese market and adorns the menus of Chinese restaurants around the world - a brewing tradition inaugurated by the Germans in 1903. Then there's the architecture: walking around the old heart of Qingdao is a surreal experience. The red-tiled pitched roofs, half-timbered walls, high gables, wooden turrets and touches of Jugendstil decor belong to a genteel fin de siecle suburb of Munich. They formed the residences and official buildings of the German colonists who grabbed Qingdao from China in 1897, ostensibly in retaliation for the murder of two missionaries, but in reality as part of Germany's late push to enter the club of European imperial powers.
The German occupation of the harbour was not especially significant in itself, since Qingdao had been little more than a fishing village with a garrison attached, and the Germans were simply continuing what the British, French and Americans had already done in other parts of China. What made Qingdao an epoch-making issue was what happened during and after the first World War.
First, Japan, which was allied with Britain and France, used the opportunity of the war to besiege and capture Qingdao, giving it a strategic foothold in China. The Qing dynasty had been shamed in 1905 when Russia and Japan fought for control of its Manchurian homeland. Now, the fledgling Chinese Republic, founded after the abdication of the last emperor in 1911, had to watch as Germany and Japan fought for ownership of Qingdao. The victorious Japanese then demanded - and received - huge economic, commercial and political concessions from China.
WORSE WAS TO follow. China allied itself with Britain and France in 1917 and sent around 100,000 troops to the Western Front, where they served as labourers. The Chinese expected that, as one of the victorious powers, they would be rewarded at the Versailles peace conference at least with the return of Qingdao and the other colonies that the Germans had established in Shandong. In fact, Britain and France had already done a secret deal with Japan, agreeing that those colonies should be transferred from German to Japanese control.
It was the clearest possible statement that, in the realpolitik of the great powers, China simply didn't count.
The reaction shaped much of 20th-century Chinese history. On May 4th 1919, just after the news from Versailles reached China, 3,000 students from Beijing's colleges and universities gathered in front of the Tiananmen gate of the Forbidden City holding banners of protest. They listened to speeches and then moved on to the house of a government minister, Cao Rulin, who was regarded as being close to the Japanese. They wrecked the house, set it on fire and beat up its occupants, almost killing a former Chinese ambassador to Japan who was unfortunate enough to be visiting that day. In the evening, one of the student leaders Xu Deheng, afterwards a prominent Communist Party leader in the People's Republic of China, wrote a poem declaring that the demonstrators had acted to "purge clean the shame from Chinese hearts and minds".
Though they were not especially violent or dramatic by the standards of 20th-century Chinese history, it would be hard to overstate the importance of these events in the national psyche. May 4th, 1919 is to China what Easter 1916 is to Ireland or July 4th, 1776 is to the United States. Almost every major city in China has a square or a monument named after May 4th. Every major political movement has claimed to be the heir to May 4th, including the Nationalists who lost the civil war, the Communists who won it, and the student democracy movement which chose May 4th, 1989 to begin its ultimately tragic demonstrations at the same Tiananmen Gate. Qingdao may have reverted to Chinese control in 1945 after the defeat of Japan in the second World War, but its symbolic significance as the source of a shame that needs to be purged continues to shape Chinese politics in the 21st century.
The city has, of course, a May 4th Square of its own. But it's not the strident, agitprop rallying-point that might be expected. It's just a large open space on the sea-front, with pine trees, fountains, a meadow and a big, abstract, red spiral sculpture that seems to symbolise more a vague sense of aspiration than any aggressive defiance. Behind it are huge steel-and-glass corporate headquarters buildings. To either side are long, beautifully laid out walkways decorated with statues that illustrate the folkloric legends of super-smart kids, such as Cao Chong who figured out how to weigh an elephant or Sima Guang who saved a child by breaking the vat in which the child was drowning. The message seems as clear as it is benevolent: Qingdao's shame is being erased, not by bitterness and muscle-flexing, but by celebrating skill and invention.
The confidence that comes from economic success is the most effective antidote to the poison of historic humiliation. It also provides a way to embrace what remains an odd identity for a communist city: home to the rich man's sport of sailing. Looking out over the seafront where the Olympic boats will sail in 2008, Li Fengli, who is organising those events, happily admits that a sense of incongruity is justified. Such is the novelty of sailing as a sport that he and his colleagues have produced a colourful cartoon booklet for local primary schools, explaining what those odd boats and sails are for.
'ACTUALLY,' HE SAYS, "sailing is not that popular here. It's a sport for the rich. You need money to buy a boat and you need free time to sail it, and most Chinese people don't have enough of either. So, we are not a sailing nation. But more and more people are getting to the stage where this becomes a possibility. If you get rich, you buy an apartment and a car.
"What's next? Living by the sea, you get a surfboard, then maybe a small boat. Eventually, you get some people like the guy who bought a yacht for $2 million (€1.6 m) at a marine fair here recently. If someone can do that, it's a sign of economic power for the local people." Li Fengli sees the Olympic sailing regatta as a "marker pen which will highlight the city". It will, he hopes, create a sense in other countries that Qingdao means "something more than beer".
What is striking, though, is that these efforts to use sailing to build a new image for Qingdao have paid special attention to two particular countries - the former colonial powers, Germany and Japan. The maiden voyage of a yacht specially commissioned to mark the awarding of the Olympics to Qingdao was to Japan, and sailing teams from the Japanese city of Shimonoseki have been brought over for goodwill yacht races. An annual sailing week has been organised in conjunction with the German city of Kiel. In the pleasantest way possible, the pleasure boats on the water are a kind of reply to the warships in the harbour, showing the old colonial masters how well the city is getting on without them.
But all of this is also a decent way for Qingdao to reconcile itself to its own history. The publicity brochure for the Olympic regatta includes a double-page photographic panorama of Qingdao at the time of the German occupation. If you lift the flap in the centre, it folds out into a picture of the same scene today with gleaming towers, thrusting jetties, and huge cargo ships in the bay. But the German buildings remain prominent in the foreground, and the city now takes pride in its hybrid heritage.
"Qingdao is very different from other Chinese cities," says Li Fengli. "It's more like a European city in some ways. The Germans started planning the city and we're still following the basic plan they laid out. So people coming here have brought good things as well as bad. They call the US a big melting pot, maybe Qingdao is a small melting pot. Or maybe the city is like a book that's made up of many different pages. If you start tearing out pages, you end up with a book that you can't read."