Why is PR So Bad in China?

Amongst the myriad thousand questions that the Wenzhou train accident last weekend has raised, one that lingers around the most is “why is PR so bad in China?”.  I had previously written about the epic gaffes that CCTV had played on the public, ranging from using footage from Top Gun in a report about a new fighter jet, to Hu Jin Tao visiting the home of a Chinese woman who claims to pay only 77rmb per month in rent.

From start to finish, the efforts of the spokespersons of the various government agencies that are involved in the train crash have been particularly underwhelming:

Wang Yong Ping’s (the spokesman for the Ministry of Railways whos was spotted recently taking the plane instead of the train)statement explaining (or not, as the case may be) why train carriages were buried at the scene of the accident almost instantly became an internet meme when he said

“…During the emergency rescue operations, the area was very complex, and there was a marsh below, so it was very difficult to do our best job. We also had to deal with all the other train cars, so (the earth-moving equipment operator) buried the front car below, covering it with earth, and it was mainly just a case of dealing with the emergency. This was the explanation he offered. Whether you believe it or not, I certainly do.”

Which wasn’t particularly reassuring, especially since, they’ve dug them back up again.

When Premier Wen eventually turned up to do the consolation thing that he’s so good at, he told reporters “I am ill, having spent 11 days in bed, but I managed to come today only after my doctor reluctantly allowed me to check out of hospital. This is why I didn't come here sooner,”.  Not so ill, it would seem, to have met several different leaders of state in the last 11 days, however.  Not only did he lie, accordingly to The Shanghaiist, he lied to the same state controlled media that had in fact been openly reporting on the fact that he wasn’t ill and had attended several meetings:

On July 18, Wen received Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
On July 19, Wen presided over a State Council meeting on climate change and sustainable development.
On July 20, Wen presided over a State Council working session.
On July 21, Wen met up with Cameroonian President Paul Biya.
On July 24, Wen received a delegation from the Japanese Association for the Promotion of International Trade.
On July 27, Wen presided over another State Council working session.

The government appeared to want to use the crash as another attempt to stir up all the emotions that a growing dictatorship needs from it’s populous – instructing the media to specifically focus on stories that were “more touching” whilst telling them not to even think about investigating the causes of the crash themselves, along with terse, clear instructions not to reflect or comment.  The rules were happily ignorned when the journalists found out that no-one was really answering any questions at the press conferences.

The Chinese press has drawn parallels with another train crash that happened last year in Guangdong:

"Train K859 derailed on May 23 last year (the death toll given was 19), and a rescue worker tells our reporters: 'The accident happened at 2am, and trains were running by 6pm [the same day], so last time the rescue work was even shorter. They used diggers to make a pit, then dragged the train cars into the pit. After that they used tractor shovels to crush them down. Some body parts that hadn't been taken out were mixed in and buried together [with the wreckage]. A couple of weeks later, after the incident had settled down, everything was dug out again, everything cleaned away and carted off."

When the company that supplied the railway signals held a “press conference” that was either grossly misreported on or so fantastically awful and mismanaged that it beggars belief and went through all the colours of the rainbow, starting as a calamity, through to a major crisis, and finally deciding on taking flight as a fully-fledged catastrophe (again from The Shanghaiist):

Q: What railway signals equipment has your company been supplying for the D trains?
A: You can check it out from our website yourself.

Q: What is your company's relationship with the Ministry of Railways?
A: It's not convenient to talk about that.

Q: What is the government board that is directly in charge of your company?
A: If you've made it to this press conference, you should know the answer.

Q: So why are you conducting today's press conference?
A: Uh. I don't know. The weather's been really hot, and you guys have been having a hard time running around outside. (The phone rings.) Uh. Can I take this call?

Media: Can you please show us some respect around here? This is a press conference!
A: Uh. Please let me take this call really quickly.

Finally, when the names of the people who would be providing the "swift, open and transparent" investigation of the Ministry of Railways ordered by Wen Jia Bao, it appeared that almost all of them officials on the investigating committee are currently employed by the, er, Ministry of Railways.  According to the China Media Project's Newswire, noted scholar He Weifang wrote that "Officials from the railway ministry stand out [on the list]. They should decline [participation]. No one can be a judge of events that directly concern their own interests — this is the most basic demand of procedural justice."  I don't think that anyone is holding their breath over that one.

For the most part, the Chinese government seem to have understood that they have lost this propaganda battle for now.  They may have taken the view that it's probably best for the outrage to burn itself out in the press and in the Chinese cyberscape.  When the CCP decides that enough is enough, they'll start clamping down on coverage sending the message that it's no longer acceptable to discuss the failings of the Party.

Related articles

• Chinese angered by make up of bullet train crash inquiry (telegraph.co.uk)


• Relatives grieve over China crash as anger lingers (seattletimes.nwsource.com)


• Anger lingers as relatives mourn China train crash dead (ctv.ca)


• Repercussions of train crash - Xinhua (news.google.com)

We Hope For a Miracle

A cartoon currently doing the rounds on Weibo (thanks to Emma Lau for the link and the translation) - the last frame says "we can only hope for a miracle!" showing Ministry of Railways spokesman Wang Yong Ping tied to the train tracks as an out of control train hurtles towards him.

 

Quote/Unquote: Wang Yong Ping

...During the emergency rescue operations, the area was very complex, and there was a marsh below, so it was very difficult to do our best job. We also had to deal with all the other train cars, so (the earth-moving equipment operator) buried the front car below, covering it with earth, and it was mainly just a case of dealing with the emergency. This was the explanation he offered. Whether you believe it or not, I certainly do.

- Ministry of Railways Spokesman Wang Yong Ping explaining why the carriages from the Wenzhou train crash were buried.  Thanks to Shanghaiist for the quote.

Wenzhou Crash Media Aftermath

The western and English language media in China is going into overdrive providing coverage and commentary on the aftermath of the Wenzhou Train Crash.

Xinhua is reporting that Wen Jia Bao has called for a “swift, open transparent investigation”, although Grandpa Wen has pretty much been calling for whatever he wants since he’s going to to be stepping down as Premier next year – he promised political reform when he was in England earlier in the summer.

Time Magazine has a piece on the “murmurs of dissent” in China following the crash – although almost every foreign reporter in China is probably playing up the idea that Chinese people are disagreeing with the government

The ever-excellent Ministry of Tofu (which I keep mistyping as the Ministry of Tudu for some reason) has a rundown and translation of the microblog surveys that have been run through the Chinese cyberscape.  Needless to say, people ain’t happy.

China Realtime Report has a slideshow of pictures from the crash site  and another Chinese language gallery shows how the newspapers on the mainland are reporting on the tragedy.

Both the Global Times and the China Daily have ripped the government a new one over the Ministry of Railways handling of the crash.  The Global Times has attacked the department’s officials, saying that their “arrogance results in bad PR” (another brief tells of the total cost that the new rail system might total up to).  The Global Times editorial ominously ends with the lines that “the relationship between the government and the public is like that of a ship and water. Water can keep the ship afloat or sink it.”

Wenzhou Train Crash Round-Up

By now you have probably heard about the Wenzhou Train Crash, which is China's worst train crash since the Qingdao derailment in 2008.

The actual accident and the belated, lacklustre response from the government (and you might want to do a wordcloud on how many times "government reponse appears in this post) have been amplified well beyond any level that the CCP would wish for.

