Dinner and a (Cultural Revolution) Show

Performers in Miao minority (I'm pretty sure) garb in Guizhou.

All over China, you'll find massive theme restaurants serving up teeming plates of specialty dishes and a song-and-dance show, like the restaurant featured in The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World. But for those who've grown tired of Peking opera or the usual "ethnic" shows (like the one pictured at left), there's a growing number of what have been dubbed "red restaurants"—eateries with performances based on the Cultural Revolution.

I really enjoyed this article in a recent issue of Newsweek about the restaurant Red Scene. Melinda Liu writes, "at Red Scene, the waiters and performers are all dressed as Red Army soldiers, Red Guards, workers, and peasants. And the skit is showcasing the persecution of an evil landlord, who is being beaten and forced to wear a dunce cap—a scene straight out of China's Cultural Revolution, one of the most tumultuous times in the nation's history." Really, you never know what you're going to get when talking about the Cultural Revolution (which took place during the 1960s and '70s) with Chinese people: during a job interview right when I arrived in Beijing, my interviewer revealed that he'd been shot back then.

Cultural Revolution kitsch is certainly easy to find these days. You can buy mugs, T-shirts, and change-purses emblazoned with old propaganda images in areas frequented by Chinese and international tourists, like Beijing's 798 Art Zone and the strip of shops along Nanluoguxiang. As one waiter says in the article, "we simply want our customers to be entertained and to recall their old experiences without thinking too deeply of these social issues."