The Ghost of Authenticity

For here, where hope is in the future,
The present doesn’t haunt the day
With the authenticity of a past
In which every bullet-pocked wall
Is preserved under bullet-proof glass
In Berlin’s New Museum
And the copper piping left exposed
In London’s warehouse conversions
And the wooden floor uncarpeted
In New York’s loft apartments.

For here, the remade past lives on
In the rebuilt Confucian temple
The replanted Qing Dynasty park
The reconstructed poet’s pavilion
The refurbished composer’s courtyard
From which the cobwebs have been swept
The embalming fluid drained
The lid unscrewed from the aspic jar
And the signs warning ‘Do not Touch!’
Replaced by an offer to sample.

For here, girls in traditional dress
Of the Bai people of Yunnan
Pose for the cameras unaccused
Of cultural appropriation
Buy flowers picked by peasants free
Of the guilt of exploitation
Purchase every faked antique unstained
By the sin of commercialisation
For everything’s for sale, past and future,
In the now of China’s present.

And nothing here is more Chinese
Than women dressed in ethnic chic
Dancing in sync to a disco beat
In a bar serving regional cuisine
Whose patrons cannot tear their eyes
From the smartphones on their table
And the only applause is the noise
Of sucked-up bowlfuls of noodles
For here, manners are as absent
As the ghost of the authentic.

— Dali Old Town (June 2024)

• • • • •

Although intensely proud of what it uniformly describes as its 5,000-year-old history, China appears not to share the European concept of authenticity. From my early impressions, this may be one of the key differences between the two civilisations. As I saw in my travels across China, the Chinese think nothing of rebuilding demolished, vandalised or lost towns, pavilions, parks or temples, dressing up in the ethnic dress of the numerous tribes, peoples and cultures that compose their civilisation, or of constructing a concrete path, metal staircase or glass bridge across landscapes we in Europe would agonise about preserving. While revering a past that in Europe, under our colonisation by US-manufactured ideologies, we do everything to denigrate and repudiate, the Chinese see no practical difference between a thirteenth-century Confucian temple and the building replicating it constructed in the last 50 years, when the latter continues to be used as a place of prayer and contemplation.

As I walked through the eighth-century, but largely reconstructed, Dali Old Town in the province of Yunnan, whose cobbled streets were packed with Chinese tourists dressed up in the traditional dress of the Bai people, it struck me that this was reflective of different attitudes not to the past but to the future. I doubt there’s a person in the West today who thinks the future of their country will be better than its past. In China it’s the opposite. The Chinese people I’ve spoken with are immensely proud of the achievements of their country since the ‘century of shame’ under colonial occupation, deeply respectful of the legacy of their ancient past, and full of confidence about what the future holds. Accusing them of crass commercialisation or a lack of authenticity — or even of a lack of table manners — would, I imagine, mean nothing to them, except as an expression of our declining faith in our own moribund civilisation.