The Beijing-Shanghai high speed line was, of course, one of the flagship engineering projects that the government had been trumpeting for the last year or so, and the opening of the line coincided with the 1st July celebrations that were organised to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.  It's no big secret that things were pretty much rushed through to meet the deadline, and the Kunming Highway Project had already claimed ten lives a mere day and a half after it was opened.  What began as a unifying, rallying celebration of Chineseness has quickly dissolved into a backlash of fear and paranoia fostered on the Chinese internet through Weibo and Youku and has become a platform for scathing attacks from both the national press on the government, and for angry journlists who have begun demanding more that the usual excuses from party officials.

The China Media Project has a comprehensive  rundown of the salient points of the accident, starting with the now infamous claim from Wang Yong Ping that  “The Beijing-Shanghai High-speed Railway and Japan’s Shinkansen can’t even be raised in the same breath, because many of the technologies employed by China’s high-speed rail are far superior to those used in Japan’s Shinkansen,”

ChinaGeeks has been covering the days (Sunday, Monday and Tuesday since the crash, offering translations and reposts of the Chinese reaction to the accident and the government response.

Much has been made of the Chinese Propaganda Department’s media directives that were almost immediately leaked online that show exactly how the Chinese government manipulates the media to stir up feelings of national pride:

The latest directives on reporting the Wenzhou high-speed train crash:

1. Release death toll only according to figures from authorities.

2. Do not report on a frequent basis.

3. More touching stories are to reported instead, i.e. blood donation, free taxi services, etc.

4. Do not investigate the causes of the accident; use information released from authorities as standard.

5. Do not reflect or comment.

Reminder on reporting matters: All reports regarding the Wenzhou high-speed train accident are to be titled “7.23 Yong-Wen line major transportation accident.” Reporting of the accident is to use 'In the face of great tragedy, there's great love' as the major theme. Do not question. Do not elaborate. Do not associate. No re-posting on micro-blogs will be allowed! Related service information may be provided during news reporting. Music is to be carefully selected!"
「温州事故报道的最新要求：1、死伤数字以权威部门发布为准；2、报道频度不要太密；3、要多报道感人事迹，如义务献血和出租车司机不收钱等等；4、对事故原因不要挖掘，以权威部门的发布为准；5、不要做反思和评论。

宣传提示：温州动车脱轨事故报道名称统一使用“7.23甬温线特别重大铁路交通事故”。温州动车事故从现在起以“大灾面前有大爱”为主题报道，不质疑，不展开，不联想，个人微博也不要转发！节目中可提供相应服务信息，音乐注意氛围！」

The Chinese microblog site has been at the centre of much of the outrage, starting with the survey that showed 97% of it's users were unhappy with the government's handling of the accident.  Chinese Youku users have been uploading videos to Youku and other sharing sites, including one  that shows a body being recovered from the crash.  Angry journalists demanding answers from the officials in charge of the recovery operation have also been posted online.

The Economist has an overview of how The Party responded in typical fashion - not blaming anyone and firing a few token officials (God forbid that they should resign and say sorry) and there's blunt response from Stan Abrams over at China Hearsay to Megan MacArdle's article in The Atlantic.

Related articles

• Death toll from China's train crash rises to 39, including two Americans - Xinhua (news.google.com)


• Public calls for change of track following bullet train crash in China (csmonitor.com)


• VIDEO: Chinese baby survives train crash (bbc.co.uk)


• China orders safety inspection after train crash (ctv.ca)


• You: Bullet train crash kills 32 in China (nation.com.pk)


• China Tries to Calm Fears After Train Crash (online.wsj.com)


• China Tries to Calm Fears After Bullet-Train Crash - Wall Street Journal (news.google.com)


• WENZHOU, CHINA: At Least 35 Killed, Hundreds Injured In High-Speed Train Crash (lostchildreninthewilderness.wordpress.com)


• Propaganda Instructions on Wenzhou Train Crash (businessinsider.com)


• The Propaganda Instructions For The Wenzhou Train Crash (businessinsider.com)

Congratulations to the CCP

Among those congratulating the Chinese Communist Party on reaching the grand old age of 90 years old was one Boris Gryzlov, who remarked that the CCP had " weathered war flames and various hardships and led the Chinese people on the road toward peace and prosperity".  Conicidentally, he's also the very same Boris Gryzlov who was quoted in Time  saying "Parliament isn't a place for political discussions".  He's also the same Boris Gryzlov who defended electoral violations in the 2007 Russian election by saying "They in no way put in doubt the final result. The fact that these violations have been registered shows that we have a transparent ballot."

Mwai Kibaki sent in his congratulations, and he should know all about poltical reform since he was...er... accused of electoral fraud in the 2007/8 Kenyan elections.  The Independent Reviews Commission noted that during the Kenyan elections " there were too many electoral malpractices from several regions perpetrated by all the contesting parties to conclusively establish which candidate won the December 2007 Presidential elections. Such malpractices included widespread bribery, vote buying, intimidation and ballot-stuffing by both sides, as well as incompetence from the Electoral Commission of Kenya".  The head of a local democracy watchdog,  the Institute of Education in Democracy, said on the day of Kibaki's swearing-ine that "This is the saddest day in the history of democracy in this country. It is a coup d'etat,"

Projects that were supposed to highlight the technical achievements of the CCP completed in time for the celebrations have included:

• A new high speed rail link connecting Beijing and Shanghai which has suffered three malfunctions in two days that resulted in scores of late arrivals.  When asked if the trains used any Japanese technology, Wang Yong Ping, the spokesman for China's Ministry of Railways scoffed at the suggestion, saying  “the Beijing-Shanghai High-speed Railway and Japan’s Shinkansen can’t even be raised in the same breath, because many of the technologies employed by China’s high-speed rail are far superior to those used in Japan’s Shinkansen.”

• Another flagship construction project was a new road in Kunming that promptly collapsed down the cliff that it was built on a mere day and a half after it was "completed" killing two people and injuring ten others.

• Finally, the chief engineer, Shao Xin Peng, has reassured everyone (including the BBC ) that the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge is safe for traffic.  Construction workers had told CCTV that the bridge was at least 2 months away from being completed, and reporters found missing bolts, missing safety barriers and even missing lighting.  Thankfully Xin Peng pointed out that "The status of secondary features does not affect the main project or the opening of the bridge."  So that's all right then.  Locals have pointed out that the  $US2.3 billion bridge has resulted in only a 10 minute reduction in travel time - compared to the highway that runs parallel to it -and  thanks to the fact that there are only 3 toll booths installed, a 1.5 hour journey is now compressed into a 3 hour wait in the queue at the exit of the bridge.

So Remember...Always Wear a Condom

China Geek provides an excellent summing-up(I'm pretty sure that's a word) of the ongoing “official implicated in the rape of a teacher”(original Chinese). A middle school teacher was plied with drinks, whereupon she was raped by the city rural land resources manager, Wang Zhong Gui. Typically, the police weren't really interested, claiming that “If he wore a condom, it’s not rape.”:

Recently, the topic “official implicated in the rape of a teacher” has been appearing on forums and has attracted a lot of attention. The person who made the post was the Huajuea City Middle School English teacher, 26-year-old Zhou Qin. She says that on May 17, 2011, the school principal ordered her to accompany 8 [government] leaders for drinks. After she was drunk, she was raped by the city rural land resources manager, Wang Zhonggui. What’s even more shocking is that according to what’s being said on the net, when Zhou Qin reported this to her local police station, the police said: “If he wore a condom, it’s not rape.”

