Cultural Hybridization: Chinese Carnival in Bavarian China and Sino-German Relations

On "Crazy Thursday" at the beginning of each year since 1954, the Teutonic inhabitants of a charming medieval town in Germany celebrates the national day of Bavarian China (Bayrisch-China) by holding a Chinese Carnival. They parade in colorful Chinese costumes with an emperor presiding, and party into the morning hours.The emperor in his dragon carriage is saluted by his subjects with joyful cries of "Kille-Wau!"

Frenzy on the Podium in Front of City Hall, Crazy Thursday, 2006

Is this the figment of imagination of a feverish mind? No, it is a fascinating instance of cultural hybridization in a globalized world, and has recently received extensive coverage in Chinese language media [ch].

On January 31 of 2008, the townspeople of Dietfurt will once again celebrate "Crazy Thursday" (Unsinniger Donnerstag). Dietfurt on the Altmühl, the "Town of the seven valleys," is a small town of 2,800 people located in Bavaria, about an hour's drive from Munich and Nuremberg. The tradition of "Crazy Thursday" dated back to 1880, but the practice of dressing up in Chinese costume in parades began only in 1928. The celebration did not become a regular celebration of the national day of Bavarian China until 1954, when Egid Prock was elected as the first emperor, Ma-Ler-Gie. Since 2001, Fritz Koller, a hospital worker, has presided as Emperor Ko-Houang-Di 高皇帝.

Emperor Ko-Huang-Di Presiding Over Crazy Thursday, 2006

However, the association of Dietfurt with China, as manifested by not just the Chinese Carnival, but also by its alternate name of Bavarian China and its inhabitants calling themselves Chinese, appears to have dated much farther back in time. There were documents dated in the 1860s that referred to the town as "Chinatown" (Chinesenviertel) and the people as "Chinese" (Chinesen). In the central square of Dietfurt is a Chinese fountain, with a fat and squat Chinese mandarin with his arms outstretched and sprouting water. Near the fountain is a stone tablet with the inscription "Dietfurt, Bavarian China." There are even two versions of a national anthem of Bavarian China.

Chinese Fountain, Central Square of Dietfurt

How did this association of Dietfurt with China, culminating in the annual Chinese Carnival, come about? According to local lore, during medieval times the bishop of Eichstatt sent an agent to collect from Dietfurt when taxes were in arrears. The townspeople of Dietfurt thwarted the tax collector by barricading themselves inside their town walls. The collector reported back to the bishop, comparing the Dietfurters to the Chinese who shut themselves in with their Great Wall.

The Chinese media [ch], however, preferred a second explanation. Several hundred years ago Dietfurt traded with China, exchanging its silver and handicrafts for Chinese silk, porcelain and tea. The townspeople became fond of Chinese culture over time, and created their own version of Chinese festivities. It is unclear whether this account favored by the Chinese reports is based on local accounts, or whether it represents speculations by the Chinese. The latter may be more likely as the German Web sources make no mention of this version of how Dietfurt came to develop its association with China.

What is interesting, however, is that the first version emphasizes the insularity of the Chinese, while the second version signifies China's global connections and the allure of Chinese civilization for foreign peoples even in the distant past. The second version, therefore, is in keeping with the Chinese government's current goals of pursuing a peaceful rise and extending Chinese soft power in the global community.

The Chinese Carnival in Bavarian China has been known to the Chinese since the 1990s if not earlier: in 1997 a high-ranking delegation from Beijing visited Dietfurt during the Crazy Thursday celebrations. Why then the recent flurry of mainland Chinese media reports on Chinese Bavaria? Could it be, as one Taiwan source speculated, part of a concerted effort by the Chinese government to mend fences with Germany [ch] after relations took a nose dive following Chancellor Angela Merkel's Sept. 23, 2007 meeting with the Dalai Lama?

If so, then perhaps this picture of a Bavarian China lady [ch], wearing a Chinese costume displaying a design with the Olympic rings and a Chinese dragon, which features prominently in Chinese media coverage of Dietfurt, is symbolic of the desire of the Chinese for better relations with Germany and also a successful Olympic Games in Beijing.

