MACARENA ROMERO

Revolution Is an Eternal Dream
A Chronicle from the Other Side of the World

To reach Shanghai, the exact antipode of Buenos Aires, you have to cross eleven time zones. The world clock reads +11, so the day is, literally, tomorrow.

I travel with an instruction manual, a matryoshka of folders in Google Drive. Folder number ten is Customs. All the forms are in Mandarin, translated into English, but still dizzying, because the eye is drawn first to the sinograms, those concepts enclosed in crossing lines, while the Roman alphabet fades away.

I can’t tell if it’s an inherent trait of the language or the magnetic pull of what we don’t understand, the foreign, the other.

The Forbidden List

The first PDF is titled “非药用类麻醉药品和精神药品管制品种增补目录.”
Below it, the English translation: Prohibit medicine NO-NO. Four pages long.

The list of allowed medicines is longer, though most require prescriptions translated into English, preferably Mandarin. Permission always comes with conditions.

I’m carrying a single blister pack of ibuprofen, one of paracetamol. I need a bit of Xanax, or I’ll spend the next 29 hours in a metal tube in the sky clinging to the armrest. I hate flying.

On the NO-NO list, most are opioids. China’s Century of Humiliation began with the First Opium War. The British, in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, craved new markets. China, perfumed with the scent of tea, painting porcelain, weaving silk from threads of butterflies, was irresistible. 

But China wanted only silver, that metallic blood drained from men and land in the Potosí’s mines. And so Britain, claiming to balance trade, flooded the empire with opium, 1,400 tons a day. The weight of five planes. Every single day.

In 1898, Henri Meyer drew a cartoon for Le Petit Journal: the imperial powers carving China like a cake. But that was too sweet. It wasn’t division, it was dismemberment. Addiction as policy. Dependency as control. The first experiment in necrobiopolitics.

So I take only two pills, leave the rest.

The Infinite App

I download Chinese payment apps. Later, I’ll learn they’re also for chatting, navigating, ordering food. Each super-app contains, within itself, an entire universe. A technological Aleph where you can buy a dragon fruit from a street cart or a transcontinental flight ticket; order jiaozi for a park lunch, or a McDonald’s burger delivered to your seat on a high-speed train. You can get a phone, a pair of pants, a fan, or a drone. The whole world on your fingertip.

I’ll see two Americans at a restaurant in a Shanghai mall order a Coke from outside because nothing on the menu matched their craving. The streets are crowded with workers on bicycles and motorcycles, delivering goods they couldn’t even afford with their own wages.

And all under the gaze of the leader of the revolution.

Planet Mao

The portrait of Mao hanging in a white, minimalist living room of an expat in ultra-modern Chengdu city is framed in thin blue glass. The one that an elderly woman of the Miao ethnic minority has in her wooden one room home that is kitchen, bedroom and dining room at the same time, is faded, oily, tacked to the wall. The image is the same. The village where she lives, Xijiang, exists detached from Time. Its narrow stone streets force everybody to walk in line, an invisible order floats among the people.

Mao lives on cigarette cases, T-shirts, posters, backpacks, caps. And pins. These bright red aluminum buttons, with his profile always facing left, were originally handmade. Soldiers crafted them from toothpaste tubes in Yan’an, the most important communist base during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). If history were told counterclockwise, that might be the beginning of World War II.

After the triumph of the communist revolution and the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, pins were mass-produced, used as tokens of honor for workers and soldiers. And during the Cultural Revolution, they became symbols of belonging and cult to the leader. Mine, beneath this golden face like the sun, reads: Serve the People. Mao’s Little Red Book, with speeches and quotes to strengthen the morale and discipline of the People’s Liberation Army, now sits on supermarket shelves, in Mandarin but also in English, between panda dolls and Labubu figurines.

Mao’s body lies embalmed like a sparrow in Tiananmen Square, his smile welcomes commuters to the subway, he speaks on T-shirts that pass by.
Is his mass line still alive? Are the ideas of the Chinese people what the CCP gathers, processes, and carries forward?

Table Earth

SuR, an Argentine migrant that has lived in China for a decade, tells me:
“Chinese people don’t care about politics. They care about living well, education, health, a roof, technology, and food. Especially food.”

When a flight is delayed, they’re given as many five-ingredient trays as they want. There must never be hunger.