The Shangaiist weighs in dryly noting that "when someone is a victim of robbery, do the police let the thief go free because the victim did not have a better lock on their door? If a person is beaten or killed, does the assailant get a weaker sentence because the victim did not defend himself well enough?"

Five Simple Rules for Learning my Language

The British comedian Tony Hawks in an episode of the BBC’s “Grumpy Old Men” told of his revolutionary new diet plan.  One Day One, you eat less and get more exercise.  On Day Two, you eat less and get more exercise.  One Day Three, you eat less and get more exercise, but on Day Four, you do something really exciting:  You get more exercise and eat less.

The number one question I get asked is “how can I improve my English?” Like a lot of things, it’s not really about getting the right answer, it’s all about asking the right question.  “How can I improve my English?” is one of those questions that is often answered with the simple, and rather uninteresting “speak more”.

It is entirely possible to learn English (or any language for that matter) in a very short space of time; you just need the right tools.  And by “the right tools”, I don’t mean “a good teacher”.  There are a number of roadblocks for Chinese students that must be overcome in order to obtain proficiency in a foreign language – in the vast majority of cases, this means learning English.

The first step is to set a goal.  “Speak English well” is not really a goal, whereas, “I aim to achieve a level 8 on the IELTS exam” is a goal.  When I first started learning to read and write Chinese in 2009, the best advice that anyone gave me was from my Chinese textbook – write the date at the top of every page.  Then, six months down the line, you’ll be able to see how your writing has progressed from the uncertain scratches in the front of the notebook, to the more practiced strokes of someone who is getting somewhere in their studies.

Using an outside system of measuring is essential because, basically, your own perception of learning isn’t a really good way of determining if you have improved or not.  Intermediate English students regularly complain to me that they feel their English isn’t improving, but they are basing their level of learning on their past experiences of learning lots of things three or four months ago when they were at a beginner level or pre-intermediate level.  Even worse, some of them will compare themselves halfway through a course to an advanced student, or even a native speaker, and find themselves demoralized that no matter how much work they put in, they can never quite get to the level that will satisfy their own, ever changing measuring stick on how good their English fluency is.

So the first rule is: Don’t trust yourself to measure your own successes and always set realistic goals.

You can never trust yourself to measure yourself.  Lying on the sofa suffering from a hangover after a New Year’s Eve party can make you feel pretty awful, but you are not seriously sick, and certainly don’t need to visit a doctor.  Your own perceptions of yourself are skewed, depending on the time of day, whether you are hungry or not, or how much sleep you go the previous night.  Don’t trust yourself to guess how good or bad you are at something, because you’ll almost always feel bad.

If you want to learn to swim, go swimming.  If you want to learn to drive, go drive a car.  If you want to learn to speak another language, then you have to go and speak that language.  Western language learning systems, and their respective companies have known this for years.  Rosetta Stone is a system of listening-based matching activities.  The Pimsleur Method is only available on CD and contains no written material at all.  Michel Thomas goes even further and tells students outright that under no circumstances should they ever take notes during a class.  Reading and writing something employs different parts of the brain than speaking a listening.  Writing things down means that your brain tells your fingers which position to hold a pen in, while speaking requires your brain to co-ordinate different sets of muscles in your throat and your mouth to make the right sounds.  Logically, they are completely different parts of the body, and they’re completely different parts of the brain.  Writing everything down (in case you forget) is pointless because, well, you will forget exactly because you wrote it down.  If you’re just going to go to a class and write things down, it’s a waste of your time and money and you may as well give up because reading and writing won’t help your speaking a listening skills.

Rule 2: Don’t write everything down.  If you forget something, listen again (ask your teacher, replay the CD, etc)

Chinese students get too hung up on the teacher.  Students who have never been near a school since they graduated from university years before think that they are good judges of what is a good teacher or not.  This is complete a total rubbish, and allows the student to display an amazing amount of contempt and arrogance towards their teacher.  Students are no better judges of their teacher in the same way that soldiers are not good judges of what makes an effective drill sergeant in the army.   A teacher needs to follow only one – he must speak less than the students.  If your teacher is speaking too much, and isn’t letting you speak, you need to complain, or you need to find another teacher.

The teacher is never a good as the materials, and before you sign any contract or hand over any money, you should ask to see all the materials that you will be learning from.  Demand to sit in on a class, or arrange a demo class.  The best type of school is the type of school that will allow successful students to continue on to the higher level classes, and keep back failing students – essentially they fire underperforming students from the class.  The class can only go as fast as the worst student, and one beginner in an advanced class can ruin the whole learning experience for everyone.

Rule Number Three is: Be critical of your teacher and materials, expect failing students to repeat classes, and make sure to see any and all materials that you’ll be learning from.

When I started working at Wall Street Institute a few years ago, a large American man called Charlie who had moved from Dubai with his wife to relocate to China told me a rather incredulous story that a rich Arab had wandered into the center of which he was the manager, and after sitting through the sales pitch, quite politely asked, “so you just download English into my brain?”  Four years, later, I still can’t decide if I’m stunned at his ignorance that a language can be learned this way, or that he was willing to have the surgery to have a USB socket implanted in his brain.  The point is that language learned cannot simply be a passive process.  If you look at children in the playground, they don’t speak because they have to, they speak because they can.

I can still remember when I reached what I call “The Playground Milestone” because I could finally tell people in China what they looked like and what they sounded like.  I took great pleasure in telling people they looked like a whale, or that they smelled like a monkey.  Hugely offensive, of course, but it gave me important practice in what is an essential part of language.   The point wasn’t that people really did sound like frogs but that I was taking the language apart in my mouth and my brain and placing it in that “sweet spot” that enables me to quickly and fluently withdraw and deposit words from and to my long term language memory and produce the sound accurately.  An active learning process means that you are able to guess what a word or phrase means based on the context and any other cues (sounds, wild gesturing by the teacher, bizarre graffiti on the whiteboard).

Rule 4: Get involved, engage your brain and start thinking, try to make your own grammar rules based on observation and repetition.

Over the weekend and Advanced student took a pre-intermediate class.  She didn’t really need to be in the class, and she could effectively communicate in English with me on a variety of different topics.  Her English was a little ropey, but for someone who had almost exclusively learned from books her entire life, she had pretty good speaking and listening skills.  In the class, she asked quite possibly the most pointless and idiotic question that I’ve ever heard from a student of her ability: “Is, ‘do you married?’ ok?”  The poor teacher tasked with leading the class had to stand around and patiently explain exactly why it was wrong.  Which is where we come to Rule 5: Don’t use the classroom as a crutch.

Chinese students essentially want to be told that their English is great.  Having said, everyone wants to be told that their second language ability is great.  It’s only when you get out of the classroom and start talking to people that you realize one important thing: You don’t know shit.  Suddenly, you are grasping for words, trying to keep up with what they are saying, you don’t understand much and you fall silent as your pathetically small vocabulary fails you in almost every respect.  Back in the classroom, you get all the answers right and you feel great.  One of the reasons that Rosetta Stone is such a great success is that once you mechanically learn all the right responses, you get 96% on almost every level.  You have great grammar, wonderful pronunciation and you can recall each and every word perfectly.

