Summering with the CCP

On the beach at Beidaihe

It’s August, which means, if you’re lucky, bright days on the seashore or cool dips in a lake. If you happen to be a senior leader in the Chinese Communist Party, August is the time to gather at a secluded resort known as Beidaihe, for a holiday full of meetings and politicking. Fun, right?

Summering at Beidaihe has been a ritual since Chairman Mao decamped there in the 1950s, and the name itself invokes intrigue and secrecy. But what’s the most storied Communist resort actually like? A few years ago, I took the short train ride from Beijing to find out.

As I wrote in the Financial Times in 2017:
The Soviets had their dachas at Yalta. Donald Trump and the US billionaire crowd prefer Palm Beach. For the Chinese Communist party, there’s Beidaihe, a moon-shaped beach on the shores of the Bohai Sea east of Beijing.

Regarding beaches, my personal opinion has always been and forever will be that you cannot beat the Jersey Shore. I accept that there are other tastes in this world, and some readers might prefer California, or Hawaii, or somewhere with palm trees. Beidaihe is like none of those.

It's way up on the Bohai Sea, which means the water is calm and a little murky, and there’s a cargo ship out there on the hazy horizon. The beaches are flat and the sand is brown and squishy. You can wander way out and still be only knee-deep in warm, softly lapping waves. It’s a place for splashing and wading, rather than surfing or actual swimming.

Tourists enjoy Beidaihe. Photo credit: Archie Zhang/Financial Times

As beaches go, Beidaihe’s most charming attribute is that the shoreline is scalloped into little coves. That was important, back in the day, because each arm of the Communist government had its own cove. If Zhou Enlai wanted to see Mao Zedong, for instance, he had to go from the State Council cove to Mao’s personal cove.

In fact, everything at Beidaihe was like that. Each government bureau had its own hotel, and its own designated villas, and its own section of the beach. In the town, you can still see sanatoria built for railway workers, and hotels built for PetroChina, the banking regulator or various ministries. There were even signs in Cyrillic, pointing towards “Moscow Beach”.

Mao Zedong (in striped robe) and Zhou Enlai meet on the beach.

If you were a cadre of a certain rank in China in the 1950s, you looked forward to your one allocated week at Beidaihe, when you stayed at your work unit’s hotel with colleagues from your office, and took your children to your designated cove. If you were lucky, you might run into a higher leader from your ministry, and get some face time. Like everything else in Maoist China, vacation at Beidaihe was a marker of carefully graded privilege and rank.

“Beidaihe was the only place in China you could get real ice cream,” said Sidney Rittenberg, an American who joined the Chinese Communist party in the 1940s. During summer holidays arranged by work units for elite cadres, he would bump into army leaders sunning themselves on the beach. “It was an amazing place. You could walk down the street past Mao’s house and there wasn’t a guard in sight. But you take one step on that lawn and you’re surrounded.”

Villas were reserved for the top leaders, many of whom stayed in Beidaihe for most of the summer, especially once they retired from the ‘front line’ of work. (Jiang Zemin kept up this grand tradition until very late in life). That’s what made Beidaihe ground-zero for politicking, especially in the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s – a bunch of retired men and their entourages, gossiping or playing cards, used their summer vacation to horse-trade political posts or generally make life more difficult for the working ministers who shuttled out from steamy Beijing to report to them.

Hu Jintao, who did not grow up in Mao’s elite court, found the Beidaihe scene very frustrating, and even tried to limit the summering season. He didn’t succeed. Xi Jinping, by contrast, learned to swim in the State Council cove as a kid. He seems to be just fine with the Beidaihe tradition.

Deng Xiaoping, taking a dip at Beidaihe. Credit: Xinhua

Anyone can stay in Beidaihe nowadays, except in late July and August when the roads are closed off and the hotels fill. But wander off the main roads and you’ll soon figure out where you are not supposed to be.

Naturally, I was most curious about the villas. Beidaihe was developed more than a century ago as a resort for German expats who found Beijing summers hard to take, and some of the buildings still have a European feel. Others have been upgraded in a concrete-and-marble sort of way, with what look like reception halls on ground floor and (presumably) living quarters above. As I walked down the residential lanes, the hedges got higher and thicker, and the number of thin men in uniform emerging from said hedges increased. I retreated.

The beating heart of Beidaihe is the Kiessling, an old-fashioned Austrian restaurant with an interior décor that is about as dark as you might expect. When New York Times reporters visited in 2012, they ran into an elderly relative of Zhou Enlai at the entrance. I didn’t see anyone recognizable in 2017, but I did hear the name of a Politburo member in a snatch of conversation drifting over from a corner table. Out on the back patio, two men were discussing their shares in a business. One was slim and elegant in fitted slacks and leather loafers, the other heavier-set, with a gold chain visible behind the open collar of his polo shirt. He looked like a guy from North Jersey cutting a deal with a WASP from Connecticut.

The most striking thing about Beidaihe is that, as a physical destination, it doesn’t live up to its outsized role in China’s political landscape. Beidaihe is a place that is magnified by human imagination, and delineated by a specific culture and mentality, into something more than the sum of its parts.

For elite Party families, I can imagine it is wrapped in the nostalgia of childhood summers, and the pleasant familiarity of returning to a beloved place again and again, plus the awareness that simply being someone who summers in Beidaihe is a powerful social flex. For ambitious cadres who didn’t grow up in the Party elite, vacations there are still a sign of really making it.

For everyone else, it exudes unattainability. You too can book into a hotel, wade in the coves and lunch at the Kiessling, but you haven’t really been to Beidaihe.