When they wait for trains, they slurp noodles atop their suitcases; onboard, they sip ramen, chew roots, open vacuum-sealed packs of durian, that fruit so sulfurous it literally smells like hell. They dine at large round tables covered with dishes of every color of the Earth. Food is regional, and has little or nothing to do with what the world calls “Chinese food.”

Bamboo shoots, duck beaks -and duck itself-, chicken claws -and the chicken-, fish with head, pig ears -and the pig-. Now everything abounds in China, but, even though, nothing is wasted. Gelatinous tofu, rice noodles, soups, oyster mushrooms, thermoses of hot water -ancient medicine- all spin on a flat glass Earth at the table’s center. No one orders for themselves; in China, food is shared.

At a Sichuan Hot Pot, a cauldron bubbling like the world’s magma, coordination is key. At a table of Argentine tourists, the broth overflows, rice noodles melt into glue, and scalding water flies. Everything was thrown in at once. No order, no timing. The result: inedible.

Between 1959 and 1961, Mao’s government launched the “Great Leap Forward,” aiming to transform China’s agrarian economy through rapid industrialization and collectivization. Besides diverting almost all resources to steel production, setting up backyard furnaces with little success, the collectivization grouped peasants into communes striving to meet food production quotas imposed by the central government, often based on overly optimistic projections.

Workers in the communes began running out of food for themselves. The number of deaths in what became known as the “Great Chinese Famine” varies depending on who’s counting, the most anti-Maoists say 50 million; the least, 20 million.

Young people hardly use the phrase their parents and grandparents did to ask “How are you?”: Ni chi fa le ma? literally means: “Have you eaten?.”

The Master Key

I want to order rice, and the menu reads like a haiku: Ancient pearls of sugar. Pink cloth of rice. Portion of dew dumplings. Mandarin transforms anything into art.

I pay with a QR code, the master key of China. With a QR, to infinity and beyond, though during the long march of the pandemic, a red QR first meant being sent to an isolation center, then doors locked with wooden bars and padlocks.

In 2022, in the city of Urumqi, a residential skyscraper caught fire. It was never confirmed whether it was due to a locked door, but evacuation failed, and ten people died.

Protests began in Beijing and Nanjing. Blank sheets of paper held high, calling for an end to lockdowns, and even Xi Jinping’s resignation.

At Tiananmen Square, the site of the 1989 student protests that ended in brutal repression, with an unrevealed death toll, you can’t enter with books or notebooks. Least of all, blank paper. Its name means Gate of Heavenly Peace.

And there, on September 3, 2025, stood Putin and Kim Jong-un, walking a red carpet between tanks and missiles for the 80th anniversary of China’s victory over Japan. The next day the carpet was still there, soft and plush. I can´t see the tanks.

Count to three

Security cameras hang like metallic bouquets, clusters of vigilance. China, SuR says, is the safest country in the world. If anything happens, the police arrive in three minutes. Yet the streets are empty of uniforms. In tourist zones, patrols look like ice cream carts, with scalloped awnings and cartoon decals of big-eyed manga officers.

Those who actually monitor the streets, rivers, monuments, and flowers are the Red Guards—young people with megaphones and red armbands.
They water sunflowers, direct traffic, and people.

The only trace of police I see are their shields and batons leaning against the wall in an empty shopping corridor, on a bridge of a small town, abandoned in a mega city street. Always solitary. Looks like they are waiting.

Three minutes is all it takes.

Stephen King says terror is what’s visible, it makes you run. The uncanny is what’s hinted at, the half-open door of a shed where each person deposits their own assumptions and fears.

There are cameras every hundred meters, in villages, cities, plazas, restaurants, even elevators. My friend A., who arrived before me, tells me she saw a chinese film where a crime was solved thanks to a camera in the bathroom. “They’re preparing them,” she said. “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear,” replies SuR.

Quantum objects

In dreams, one thing can be many. In Taoism, something can be and not be at once: opposites entwined, containing one another. Quantum objects like China have no fixed identity; they live in a realm of possibilities.

My friend A. brought back home a dream from a Chinese person in her suitcase:
Xi Jinping knocked on her door in Buenos Aires, asking how things were, whether she needed anything.

Revolution, it seems, is an eternal dream.

Macarena Romero is an Argentine political scientist from Buenos Aires University (UBA). She holds a diploma in Migrations and Interculturality, as well as a postgraduate degree in Social and Political Anthropology.

As a journalist, she contributes to various Argentine publications, including Revista Anfibia, Tiempo Argentino, Revista Colibrí, and ElDiarioAr.