Communistic monumentalism

The northern end of the Bund is devoted to the Monument to the People’s Heroes, a three legged statue that looks like a torch and a surrounding cavity that is filled with heroic images from Chinese workers’ history. Or something similar.

From the Westener point of view, the whole place looks a little bit comical in its industrialised optimism of the people’s democracies. We’ve seen the results of these experiments in former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

This monument is the only proof that I could find in Shanghai that we were visiting a communist country. Everywhere else, capitalism ruled and money talked.

Monument to the People’s Heroes, The Bund, Shanghai, China