Dietfurt Lady in Chinese Costume with Olympic & Dragon Motifs

Multimedia Supplement (German language sources only)

Dietfurt's official Web site has a lot of information and multimedia features on the town, including: Tourism Promotional Video with brief clip of Chinese Carnival (Quicktime): English; Chinese; Photo gallery of the emperors of Bavarian China since 1954

www.chinesenfasching.info: Bayrisch China feiert. Ein Faschingsfest das am Unsinnigen Donnerstag in ganze Stadt Dietfurt feiert

Fotogalerie aus Neumarkt Oberpfalz - Chinesenfasching

KBUMM: Dietfurt - ChinesenFasching

The 300 Billion Yuan Club and The Trillion Yuan Club

The 300 Billion Yuan Club (3000亿俱乐部) consists of cities in China that have an annual GDP of 300 billion yuan (about US$40 billion) or more. The municipalities of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing are not included in the tabulation, as they are equivalent in administrative rank to provinces. The designation of a 300 Billion Yuan Club signifies both huge regional disparities in economic income, as well as the prevalent preoccupation in the Chinese government and media with the size of the GDP as the measurement of merit for a region and its political leaders. In an earlier post, I pointed to a movement under way to liberate the thought of the Chinese elite and masses from a slavish devotion to economic gigantism towards a spiritual renewal with more attention to civic participation and social concerns.

In 2006, the 6 cities on the 300 Billion Yuan Club [ch] are all located in the booming coastal provinces of Guangdong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shandong: Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Wuxi, and Qingdao. In 2007, this exclusive club added 7 more cities: Foshan, Ningbo, Nanjing, Chengdu, Dongguan, Wuhan, and Dalian. Two of the new members are outside the coastal region: Wuhan and Chengdu.

Astonishingly, the GDP of any member of this club exceeds the GDP of any of the 5 poorest provinces in China: Gansu, Guizhou, Hainan, Qinghai, and Tibet. Top-ranked Guangzhou in the 300 Billion Yuan Club has a GDP that is almost ten times that of Qinghai Province!

The directly administered municipalities all have GDP's exceeding 300 billion yuan.
Beijing's estimated GDP in 2007 is about 900 billion yuan (US$124 billion). In 2006, Shanghai became the first municipality to exceed 1 trillion yuan in GDP (1.03 trillion yuan, or about US$129 billion). In comparison, in 2006 Chongqing has a GDP of 348.62 billion yuan (US$45.2 billion), while Tianjin has a GDP of 433.8 billion yuan (US$54.4 billion). The yardstick for measurement of economic achievement for province-level administrative units is the Trillion Yuan Club (GDP万亿俱乐部), and Shanghai is the only municipality to qualify as of this date (although Beijing is close). The members of this club are: Guangdong; Jiangsu; Shandong; Zhejiang; Henan; Hebei; Shanghai; Liaoning; Sichuan. The geographic distribution again indicates an overwhelming concentration of wealth in the coastal region.

Although Shanghai and the Lower Yangzi region have captured much of the limelight in Western coverage of China's economic progress in recent years, Guangdong (particularly the Pearl River Delta near Hong Kong and Macau) clearly still retains a leading position in the economic hierarchy in China. Guangdong ranks number 1 in the Trillion Yuan Club, while Guangzhou and Shenzhen hold the top two spots in the 300 Billion Yuan Club. In 2006 Guangzhou became the first city in mainland China to achieve a per capita GDP of US$10,000, threshhold for a developed economy by World Bank standards. In comparison, Beijing's per capita GDP is below US$8000 as of 2008, and Shanghai's per capita GDP was just below US$7,200 in 2006. It should be noted, however, that China's per capita GDP calculations include only the registered population (i.e. people with hukou and are permanent residents), but excludes the migrant population which is very sizable in cities like Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Beijing and Shanghai.

Among the new members of the 300 Billion Yuan Club are the Guangdong cities of Foshan and Dongguan. Both cities have grown at the annual rate of over 19% from 2004 to 2007. Particularly remarkable is the case of Dongguan, "once a sleepy town and now an industrial power in the making" since the late 1990s. Today it is a world leader in the production of toys, furniture, electronics and other commodities, and also home to one of the excesses of global consumerism, the world's largest mall, the South China Mall, which opened in 2005 with a gross leasable area of 7.1 million square feet.

South China Mall, World's Largest Mall

A New Wave of Liberation of Thought Under Way in China?

China Times (Taiwan) [ch] reports that the phrase "liberation of thought"(思想解放) has been appearing with increasing frequency in the Chinese media, indicating that a new movement for the liberation of thought may be under way. Leading local officials who assumed their new posts after the 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, including Yu Zhengsheng 俞正声, secretary of the CCP's Shanghai Municipal Committee, and Bo Xilai 薄熙来, secretary of the Chongqing Municipal Committee, have been bandying this phrase in their speeches.

Attracting the greatest amount of media attention, however, has been Wang Yang 汪洋, the secretary of the Guangdong Provincial Committee, who upon assuming his post immediately called for "a new round of liberation of thought" (新一轮思想解放) without fear of getting one's head chopped off (不怕杀头). In response, Ren Jiantao 任剑涛, the president of the College of Public Administration of Sun Yat-sen University, even revived the call for "Shenzhen to boldly plan a special political zone" (深圳应大胆筹划政治特区), voiced by former Guangdong party secretary Ren Zhongyi 任仲夷.

