„It’s raining here …“(Shanghai February 1973)

At least since Marco Polo’s travels, the Middle Kingdom has been a well-known mystery. Barely any other country is the subject of so much writing, research and dreaming here in Central Europe as China. Only little of it contributes to a better understanding of the country, its history and its people.

Every visitor to the country realizes: China is different from what you expect. The writer of this postcard has visited the country and gives us a China-typical mishmash of contradictions: On the one hand a strip of three stamps from the 1971 series “50 years Communist Party” in the typical “socialist realism” style of the Cultural Revolution, showing marching workers and peasants presenting Mao’s little red book. On the other hand two stamps from the series celebrating the completion of the “Red Flag” irrigation canal, in the style of classical Chinese landscape painting. On the one hand propaganda for a policy that wants to destroy all “ancient culture”, on the other hand exactly this ancient culture.

By 1973, the “terror phase” of the Cultural Revolution was already over, and Nixon’s “ping-pong diplomacy” opened up the country a little. However, the Cultural Revolution is not over. It is understandable that in such a situation a Western visitor writes a rather trivial message to his family: “Ihr Lieben, bin gut in Shanghai angekommen, warte auf den Weiterflug. Hier regnet es. Viele liebe Grüße, Euer Vati” (Dear ones, I arrived well in Shanghai, waiting for the connecting flight. It’s raining here. Many greetings, your dad). In the end, this is comforting: It is actually raining in China, too. Not everything is different.