Can a border wall really deter invaders and crossers alike, while defending, unifying, and maintaining the “purity” of the culture that it encircles? In human history across cultures, there have been countless walls built to map out borders, demarcate a city, a state or an empire, and protect wall builders. The Great Wall of China is perhaps the most mammoth border wall ever built. Little had the Chinese wall builders—the rulers from the Qin dynasty in 221 BC to the Ming and successive dynasties—expected to see the reverberation of their mindsets and the replica of their architectural structures in the 45th US President Donald Trump and in the 21st century United States. When Trump made “a great, great” wall on the US-Mexico border his campaign signature, the American culture has been alerted to a closed and colossal wall-mindset, which evidently defines the Trump administration and becomes an actual wall project on the administration’s top priority list. Across the Pacific thousand miles way and across a time span of more than two millennia, the Great Wall of China and the “Great” Trump Wall meet in the midst of the resurgence of the neo-Nazi and the white supremacism, the anti-immigration sentiment, the Muslim ban, the transgender ban, the anti-Semitism wave, and the misogynic and repercussions. Both also meet in front of the unlikely echoing and coalition among African–Americans, Jewish–Americans, Muslim Americans, Feminist Americans and many marginalized Americans. The racial unrest in Charlottesville has clearly revealed that the “Unite-the-Right” is emboldened by what has made Trump president and is fueled by his executive order for the US-Mexico border wall, among other executive orders to build other invisible walls. The “Unite-the-Right” gives rise to a cultural wall that intends to keep out any individual or group that is perceived as “less” American. In the face of the bigotry-filled cultural wall and cultural war, the Trumpian US-Mexico border wall becomes one that both physically and psychologically divides Americans more than protects them.
Rewinding the time machine back in 221 BC, the unification of China by the first emperor Qin Shihuang’s (259 BC–210 BC) meant the end of the chaotic and competing Warring States and the beginning of a coherently imperial and cultural identity. City walls and demarcations obstructing and defeating this purpose had to be torn down, rerouted, and connected to a newly erected great wall that intended to encircle and protect the entire empire. Thus the Great Wall of China emerged. From the inception of Chinese history, a wall embodies a culture, delineates a mindset, and defines/defends a collective identity. A wall is a construction of a narrative, a lineage, a heritage, and an ownership. The Great Wall of China was erected to respond to an imperial need for unity, identity, and a dynastic purpose for heritage. In fact, it was a piecemeal construction by successive Chinese rulers throughout their respective dynasties, particularly in the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). Through a history that spans more than 2000 years, myth and mystery, legends and stories, facts and fictions, have interwoven and surrounded a wall of a length of more than 13,000 miles, from east to west of China. Along the winding wall up and down, crawling branches and climbing vines of the tree of Chinese civilization have sprouted out from mountains, extended to grasslands, climbed up plateaus, and sunk deep into deserts. An unmistakable cultural DNA of the Chinese chromosomes has been sequenced and drawn on this iconic serpentine wall: it is the shape of a Wall-DNA.
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