Your brain needs to be strained and tested and put through a trial by fire to truly get to the level where you can converse naturally with a high level of fluency with native speakers in another language.  It’s only when you start having to donate a lot of energy to decoding and recoding foreign words that you really get to the point where you’re not talking to someone, but talking with someone.

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Don't Get Angry, Get Embarrassed.

I’ve been to America once, and God love it (which I’m told He does) I do want to live there and would spend many happy days in Maspeth, where I stayed courtesy of my friends Dan and Zoe, and watch the evening sky, at first blood red, then cool through the infrared spectrum to a dark, velvet, Guinness black.  The Manhatten skyline - still something that you can’t quite think “men made that” – of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State and the Brooklyn Bridge would be mere silhouettes that melt into the blackness of the night sky.  All of the Disneyesque poeticism pulls into stark contrast the Stephen King nightmare that is dealing with American airlines and American Homeland Security.

My time in America was a fantastic experience bookended by simply the worst travel experience known to humanity.  An experience that would make cattle on their way to the slaughterhouse feel loved.  Rarely have I been made to feel like a criminal in any airport in the world.  Even at Osaka airport, where I was fingerprinted, photographed, medically examined for fear of carrying H1N1 into the country and subject to intense investigation (I was the only foreigner with the documents that supported a one year work permit in the country), I was made to feel at home, wanted and looked after.  The elderly airport official who said “please” about 30 times in the first 10 minutes was polite, knew his stuff, and stood next to me like the grandfather I barely knew as I jumped through all the necessary hoops to get into the country.  Of course, the whole procedure took longer than any airport that I’ve been to, but it was the politeness, the feeling that someone was taking an interest, and the awareness that both of us where at the mercy of a massive administrative machine that made the whole thing much easier.

And in America, I met Seattle Bill.

Bill was fat.  Bill was big and fat.  In fact, almost everyone in America is big and fat.  I don’t mean that they are all doubly fat, I mean that for their height, they are fat.  Bill towered over me, I was eye to eye with what I imagined would be the arcing red, sweated crease in his skin underneath his last rib bone, where  - if he were shirtless – you would see the clear demarcation line between his ribcage and his unsupported intestinal tract.  He was nineteen feet in height and two  Isuzu People Carriers in width.  BP could’ve drilled for oil in his cleavage.  The unfortunate demography of his lower abdomen had forced him to buckle his trousers around his pubic bone, at roughly the point where pubic hair becomes belly hair.  His stomach muscles had long given up on keeping his gut in check, and I wondered how many steps up a flight of stairs he would need before he fell over backwards clutching his chest.

From his waist upwards, he was a big man.  From below the belthoops of his trousers, he was the stallion of a man that his wife had married thirty years, six million Happy Meals and a four million Cokes  ago.  He also had enough weaponry hanging off his low slung belt that would make Simon Mann think ‘that’s a little too much’.  When asked a perfectly reasonable question by one of the Chinese businessmen behind me - “why are there only two immigration officers?  Why do we have to wait?” - Bill pointed a chubby finger as a thick as a sausage and said through pursed lips with a John Wayne locked jaw “They’ll be ready…when I’m ready”.  He waddled off, the miniature shockwaves of his footsteps sent ripples over his tightly clad buttocks.  He presumably went to get a doughnut.

The flight from Beijing to Seattle dumped me in Seattle at 6:40am.  Thanks to the super high tech Homeland Security I made it through immigration in a mere two hours and fifteen minutes.  I had missed my flight by an hour.  The next flight that I could arrange left Seattle at 5pm, went through a time warp, and dumped me at New York JFK around 11pm.  The flight back from New York to Beijing wasn’t fun either, have been delayed for an entire 27 hours in Seattle airport.  The problem was that in America relies on people that have power but no responsibility.

Chris Rock tells a joke in his stand-up routine that he lives in an area that has house owned by Eddie Murphy, Mary J. Bilge, Jay-Z and a white dentist.  Which is exactly the same as the situation here in China, substituting black folks for Chinese, and er, keeping the white folks.  To be a white man in China, as it is in America, is to have won the lottery of life.

I live in a 68 square meter apartment that I pay 3300rmb per month for (330UKP there abouts).  I come from Manchester, UK, work as an English teacher and earn 14000rmb per month, with about 700rmb tax, I have a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology, have no intention of paying off my minor student loan, and live quite happily with few money worries apart from the dent that my annual trip to see the folks is going to put in my bank account.  I speak a little bit of high school Spanish, have intermediate Chinese  and do a little of everything from writing the occasional article in a little known magazine that nobody reads, to teaching people to speak English.  In the last years, I’ve returned home for 3 weeks, taken a 10 day vacation in New York, took a month off to visit friends in Chengdu, whilst traveling to Kunming and Lijiang, return back to my apartment in downtown Beijing, and continued working my rather dull job.  When I got suspicious about a lump growing on my lip last month I immediately went to the Hong Kong International Hospital at the Swissotel in Dongsishitiao and happily paid 680rmb to be told that I have a “lesion on lower lip” and was duly given a course of B multivitamins.

A very close friend of mine studied for her master’s degree in Manchester, speaks fluent English and Chinese, and has a prestigious position in a growing African-Chinese company.   She lives on the outskirts of town, is always looking for a roommate to help with the rent, and hasn’t been out of the country for pleasure since she graduated 8 years ago.  Over weekend she was sick, and is considering going to a doctor if she her condition doesn’t improve.  Needless to say, she’s Chinese and I’m not.

China has been taken over by the morals and values crowd, with the censorship of the Internet and the purge of pornography to create a “healthy online environment”, the failed implementation of the Green Dam software, the scrubbing of critical posts about the government and the house arrests of “subversives”.  Quite frankly, the government of China’s morals and values would have more resonance if the Chinese government actually knew what morals and values were, which I don’t think they do.  I don’t really mean that as an insult, but the belief that every Chinese person is heterosexual, that people don’t like looking at pornography (they do) and that in China don’t really knows what’s going on, or that people in China believe that an apartment in China can be rented for twelve dollars isn’t a moral or a value.  It’s just stupid.  What they’re really talking about are superstitions, traditions, fears and personality cults.  Real morals are honesty, fairness, kindness and tolerance.  The others are just bullshit issues that the Chinese government uses to justify its legitimacy.

Morals and values are choices that we make about how to treat other people.  And they can be measured.  They can be measured in the way we see people treat other people, and of course, the Chinese government, with its institutionalized torture, abuse, harassment of journalists, bloggers, and other free speech advocates, endless transparent propaganda, victimization and other downright out and out lies have shown that their morals do not include treating people like human beings.  We have found out this week, the exact extent to which the Chinese government values the basic rights that, in most modern countries in the first quarter of the 21^st Century, we take for granted.  Western journalists have been openly threatened, investigations have been whitewashed, and censorship has tightened, all in the name of the Chinese Communist Party – the last bastion of rhetoric that last saw the light of day behind closed doors in 1950’s USSR.  When did you last hear a sentence that included “the masses”?  1962?  Khrushchev?  Trotsky?  Well, it was actually last week when Wen Jiao Bao made his speech to the NPC.

