some light on the Guanghe Theater story in his blog:
"Now I confess I was surprised that I hadn't heard of the Guanghe
Theatre, if it was so famous a landmark, but the stories did point
out that it had been closed for several years, since before I first
came here. But this picture provides another explanation: it wasn't a
famous old landmark after all. A bit of research, and this is what we
discover: the Ming dynasty theatre burned down and was rebuilt in
Qing times, a couple of hundred years back. Well, that's OK, ditto
the Forbidden City. But then the Qing version started to fall down
(after Mei Lanfang started to sing there), and in the general
cultural vandalism that afflicted Beijing in early Maoist times, when
the city walls were also pulled down, it was bulldozed and replaced
with the current perfect example of Soviet-style pebble-dash
modernist concrete."
Spencer writes, "I've occasionally commented on how it is that while
the so-called 'mainstream western media' are accused of demonising
China, it's often actually China itself that is demonising China."
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/foreign/richardspencer/apr2007/
chinaheirlooms.htm
