Considerations of Inconsiderate China

Los Angeles

There was a lot of time to think about China on the flight home. We left our hotel in Beijing at about 7am on Monday morning and arrived home at about 3pm the same day. In all, it was nearly 24 hours in transit. One of the books I read on the plane was Stick Out Your Tongue by Ma Jian. It's banned in China, as is so much else that's worth reading.

The thin volume is a group of somewhat linked short stories based on the facts of the author's travels in Tibet in the mid-1980s. The stories portray the Tibetans and their Han Chinese masters as both brutal and brutalized. Ma Jian had gone to Tibet to get in touch with his Buddhist faith. He came away having lost that faith. He'd already had any of his faith in China drummed out of him.

China's a very hard place to keep your faith; in anything. It calls itself a communist country, but that's just a sick joke. The guys in power in Beijing lay claim to whatever dubious legitimacy they have through the lineage of the Communist Party - which has become no more than a state religion. They don't really believe a word of the rhetoric anymore, but if they ever say so publically they'll just be pulling down their own house of cards. In reality China is still ruled by emperors: the Ming Dynasty gave way to the Ching which gave way to the Manchu, then to a Nationalist Dynasty which was supplanted by the Chairman Mao Dynasty then a short period of turmoil before the Deng Dynasty. Now China seems to be firmly ruled by a Dull Technocrat Dynasty that is turning it into the kind of old-fashioned, exploitive capitalist country that much of the rest of the world has evolved beyond.

One day in Beijing we walked through a park that was being restored. The workers, imported from villages in the countryside - a lot cheaper than hiring city dwellers - live in a big tent and eat communal meals. They're in Beijing on a one year contract. So as to ensure they will stick around for the whole year, they're not paid until their term is completed. In the case of the park it's the government that's employing them, so their money might be safe. All too often at the end of the year, if they're working for a private company, the company will declare financial hardship and pay them less than they're entitled to, or nothing more than a bus ride home. There is almost nothing they can do about it.

The old, traditional neighborhoods in Beijing are called hutongs and they're disappearing fast; torn down to make way for nondescript blocks of high-rise apartments. The people who are displaced are compensated, slightly. But not nearly enough to afford the new apartments. They move to the outskirts of the city, or to someplace else altogether, breaking up communities that have been together for generations.

Nearly 800 million Chinese live in "rural" areas. They are the "peasents" who were the backbone of China's revolution. Communism was supposed to be on their behalf. That didn't work out so well. They got as screwed by the Mao Dynasty as they had been by the other dyansties before it.

In the Deng Dynasty they were somewhat freed. They still couldn't own their land - a promise that was broken by the Emperor Mao - but they could grow whatever they wanted on it and let a free market sort it out. From 1983 to 1991 their incomes rose significantly. They've stagnated, or even declined, since. There were nearly a hundred thousand rural protests last year in China. It's hard to get an exact figure on anything in the country, but the government itself admits to around 74,000. None of them had any real impact. Many of them were brutally suppressed.

And many of them are losing the land that they don't own anyhow. The government owns agricultural land. People can buy, sell and speculate on residential, commercial and industrial property and that's a whole lot more lucrative than farming. So local governments all over China have been selling off huge chunks of agricultural land to developers from the cities - and from other countries. They boot the farmers off to make way for housing developments, industrial parks and shopping malls. In some cases the farmers are compensated at the very low "agricultural use value" of the land. In many cases they are just shoved aside and told to go find work elsewhere. (Living in tents in the city and not getting paid for a year, for instance.)

China is no worker's paradise. It is the most unbridled, raucous, venal capitalist society I have ever seen. By comparison, the U.S. is much further down the road to socialist utopia. By every measure, (even those where the U.S. does a piss poor job)- education, healthcare, poverty levels and social welfare, social services, legal protections for minorities and women, infrastructure, privacy from government intrusion into daily life, cultural and arts funding, honest law enforcement, rights of individuals, free and open access to information, even that old Marxist goal of labor and public ownership of the means of production, etc. - the U.S. - and for that matter practically every other "non-socialist" country in Asia - kicks China's ass.

I did meet one person in China who has kept the faith. As a young nuclear physicist, Joan Hinton worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. She witnessed the explosion of the first bomb at Trinity Site, New Mexico. With her own hands she helped to build the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. She freaked out when she heard how many people her handiwork had helped to kill. She became a lifelong communist. She defected to China in 1948 and has lived there ever since. Now, living on a dairy farm outside of Beijing, she still thinks Chairman Mao did almost nothing, if anything, wrong. The 30 to 40 million people who most reputable historians say died during China's Great Leap Forward in the early 1960s are simply a "gross exaggeration." If Chairman Mao hadn't died, and had been able to complete his Cultural Revolution, it would have been his greatest achievement. It is still something that China ought to be proud of. Deng Xiaoping and his cronies were horribly corrupt "capitalist roaders." She's a smart, warm, strong, fascinating woman and a true believer.

And maybe she's got at least part of a point. A whole lot fewer people are being killed these days by the design and mismanagement of China's government than were slaughtered by Emperor Mao. (Although a country that executes as many as twenty thousand people a year and allows many tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands to die in industrial accidents, can scarcely be cited for humanitarianism.) But still, parts of the Chinese economy seem to be reverting to feudalism. Sooner or later the country is going to have to reform real quick, split apart, or face another revolution.