Chinese people have it easy.  They don’t really have to think that much.  They aren’t really taught to think that much, and anyone who has ridden any subway and has seen Chinese people bemused by the ticket machines, the thought of giving people the vote in China is a terrifying prospect.  When people offer some such pro-democracy comment thinly disguised as “power to the people”, I often find myself asking the question, “what people?  These assholes?”.  Chinese people are often the first to leap to their country’s defense, citing economic progress, healthcare, literacy, the rise in living standards, confused that they shouldn’t be angry at their country, since they have really only done things that their parents could dream about.  Angry is the wrong emotion.  Chinese people shouldn’t be angry about their country or their leadership.  The Chinese, like American people, shouldn’t hate their country – they should be embarrassed by it.

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Change Ain't Good

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="250" caption="Image via Wikipedia"][/caption]

“And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission.”

V, V for Vendetta

“What we need right now is a clear message to the people of this country. This message must be read in every newspaper, heard on every radio, seen on every television.  I want this country to realize that we stand on the edge of oblivion. I want everyone to remember why they need us!”

Chancellor Adam Sutler, V for Vendetta

As a fresh faced youngster in 2006, I wanted to save China.  I wanted to shine a light on the corruption, the censorship, the human rights abuses and I wanted to open the eyes of the Chinese people, and really let them see what China was, and let them understand what the western world thought of China.

Of course, it was an utterly pointless exercise.  I got my first Chinese girlfriend, a 19 year old economics student (ok, I’ll admit that I was 27 at the time), and I really thought that I’d be able to bring her around to the western way of thinking, hoping that this article that I wrote about movie censorship, or that column I wrote about plagiarism, or the things that showing her pictures of Tankman and the 1989 protests would make her see sense.  I even dragged her around the old Qianmen area that was scheduled for demolition to make her see what her government was doing to these irreplaceably historic buildings.  I got shooed off the makeshift living areas for the homeless behind the infamous “mini great wall” behind the Qianmen bus station for taking unwanted picture of the squalor.  For all my procrastinations, for all my heartfelt appeals, for all my solemn, headshaking, I didn’t make a dent.

Her father was a government lawyer, and was having none of it.  After a couple of months, I had gotten around to the idea that her life revolved around getting a manicure in Wang Fu Jing, going to KTV, and going dancing till three in the morning and coming home stinking of cigarettes and baijiu.  Occasionally seeing me, and quite possibly buying more shoes.  Things didn’t work out between us.

I like to live in a sea of information.  I’ve got Facebook open, Tweetdeck tuned to some of the top China commentators and bloggers, the TV on mute tuned to BBC News 24, and BBC World service playing via the Internet – I do all this whilst chatting on MSN, sending and receiving text messages and answering Skype calls and downloading podcasts to my iPod for later listening.  It all adds up to the fact that I know more about what’s going on in China than most Chinese people, and I barely speak the language.  All of my information about what’s going on in China comes from English news sources.  This is a source of friction between me and the Chinese people that I talk to, basically because the news isn’t always good news and Chinese people don’t believe that western news sources can be trusted.  This is a rather inconvenient situation for foreigners, because nearly all Chinese people don’t actually know that it’s illegal for Chinese journalists to work for foreign publications.  So how the hell else are we supposed to get the skinny on what’s happening in China?  What is interesting though, is that the things that I’m interesting and repost on Weibo or Kaixin, aren’t the same things that my Chinese friends are interested in.

Starved, in the first few months of my return to China from Japan, of Facebook, I signed up with Kaixin which slaked my thirst for constant new news.  Last week I disabled my account, mostly because what my Chinese friends on Kaixin were blogging about was pretty much diametrically opposite to what I was blogging and reposting about.  That and I was getting pretty pissed off with everything I was reposting as “newsworthy” was pretty much instantly deleted by the censors

And this is where we come to part one of my theory of why everyone in this part of the world defends their culture so much.  It’s a cliché, and it’s not going to be popular, but in a nutshell: everyone looks the same in this part of the world and the historical and cultural background is the only thing that can help people differentiate Korean from Chinese from Japanese.  Part two of my theory attempts to answer a question that was posted last weekend about why the Chinese government is so good at “playing the crowd” at home, but not particularly good doing it on an international scale.  Every citizen has a certain preference as to how they perceive their country.  The Chinese government has the advantage because for a long time, it’s told people how to perceive their country.

Let’s take a look at the Japanese for a moment.

The Japanese prefer to think of their country as small.  You’ll say you want travel somewhere, and they will almost faint away in shock at the very thought of the great distance you want to travel.  You’ll meet someone in Osaka, enthuse about the country to a certain extent, and hear about how small the country is.  Then you’ll mention that you want to travel somewhere like Himeji (a mere two hours away from Osaka Station on the limited stop service).  Hands will fly up in horror, girls will faint away in a swoon, sirens, klaxons and alarms will sound and Japanese special forces will abseil down from the ceiling and crash through the windows as the Japanese people you are talking to try to contemplate the great distances involved in the epic journey that you are planning and very likely may not survive.  Japan is small, but everything is Very Far Away. And Japanese like to think of it like that.  And it’s the same with China, Chinese people have certain preferences that they adhere to when they think of their country.

Chinese people prefer the idea that China has been ruled in a ceaseless, uninterrupted chain of dynasties and emperors.  The actual details of wars, in-fighting, assassination attempts, treachery and other insidious parts of Chinese history are not important.  What is important is that the rule of China as one country has been how it has been, and it is the way that things will be to come.  This is why slogans like “a thousand years of the CCP” and suchlike were so popular.  It made Chinese people feel secure that someone was actually going to be watching over them, that something would be there.  In China, there’s no corruption.  Corruption is just a means to the end of being comfortable about knowing the outcome – the accumulation of money is incidental.

Chinese people prefer to know what’s going to happen – my love life is littered with Chinese girlfriends who thought obsessively about the future – they wanted to know if I had a life plan, if they should have a life plan, if they should have a monthly or 6 monthly plans.  My most recent ex was given the advice that if she didn’t get a promotion in the next six months, she should quit the company.  That was last June, and as far as I know, she’s still at the same place.  One of my go-getter Chinese friends sits down and writes a yearly schedule for herself every January 1^st.  Last year, one of my students wouldn’t even move to Xian because (amongst a myriad thousand reasons), she was afraid of what might happen.

Fear of failure is rampant in China, and it all comes from the Chinese education system.  Students are repeatedly told that they know nothing, that they are empty vessels and they need to be filled with instructions on how to carry out the simplest of tasks (one of my students in the English school I was working in last year asked me to do a class on how to tie a tie) without instruction, without clear leadership, without the feel that they are being told something that they didn’t already know, Chinese people are lost.  Into this steps the CCP, which rather than being run as a voice of the people, sees itself (and calls itself) the ruling party of the country and indeed, of Chinese society.  Chinese laws don’t so much protect individuals, but they protect social and economic stability, a legal situation, and a national mindset that goes in completely the opposite direction to the western ideals of protecting individuals first.

The Chinese Communist Party is very proud of the fact that they have “opened up China”, with their policy of reforms and, er, opening up.  In actual fact, no one actually did anything, rather, the Party stopped interfering with people’s lives, and let them get on with whatever they wanted to get on with.  The problem with opening up has been that the focus in China has shifted from the collective “China” to the individual “Chinese”, and the laws in China, as already pointed out do not take into account protection for the individual.  There are no independent courts, no due process, and very channels for legal protection for the average Joe Chun.  The people are left with one alternative: The authoritarian protection of the ruling CCP.