As party boss from 1980 to 1985, Ren Zhongyi led "the transformation that has today made Guangdong the richest part of China and the source of one third of the exports that constitute China’s growing footprint on the global economy." Ren, however, also became one of a handful of senior Communist cadres who strongly supported political reform, along with Li Rui 李锐, former private secretary to Mao Zedong, and Hu Jiwei 胡绩伟, former editor of the People’s Daily.

Ren Zhongyi accompanying Deng Xiaoping in attendance at Spring Festival celebration in Guangzhou, February 1984

In 2000, Ren Zhongyi wrote an editorial in Southern Daily, the official paper of the Guangzhou party committee, in which he subtly called for an end to the monopoly of power held by the Communist Party: "Improving the leadership of the party means establishing a system that can effectively supervise and constrain the party. . . . Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The Communist Party is no exception to that rule. The Communist Party supervising itself is like having the left hand supervise the right hand. That just won't do. The party needs to be supervised not just by the party but by the people." One year before Ren's death in 2005, he went even further in an interview with a Guangdong magazine, “We cannot just set up special economic zones but must create special political zones as well. We must experiment by allowing the direct election of leaders at the county and city levels in certain areas, and then move on to provincial leaders.”

If Ren Jiantao's revival of Ren Zhongyi's call for special political zones is indicative of a new political wave, then Guangdong may once again be One Step Ahead in China (title of Ezra Vogel's book on Guangdong under reform in the 1980s).

A January 19, 2008 editorial on the liberation of thought [ch] in Guangzhou Evening News 羊城晚报 identifies 3 earlier phases of the liberation of thought after the Cultural Revolution. The first came in 1978, when a Guangming Daily editorial espousing "Practice is the Sole Criterion of Truth 实践是检验真理的唯一标准" set in motion an ideological debate that liberated the Chinese people from the dogmatism of Mao Zedong Thought, and paved the way for the return of Deng Xiaoping to power and the beginning of economic reform. The second phase came in 1992, when Deng Xiaoping's strong affirmation of economic reform on the Shenzhen model during his Southern Tour liberated the Chinese economy from the worship of the planned economy model. In 1997, the 15th National Party Congress endorsed the selling off of state-owned enterprises and the transition from socialist-style state ownership to a system of share-holding. This marked the liberation from the worship of the system of state ownership.

In his Jan. 12, 2008 speech [ch] at Guangzhou, Ren Jiantao pointed out that in thirty years of reform, economic achievements far outstripped social and political progress, and the focus on promotion of material well-being has been accompanied by spiritual impoverishment. Reform has depended only on the words and actions of a small number of the elite. To achieve a breakthrough against the limitations of reform, the Chinese people must liberate their thinking, become actively engaged in exercising their civic duties and responsibilities, and contribute towards the building of a civic society characterized by democracy, rule of law, and constitutionalism.

In a similar vein, the Guangzhou Evening News editorial [ch] calls for the liberation of the citizens and public servants of Guangdong from the blind worship of growth while paying little attention to its attendant costs. The leadership must free itself from single-minded focus on growth in per capita GDP to guide the cadres to consider how to contain or manage the negative impact of economic policy on the people's quality of life, including environmental costs, demand for social welfare, and growing crime rates.

This liberation of thought is consonant with the policies of the party leadership under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao to promote scientific development and social harmony. According to China Times [ch], the call for "a new round of liberation of thought" from the local leadership (the highest ranking of whom, including Wang Yang, Yu Zhengsheng and Bo Xilai, are also members of the Politburo of the Central Committee), is also echoed in some commentaries from the party center. For example, Shi Zhihong 施芝鸿, the vice-director of the Policy Research Office of the Central Committee (中央政策研究室), which is the principal think-tank of the Chinese Communist Party, penned a Jan. 5 2008 editorial in the Liberation Daily 解放日报, in which he identified the liberation of thought as one of the magical weapons (法宝) for developing socialism with Chinese characteristics. Given the special status of Liberation Daily among the party newspapers and the role of the Policy Research Office in drafting documents for the Central Committee, Shi's editorial is likely to be an authoritative statement from the center supporting initiatives from local party leaders in South China, in particular Guangdong Province.

According to Ren Jiantao [ch], Guangdong enjoys various advantages in striving towards a new breakthrough in reform in comparison to other provinces. Because of the proximity of the province to Hong Kong and Macau, the social psychology of the Cantonese is receptive to reform. Moreover, Guangdong has thirty years of achievements and experiences in reform to draw on, and possesses substantial economic wealth and resources. Indeed, Guangdong has the responsibility to be the leader in the next phase of reform in China.