Renata Pisu
Qui Pechino

This volume from the Touring Club Italiano is a little-known book, found by chance at a secondhand stall. Awkward to handle, large yet short, clad in a plain gray cover, it is, all things considered, an unattractive ornament for any library. Here Beijing is not just an educational book, full of photographs and graphic embellishments (various scans of paper-cut images typical of China), aimed at informing anyone interested in the Northern Capital that we know as Beijing, but it is also, thanks to Renata Pisu's observations, a significant document on China before Mao's death, on its new way of conceiving society, life, and culture. The China that emerges from this book is a revolutionary country, not only in name but in its conception of a new state: a socialist state that claims progress goes beyond industrialization, where well-being is set in opposition to consumerism. Although noticed by few, the China of the people's communes was the first Marxist state to view positivism critically, no longer judging it the necessary answer to every human need; it is the first country where distrust of hierarchies becomes central, referring to the mass line theorized by Mao, collapsing the idea that intellectuals necessarily have superior ideas compared to the man working in the factory or in the fields. It is a China independent from Western and Soviet thought, a country that praises Stalin for his historical role but has the courage to raise its hand and say: "Times have changed: development does not mean urbanization, which has become synonymous with alienation, but a return to the countryside." In fact, continuing this ideal reading, one comes to the conclusion that "in China, the city will tend to disappear," recalling the radical reading of Maoism that took hold in Cambodia during the same years.
Brimming with curiosity due to its illustrative nature, for example, on the particular architecture of a perfectly south-oriented Beijing (just open Google Earth for visual proof), with the Forbidden City having its back to the north due to spiritual fear of invasions from the north, the book, beneath its anecdotes, also conceals other and more profound information. Starting from afar, Pisu reports the ideas of various Sinologists, who observe how imperial China had the aspect of a microcosm: in every house, the entire China, the entire China as a large house; despite the communist revolution, despite the new ideas of that China of 1976, the microcosm, "the great garden," has maintained the same structure: students who, after finishing middle school, are obligatorily sent to work in the fields or in a factory, likewise government officials are called, in turn, to the same obligation; a China where factories are open organisms, where families and tourists enter to watch how workers work, where agricultural communes host hundreds of people and every day new ones come to study their practices, because "ignorant is he who does not know the five grains." Everything is interconnected within a large house, where the separation between city and countryside is universally shunned.
Renata Pisu, who had already lived for many years in China at the time, talks about all this without praise or condemnation; there are no ironic comments on the regime's policies, unlike in other essays of the time on the communist world (see "Russia" by Enzo Biagi, who, by force of circumstances, had the eye of a tourist), allowing the reader to search for meaning within a society so different from ours. It is an interesting snapshot, as I was saying, because today the China of Qui Pechino is not only in contrast to the metropolitan West, but it would also seem a society distant to today's Chinese: rejection of consumerism, suspicion of mass production, the search for an alternative to industrialization, the desire to produce a new man uninterested in profit, all this, by 2018, no longer exists even in the East. Qui Pechino is a significant testimony, a small gem that deserves to be read not so much to praise or criticize the regime of Mao Tse-tung, but to cast an ideal eye on a society radically different from the stagnant one in which we live.