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China's Revolution Needs Supersizing

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="460" caption="move along, nothing to protest about here"][/caption]

Chinese citizens were told to shout “We want food, we want work, we want housing, we want fairness”, referencing rising food and housing prices, the overqualified and underpaid ant-tribe, and massive government corruption and cronyism that has dogged the Chinese government since its inception.

While the protests in Egypt, Libya and Bahrain were gathering momentum, I found myself hoping that the same wouldn’t happen in China.  If it did, I explain on Facebook, the government crackdown would make Gadhafi’s violent response look like a paintballing outing for extremely nervous insurance salesmen.  The choice of venues (KFC and McDonalds) neatly illustrates the pampered nature of the Angry Young Men of China – we can have a protest, but we really need to go somewhere where we can get some food later on, possibly with a the local neighborhood American diplomat.

Suffice to say that the Chinese didn’t really grasp the nettle and give an all-out protest on the same scale as their Egyptian and Libyan counterparts.   A number of factors conspired against them a) they publicized the whole thing on Twitter which is banned in China, b) the Chinese authorities are stupid, but they’re not too stupid not to use Twitter to keep tabs on troublemakers c) they used Google Maps to pinpoint exactly were the protests were being held.  It was, to borrow one of Hannibal Lecter’s lines, a fledging protestor’s first attempt at a transformation, and not that great a success.  That said, at least the members of one of the world’s largest standing armies had something to other than stand.

The authorities didn’t really do themselves any favors either.  Fearing massive negative publicity, they duly phoned up every reporter in the city and told them not to go anywhere near Wangfujing or Tiananmen Square without special permission - which is a little like telling a two year old not to press, under any circumstances, the big red button with “danger – do not press” written in yellow and red letters above it.  If anyone should be arrested for subverting state power, it’s the Chinese idiots who spread news to the people who didn’t even know there was news in the first place to be spread.  It’s also given officials, as the 9/11 terror attacks in American gave the American officials, more wiggle room to collect in one place all the troublemakers, and any excuse to tighten the rules is a good excuse.

While their tactics have been quite simple, they have been quite effective – no one can argue that spraying water from a street cleaning van is a more acceptable than an M1 tank rumbling down the Wang Fu Jing.  If the dissidents get the idea that the most they have to deal with is getting a little bit wet (which, admittedly for Chinese people is on the same level as contracting leprosy) every weekend, they may get that little bit bolder.  It’s a shame that the Chinese police didn’t deal with the foreign news media.  Nothing makes a western report moist with anticipation more than a protest in China, but nothing eats up column inches like reports of Chinese police beating the living daylights out of foreign reporters and illegally detaining those covering a protest in China.

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CCTV's Greatest Hits

Rare is the day that CCTV contains actual news about China, the editorial staff at the station routinely concoct fake stories, use fake footage (sometimes culled from Hollywood movies) and use fake people to keep everyone happy and safe in the knowledge that they living in a socialist paradise.  Here’s a run-down of some the worst news gathering not seen since…well…ever, really.

Top Gun

Not happy with the use of actual real news footage, CCTV spliced in a scene of a missile destroying a plane.  The video was posted on the myriad thousand video sharing sites around China, along with various, non-too-complimentary comments.  The Wall Street Journal reported that the video might have actually been part of the promotional materials used by a jet manufacturer.



Taking a leaf from the Chinese Book of Effective PR, a spokesman promptly denied that they used the footage to beef up its advertising.  “It’s impossible and unnecessary for us to do anything like that,” Ding Zhiyong, AVIC’s director of public relations, told China Real Time, “The J-10 is an accomplishment we’re proud of–why would we even need to use ‘Top Gun’ footage?”.  Thankfully, once the tweets had hit the fan in the Chinese blogosphere, no one at CCTV was available for comment because of the Chinese New Year, and the story blew over quite conveniently.

The $12 Apartment




For anyone who has lived in Beijing, the housing market is something that weigh s heavily on the mind.  Contracts are often worth more than the paper they’re hurriedly printed on, landlords greed can often mean that people are thrown out of their houses with a few days to find a new place to live because the landlord is selling the place, and the government is trying to contain a rapidly expanding property bubble.


One of the misguided efforts that the CCP made was to stage an interview with a Beijing resident claiming that the apartment in which she lived had a monthly rent of a mere 77RMB for a princely 45 square meter pad (to compare, this author’s apartment in Chongwenmen is 3300RMB per month for 68 square meters).  Hu Jin Tao replied that the glorious Chinese Communist Party was doing everything it could to help people on low incomes live, well, like they weren’t on a low income, proclaiming “The party and the government pay great attention on improving people’s livelihood. Now we’ve adopted series of measures, and more are expected to come to improve lives of low-income families.”

Internet users were not happy, and soon uncovered a series of photos that showed the esteemed apartment owner, Mrs. Guo and her daughter taking not-so-low-income jollies to places like Shanghai, Dalian and Xiamen.  The broadcast ultimately backfired, deepened the discontent within the Chinese middle classes who have had to cope with increasingly high rents.  The problem got so bad that the government ordered the story and comments to be scrubbed from all discussion forums and social network sites.

Google Porn

The Chinese government is very proud of the fact that it has a clean and harmonious Internet environment.  Yes, in a country of 1.3 billion people, it’s forbidden to look at porn, and of course, the CCP Propaganda Department is anxious not only to establish itself as the thin red line, but also point out that looking at porn on the Internet is worse than eating babies in church, or drowning bag loads of kittens in the Yangtze.  To wit, the CCTV “current affairs show”, Focus Interview, broadcast an interview with a student who was addicted to looking at X-rated imaged on the web.  In a delicious twist, the interviewee pointed out that most of the images were to be found on the Chinese governments favorite search engine, Google.

Chinese netizens – all 300 million of them – were unimpressed and just a little skeptical of the claims.  A little searching around (probably using Google) uncovered the evil plot – Gao Ye, the student being interviewed was actually one of Focus Interviews’s own interns.  The Internet monitors in Beijing promptly added the words “Gao Ye” to their keyword blacklists, which in turn managed to grind the most of the Chinese Internet traffic to a halt since “gao” means “tall” and “ye” means “also”.

BTCC Spring Festival Fire

Ove the Spring Festival in 2009, a fireworks display went out of control and turned the Beijing Television Cultural Center in a massive roman candle that could be seen for miles around.  In the ensuing investigation, it was discovered that officials at CCTV had authorized the display, but hadn’t applied for permits from the local Beijing government, not only that, but they had ignored repeated warnings from the police  that the fireworks would be too powerful and dangerous.  As it turned out the fireworks were too dangerous (who would’ve guessed?) and the resulting inferno raged for 5 hours, killed one firefighter and completely destroyed the $731 million building.

Arrests immediately followed, including the former head of CCTV's construction bureau, 50-year-old Xu We.  Attempts to clamp down on the news story also followed, resulting in a wave of criticism from Chinese netizens and the international press. In a leaked memo to the New York Times, Beijing authorities had apparently ordered "No photos, no video clips, no in-depth reports…the news should be put on news areas only and the comments posting areas should be closed".  The reason?  The fire was said to symbolize bad luck for the coming New Year.

