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

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Image by luca pedrotti via Flickr"][/caption]

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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Hitting the Ground Running

After a long hiatus, almost going insane teaching English and dealing with some of the most difficult students that I've ever had the pleasure of educating, I'm in the first week of my month long leave of absence.

Predictably, owing to the mass migration during Spring Festival, my original plan to go to Tibet and the Xinjiang has had to be re-planned, and I elected to travel south instead to Kunming...of course, I started off in my favourite place in the whole world: Chengdu. And had hotpot. Actually, I had hotpot twice, which for my delicate palate is two times too many, but I just seem to get addicted to the damn stuff - to wit, I was able to enjoy the delights of both wet and dry hotpot - the dry one was ribs, which is Chinese shorthand for "full of bones that'll break your teeth". The rest of the night was rather misjudged, and I ended up getting terribly drunk in a bar called Jellyfish, which has nothing but the finest in thumpy-thumpy dance music (the type that sounds like an pneumatic drill being gang raped by a deranged posse of air hammers and is almost always played at a volume that makes the chair next to you bleed) and some of the strongest White Russians that I've come across.

Against all the odds - especially the Russian odds - and despite having to pack at 1am in the dark, I made it. Although I'm slightly worried that when I boarded in Beijing, my pack weighed 14kg, and at Chengdu airport my pack checked in at 12kg. I'm a little worried that whatever weighed 2kg must have been important enough for me to pack, and I may have left it for some unsuspected innocent in Chengdu.

One other point of amusement was the trouble that my electric toothbrush caused at Chengdu Airport. Initially confused that the item in question was a mobile phone (something that I've thought about at length, and can only assume that the battery was the source of the problem) I was summoned behind the check-in counter, whereupon a number of efforts were made to the poor toothbrush. Hungover, still a little drunk, and not particularly happy at having my underwear put on show for every Chinese person in front of the check-in desk, I took the opportunity to further British-Chinese relations, putting on my best Beijing accent and screaming something along the lines of "This wasn't a problem in Beijing airport, why is it a problem now?!". Of course I probably got the tones all in the wrong places and the officials in question probably heard something like "why is my armadillo snorkeling? I eat pasta!". Either way, I established myself as a strung out foreigner who was prepared to shout gibberish at people like them all day if need be - I was duly and begrudgingly allowed on the plane.

The arrival in Kunming was uneventful and as boring as you can expect. The only point of amusement was the taxi driver who drove me from the airport to the hostel who was dressed in a style that I can only describe succinctly as "Mad Max Drag". That is to say that he was kitted out in huge aviator sunglasses, fingerless leather gloves, leather trousers and a leather jacket nicely set off by a luxuriantly thick fake fur ruff around the collar.

So right now, after catching up on some badly needed sleep, I'm fully ensconced in delightful "Cloudland Hostel" in Kunming...sipping coffee, watching old people play mahjong and wondering what else I can do. An idyllic scene somewhat ruined by the Chinese staff watching The Empire Strikes Back on the only TV in the room.

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