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| MARTIN REGG COHN/TORONTO STAR |
| A photo of Karl Marx hangs on a wall in the
Underground City in Beijing. Dug mostly by hand,
the late chairman Mao Zedong ordered the
underground bomb shelters built across the country
in
1969. | | The tunnel vision of Chairman Mao
Shelters built for Soviet attack
Beijing facility
well-kept secret
MARTIN
REGG COHN
ASIA BUREAU
BEIJINGA uniformed soldier leads the way down: 10
metres below ground it is dark, dank, disorienting.
Water drips from the ceilings of the vaulted tunnels,
seeps from the damp walls and pools along the earthen floors.
The trickle hasn't stopped for 35 years.
Locked behind thick gas-proof metal doors, this is
where millions of Chinese were destined to wait out the war
had the Soviet Union attacked a generation ago. This labyrinth
below street level would keep the masses fed and watered,
would be their salvation.
Today, the tunnels are slippery, eerie, empty.
The place smells of human sweat and reeks of rat
droppings. The humidity is suffocating. The cool 18C air is
bracing in summer, brutal in winter.
Dug mostly by hand on orders of the Great Helmsman, Mao
Zedong, this Beijing shelter survives intact a testament to
his vision, a monument to his blindness. Motivated by Mao's
musings, inspired by his cult of personality, the masses
toiled until the tunnels took shape.
His words are still etched into the walls:
"Dig tunnels deep, store grain everywhere and never
seek hegemony," proclaims one big character slogan. "Prepare
for War, Prepare for Famine," warns another.
"People's War" screams one wall poster lit by bare
bulbs. "The American Empire Will be Defeated!" promises
another.
Emblazoned in bold red paint, the admonitions have
endured the ravages of time if not quite the shifting sands
of geopolitics and the vagaries of economics. Fearing nuclear
war with the Soviets, the founder of Communist China exhorted
the masses in 1969 to build underground bomb shelters across
the motherland.
It took them 10 years. "The total length is greater
than the Great Wall," my military guide, Wu Dong Mei,
announces breathlessly. "But only a small percentage of the
tunnel network is open to the public, less than 1 per cent.
The rest remains under military control."
In fact, the Great Wall is estimated to be up to 7,000
kilometres long. Wu boasts that the underground tunnels,
roughly 3 to 5 metres wide, total more than 12,000 kilometres
in dozens of cities across China.
Clad in a camouflage uniform, Wu warns that no
photographs are allowed of this military facility. But after
much discussion with my translator about the achievements of
the People's Liberation Army, she relents.
Like most shelters, this one features a battlefield
hospital, school, granary, cinema, public baths and barber
shop. An underground hotel also operated for a time, most
recently sheltering migrant workers who flooded the capital in
the 1980s.
A mural shows labourers in peak caps laden with picks
and shovels, digging with their bare hands. A framed poster of
Karl Marx decorates one desolate tunnel; others are graced
with schematic identification charts showing Soviet-era
bombers and American attack aircraft.
The sole public entrance lies hidden in a hutong, or
low-rise neighbourhood that retains its traditional Chinese
architecture. A nondescript storefront in the centrally
located Damochang hutong announces the Underground City, which
was designed to safeguard most of its residents.
Today, the entrance is guarded by a handful of bored
soldiers no longer fearful of enemy attack but braced for
foreign tourists. Most of the other hatches have been
shuttered, or cordoned off by the 25-centimetre-thick steel
doors.
The tunnels remain one of Beijing's best-kept secrets,
a forgotten city that few local residents are aware of. Most
visitors are Taiwanese, and on this day a clutch of tourists
emerges, marvelling at the maze.
"This tunnel is a result of bad historical times, it's
impossible to imagine building it now," says insurance
salesperson Su Dan Chen, 35, on her first visit to the
mainland.
"Ordinary people want peaceful and better lives, and
just the chance to make more money," adds another Taiwanese
tourist who, still nervous about visiting Beijing, gives only
his surname, Wang.
In deference to the visitors, the atheistic authorities
have improvised a Buddhist shrine beside the exit where
tourists can give thanks for the peaceful times. The
improbable juxtaposition of Buddha statues and Mao busts is a
sign of cohabitation in these changing times.
While the tunnels withstood the Soviet threat, they are
crumbling under the weight of an American capitalist invasion.
Highrise office towers are sinking their foundations into the
once impregnable tunnels, undermining the underground city
that Mao built.
Happily, they were never needed. But if the Communist
titans in Beijing and Moscow had gone to war as they did
briefly in a 1969 border skirmish that unnerved Mao the
panicked masses might have emerged from this subterranean
sanctuary to see their beloved Beijing in ruins.
Today, as it turns out, their city is unrecognizable
recast as a modern capital in advance of the 2008 Olympics.
Amidst the demolitions, the best-preserved template of
the capital's recent past can be found here, below ground, in
the Beijing Air Raid Shelter. The maze of dark tunnels that
wind beneath city intersections and along subway routes is a
reminder of the city plan from 35 years ago.
Fading road signs point to branch tunnels radiating
outward to the Beijing Railway Station, the Summer Palace,
Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. In the landmark book,
The Private Life Of Chairman Mao, his personal
physician Zhisui Li wrote that "Beijing is still crisscrossed
with these underground tunnels, and keepers of the underground
maze boasted that the entire population of the city could be
underground in three minutes."
Li wrote that the Chinese army's corps of engineers
secretly built a huge underground complex "to house the
military high command in time of war. It contains a highway
large enough for four trucks abreast."
The network of tunnels connected the Great Hall of the
People with a military hospital and headquarters. Despite the
anachronistic appearance of the tunnels, and the conversions
to other uses, such as restaurants and hotels, the authorities
have publicly acknowledged that many bomb shelters remain in
place and are in some cases being rebuilt in Beijing.
In the wake of 9/11, the Chinese government has deemed
it premature to consign the tunnels to the dustbin of history.
Additional
articles by Martin Regg Cohn
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