James Fallows, of The Atlantic wrote, “that the perils of the fireworks and firecrackers are more than a joke.... that people responsible appear to have been CCTV employees; and that the whole subsequent matter of investigating, publicizing, making sense of, and drawing omens from an unignorable spectacle involving the country's leading propaganda/communication outlet and the city's most distinctive new landmark will say a lot about the emotional and political state of China right now.”

Spring Festival Utility Men

And finally, the epic CCTV Spring Festival Gala raised it’s ugly head once again earlier this month, and while it’s becoming less and less popular, and turning into more of three hour infomercial, more fun can be had spotting people in the audience.  While typically, the sponsors of the show will have their CEO’s given the best seats, it’s the “ordinary people” – carefully vetted members of the public and “utility men” that netizens have the most fun with.



Yes, although CCTV has had the bright idea of using actors as fake members of the public, they haven’t really thought the whole thing through, and have used the same actors in the same shows for, er, the past 10 years.  One can only assume that they’ve been hoping that no one will catch on.  The bad news is of course that, well, people caught on.  And so did a lot of western news sources. Chinese netizens helpfully posted screen grabs of the utility men in a series of photos going all the way back to 2001.

Old men, Old Musical Instruments, Old Songs

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Lijiang is home to two living fossils.  One is the Traditional Chinese Medicine expert, the venerated (by Bruce Chatwin at least) Dr. Ho, who was pushing 300 when Python Michael Palin visited him in 1998 (the rumors that John Cleese visited and wrote “interesting bloke, crap tea”, are just that, two idiots wrote the names in the guestbook thinking they were being funny), and must surely be at the top of the World Heritage List by now.  The other is Naxi Music, and the history is far more interesting than Dr. Ho’s tea.

The posters around Lijiang promoting the Naxi Orchestra say that most of the performers are at least 70 years old.  The poster is somewhat out of date, and the median age of the orchestra is around 83 years old.  The youngest instrument is around 100 years old, and the oldest is..well it was based on an ancient Egyptian design that made its way to the Middle Kingdom. During the Red Army’s purges, the instruments were saved from the zealous masses hell-bent on destroying “The Three Olds” by burying them in walls or in the ground.

Xuan Ke is proud of the fact that the orchestra doesn’t receive any money from the government, what he conveniently forgets to mention is that the tickets for the 90 minute show (which ends in typical Chinese fashion with a video presentation) are about $30 each – which of course means that he doesn’t really need any kind of government grant.  Even for $30, Xuan Ke turns up late (confessing that he always comes late) and plays a couple of tunes with the orchestra, interspersing the songs with lengthy discourses in Chinese, and the odd sentence or two in English, most of which centered around the now outlawed practice of foot-binding.  The microphone is mercifully handed back to the Master of Ceremonies, who makes sly digs at the pounding techno pouring from the bars outside, probably forgetting that the audience is forced to watch the octogenarians perform in an unheated room that has, for some inexplicable reason, doors that won’t close properly.

 

The repertoire ranges from traditional Chinese songs, almost all of which seem to centre on dragons (Song of the Water Dragon, A Black Dragon Dances, Dragons Singing and Dancing, etc) to the cacophonous melodies of Tibetan hymns, to classical Chinese opera.  All of which are more preferable to the music outside that sounds like a thousand monkeys using a thousand typewriters to put up a thousand shelves.

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Walking Marriages on Lugu Lake

The flight from Kunming to Lijiang is not for the faint of heart, although those who suffer from a fear of flying (and if you don't, you will) can take solace in the fact that the flight, although utterly terrifying, it’s quite short. Short enough to barely drink a bottle of optimistically named “Aviation” spring water. The final approach to Lijiang airport has the plane buffeted and whipped by crosswinds created by the valleys and snow-capped peaks that led off from the Himalayas. While in retrospect it’s quite nice to drop words in like “Himalayas” and “snow-capped peaks”, into the conversation a few hours and a couple of stiff drinks after the event - while the plane was turning on final, I was suddenly aware that I had been repeating to myself “please don’t crash, please don’t crash, please God, don’t let us crash.”. It was the third flight that I’d take in the same month, and the first one that I started praying on.

We landed, most of us with our limbs still attached to our bodies, and most of us making for the toilet all at the same time. It was in the self-same public facility that I became aware that the Chinglish was getting progressively worse the further I got from the big cities. While in Kunming, I’d had to suffer signs reminding me to “please aim carefully” placed at eye level above the urinal, I was now faced with signs that told me to “be careful of the floor slide”, and others that advised me to “please slip carefully”. They reminded me of the Chinglish that had plagued a pre-Olympics Beijing. In China, the further you get from the capital city, the further back in time you go.

Surviving the flight from Kunming, I had to find a place to stay. The taxi driver that fell upon me in much the same way that a lion who had tried to go vegetarian for the last couple of weeks might fall upon a bewildered, self-peeling gazelle that had somehow become trapped between two slices of bread after having swum across a river of barbecue sauce told me that a ride to the city center would cost me 80rmb, and because cars are not allowed in the old town area, I would have to walk the last part. In the taxi, I started to muse that I had been taken advantage of somewhat – that was until we hit the underdeveloped road that led from the airport to the main highway into town. Calling it a road is probably a little too generous, dirt track, undeveloped byway or open air toilet would probably be more apt. I reflected, during attempts by the driver to concuss me on the roof of the car that although I’d been cheated out of 80RMB, the poor state of the road was actually causing three times the amount of damage to the car.

About 45 minutes later, we pulled to a halt. The driver tossed me my bags and gave me directions to my hostel. To tell the truth, he didn’t really give me directions, he just took my money and said “that way”, pointing down a cobbled street whose cobbles had been worn slippery by the thousands of shoe soles that had tread them down over the years.

The Old Town of Lijiang, so called because it was here before 1949, has been spared the locust-like attitude of the Han Chinese to sterilize, tarmac and bulldoze “modernity” into it. Although during my explorations of the town, I did come across a KFC and a Pizza Hut cunningly disguised as old buildings at one end of a street that opened out into the Chinese half of the city. Typical, I thought, the Chinese don't like anything that doesn't have a brand name on it, but then, I started to doubt that the women on the bar street trying to entice punters into the garish, equally identical establishments that I’d been taking photos of all day on the streets of the Old Town inside were true Naxi either.

The Naxi and the Musuo are, of course the reason that I’m here. Famous for their matriarchal societies, and even more famous for their “walking marriages”, the Musuo have gained notoriety, not least because of the larger than life figurehead of writer, singer and national celebrity, Namu. Recently described as a “bitch from hell” on a national Chinese TV talent show, and currently married to a Norwegian embassy worked (after having her proposal of marriage rejected by Nicholas Sarkozy), Namu is the author of no less than 8 autobiographies, most of which are thinly veiled attacks on Chinese men (not that they don’t deserve it).

The Musuo number around 30, 000 (and Namu has managed to annoy them to such an extent that they deny that she’s “true” Musuo) and live their lives around Lugu Lake at the base of Gamu Mountain. Here the womenfolk don’t marry, but take a series of lovers and the fathered children are raised independently of the men in their mothers “flower chamber”. While it all sounds very romantic and sacred and mystical and suff, Namu tells in her childhood memoir that her father rode into town on a white stallion seducing her mother by shouting “hey baby, nice ass!”. It would seem that the Musuo don’t really aim that high when it comes to finding a suitable suitor.

While I took my leave on the ancient streets of Lijiang, there is still a lot more to the city that meets the eye – the sacred Gamu Moutain, the Naxi Orchestra whose members had been persecuted by Mao during the “Thousand Flowers” persecution campaigns he waged, and of course, the Namu Museum that Namu herself had built at Lugu Lake in celebration of...herself. Added to all of that, there was Tiger Leaping Gorge. Even at the halfway point in my trip, my attitude towards traveling in China had become similar to MacBeth’s attitude towards killing people - initial doubts, followed by cautious enthusiasm and then greater and greater alarm at the sheer scale of the undertaking with still no end in sight.

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A Short Conversation With my Barber

Today was special, not least because I bought a nice pair of boots to go hiking around in, I also got my hair cut.

Having conversations in Chinese these days are hugely amusing to me. The actual act of speaking is difficult, and it’s only after I step back and look at the conversation as a whole that I realize what exactly we’ve been talking about.

After reading what we talked about, you can probably guess that everything revolved around a Chinese persons favorite conversation topic: Money.

HAIRDRESSER: Short enough?

ME: A little shorter. Really short, like the army, you know?

HARIDRESSER: Ah. I don’t want to cut it. Not many foreigners come here. Blond hair…very beautiful. You sure you want it this short?

ME: Sure.

HAIRDRESSER: Where are you from?

ME: England.

HAIRDRESSER: London? You know Beckham?

ME: No. Manchester. London’s in the south, Manchester’s in the north. I'm from Manchester

HAIRDRESSER: Oh.

ME: I can’t understand your Yunnan accent very well.

HAIRDRESSER: I can’t speak Standard Mandarin!

ME: Ok. Well, I live and work in Beijing.

HAIRDRESSER: You speak Chinese pretty well. Do you work with Chinese people? And you came to Kunming?

ME: No, I'm an English teacher. My colleagues are all foreigners. No Chinese. I came to Kunming to see the sights.

HAIRDRESSER: Oh. On the plane?

ME: Yes. First, I went to Chengdu. I have friends there.

HAIRDRESSER: Oh, friends!

ME: Chinese friends.

HAIRDRESSER: Chinese!

ME: Yes.

HAIRDRESSER: How much was the ticket?

ME: From Beijing to Chengdu?

HAIRDRESSER: Yes.

ME: 680RMB

HAIRDRESSER: How much from Chengdu to Kunming?

ME: About 500rmb…I can’t remember clearly.

HAIRDRESSER: I see. How long have you been in China?

ME: About three years.

HAIRDRESSER: Live in Beijing. Hmmm…you look good.

ME: Er. Thanks. I eat lots of fruit.

HAIRDRESSER: How much is a haircut in England?

ME: I really don’t know.

HAIRDRESSER: You can tell me!

ME: I went home once in three years. I really don’t know.

HAIRDRESSER: Guess. Roughly

ME: Probably about ten pounds.

HAIRDRESSER: Ten pounds? That’s 106rmb.

ME: I don’t know. I’m not good at maths.

HAIRDRESSER: How much is a haircut in France?

ME: I don’t know…I’m not French.

HAIRDRESSER: How much is a haircut in America?

ME: I really don’t know. I’ll ask my American friend for you.

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Kunming to Lijiang

Travelling is, to misquote Douglas Adams, unpleasantly like being drunk. What could possibly be so unpleasant about being drunk? Just ask a glass of water.

For the last two days I’ve been lying on my bunk in the hostel suffering from a mild bout of food poisoning – the prime suspect is thought to be a dodgy egg on an otherwise perfectly legitimate vegetable sandwich. Being sick in China is one of those things that every Chinese person you come across will have an opinion about, everyone will make a comment about, but no one will actually sympathize with your or offer any constructive advice about. Most of the home remedies revolve around imbibing large amounts of tea, staying away from goats on the Sabbath and, in extreme cases, for example, losing a limb, or being shot or being hit full in the face by a bus, smearing yourself with camel’s milk and diving into a holy lake. On no account should you ever see a doctor in a hospital.

Afflicted with what I could only describe as “epic” diarrhea – I was filled with dread at the thought of sneezing, or doing something even more fatal, like coughing or being surprised by something on the way to the chemist - I made my way to the nearest chemist to make what I thought would be an easy purchase – something that would stop the biological warfare in my lower gut, and give me enough time to drink a bottle of water without dashing to the nearest toilet screaming “fire in the hold!”.

The helpful chemist offered me several Traditional Chinese Medical remedies, almost all of them came with an attached caveat that they would start working in three or four days. Since I was fairly confident that in three or four days I would be lucky to have any teeth left, I forced myself to make a number of trips to and from the hostel in the hope that between the them, the so-called chemist and the receptionist would be able to figure out what the Chinese name for Loperamide (a chemical with which anyone living in China for any length of time should and will become intimately familiar with) was. A couple of hours, and several startled children later I was armed with a simple medication that almost cured me.

While the experience may be a minor tale of a couple of days of discomfort caused by nothing more than traveller’s stomach, it highlights the appalling state of public health. Despite being illegal, spitting (of the Premier League variety) borders on becoming a Chinese custom. Public toilets have little in the way of soap. On more than one occasion, I’ve seen people who in restaurants and coffeeshops enter a cubicle in a public convenience, and exit a few minutes later without washing their hands. Grown men pick their noses, waitresses pick their feet in street restaurants and there is, what has been termed by the group of expats that I hang out with, a certain “brown smell” that lingers in the hutongs over the summer months.

Moving on to happier matters, I’m off to Lijiang at the weekend. Michael Palin visited Lijiang for his documentary travelogue “Himalaya”, and he had this to say about the place:

“Lijiang is a tale of two cities: one a modern concoction of business district office blocks and shopping malls, the other an immaculately kept old town, with clay-tiled roofs, cobbled streets and a canal system that evokes Venice, Amsterdam or Bruges. Lijiang became rich and famous because of its key position the Tea-Horse Route from Tibet into China, but its idyllic situation, set comfortably in a shallow bowl of hills, is deceptive. A fault line at the edge of the Tibetan plateau runs below and the ripple effect of the tectonic collision that created the Himalaya has been responsible for over 50 strong earthquakes here in the last 130 years. The most recent, which registered over seven on the Richter scale, hit Lijiang in 1996, killing 300 and injuring 16,000. Many buildings were damaged or destroyed. The majority of them were in the new city.

The wood and stone houses of old Lijiang were built by people who knew about earthquakes and how to withstand them. They remain, thanks to UNESCO money, as an example of how to create harmony, line and proportion on a human scale. The result is a labyrinth of cobbled streets and squares, car free, perfect for walking, but also a victim of their own success. Large-scale preservation of the past is so rare in China that Lijiang has become a big draw, pulling upwards of 3 million tourists a year into an old town of 25,000 people.”

Which is slightly better than the way that he described Wanxian on the Yangtze River:

“…a hellish looking place where countless smokestacks and factory chimneys feed every shade of smoke from deep black to rust brown into a sky already turgid with low, pus-yellow clouds…”

Either way, with the one hour flight touching a little over 30UKP, it’s a deal that’s not to be missed.

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