All of this seems more apparent in Beijing than elsewhere. Even without open public discourse, politics is one of the most common topics in private conversations. In the drab, colorless, dust and pollution choked capital city, it's a whole lot harder to see evidence of the very real progress that China is making than it is in glitzy, glamorous, 24-hour-a-day, high-speed crackling Shanghai. And in the South, in Guangdong and Fujian provinces, in Hong Kong and Macau, I was regularly reminded of a favorite old Cantonese saying: "Close to my heart, and far from Beijing."


Part Two: A Short List of the Best of the Eric Stone Book Tour of China 2006

Enough China bashing for one blog. Here's some of the things I liked best on the tour.

Hong Kong & Macau

Colin Cotterill. I knew he was a wonderful writer before I met him and now I know he's a great, fun, interesting guy in person too. Read The Coroner's Lunch and Thirty-Three Teeth. You'll like them. If you don't, it could only be because you have bad taste in books. Here's a picture of Colin, (he's a lot more photogenic than I am), his girlfriend Jessi and my girlfriend Eva:



Here we are chatting with some of our legions of fans following a triumphant - well, amusing at least - panel that we both appeared on at the Man Hong Kong Literary Festival:



Fernando's. One of the world's greatest restaurants. It's on Hac Sa beach on Coloane Island in Macau. It's informal and relaxing and the spicy clams, crab casserole, bbq chicken, grilled fish and even plain green salad are utter perfection. Especially washed down with a pitcher of sangrilla or a bottle or three of Portuguese Vinho Verde. (There's a scene that takes place in it in The Living Room of the Dead.)

The Star Ferry. A much shorter ride than it used to be due to the reclaiming of land in the harbor, but still one of the great scenic bargains on the planet.

Hee Kee Fried Crab Expert. And I don't even like crab all that much. Astounding, overwhelming flavors of garlic, pepper, chili and crab. A funky little place (be warned, it isn't cheap though) that is jam packed at all hours in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong.

The Train from HK to Shanghai. It takes about 25 hours, a very comfortable private sleeper compartment for two costs about the same or less than flying, the scenery is interesting and the dining car has tasty - if greasy - food. Here's Eva, snug on the train:



Shanghai

Where to start. I fell in love with Shanghai. It's one of the most exciting cities I've ever been in. Just walking around in almost any part of the city is interesting and fun. Go to the Photos section of the website to see pictures. They ought to be up sometime later today. But, here's some few recommendations:

Xiao long bau - juicy pork dumplings. You'll find them all over town, but the very best ones we had, the very height of dumpling perfection, were at a tiny little storefront on Ningbo Road West, just north of Central Henan Road (not too far from Nanjing Lu - the main shopping street). The place is next door to the Apple Garden Bakery and the name is only in Chinese. Be very careful when you bite into the dumplings. The utterly perfect, thin but strong and pliant wrapper holds in a large amount of scalding hot pork juice. They only steam a couple of baskets at a time so that they can serve them hot, very hot. Go there and eat. It's ridiculously cheap and one of the truly great food experiences you will ever have. Even if you're a vegetarian - give it up for a meal. Here's a picture of the front of the place:



Shanghai MOCA. A great space in a nice park surrounded by strange looking buildings. The show we saw wasn't great, but the contemporary art was quirky and political in ways that I didn't expect to see in China.

Officer Emily, Shanghai PD. Eva had her wallet stolen. After an hour and a half of street cops arguing over who was going to get stuck with the jurisdiction - it happened right on the border between two precincts - and have to cope with non-Chinese speaking tourists, they took us to the station and handed us over to Emily, the low person on the totem pole. She spoke great English and had a very nice, easy way about her that made us comfortable and almost made a pleasant experience of the whole thing. Chairman Mao once said: "Women hold up half the sky." That day, Emily was holding up a whole lot more than her half. Here she and Eva are in the rather run down station house:



Terrace Bars at M on the Bund and New Heights. Mind-boggling views and strong drinks, perfect for dusk as the sun goes down and the lights come up.

Xiao Nan Guo restaurant. Superb Shanghainese food, somewhat off the tourist beaten path, big for weddings on weekends so either book ahead or go on a weekday. We had crab, shrimp, snake (really delicious snake), some sort of loofah like vegetable that was great and some sort of local pancake thing that was also great.

Beijing

We really didn't much like Beijing. It's ugly, flat, dull, spread out and filthy. (Then again, that could describe Los Angeles - although I think it's less of those things - and I love this place, so go figure.) Everyone told us that the people in Beijing were much less aggressive and unpleasant, and more couth than they are in Shanghai. We found the opposite to be true. Still, there were things we really liked about the place.

798 Arts District. A whole bunch of contemporary galleries built into the sprawling complex of what used to be an industrial cable factory. A lot of the art we saw was rather predictable and derivative, but there were some gems in the mix. (Chinese artists still have a long way to go before they work Chairman Mao and communism out of their esthetic systems.) Still, the complex itself is great and it's surprising how free the visual arts are in an otherwise pretty strict totalitarian state.

Liqun Roast Duck Restaurant. A great, family run place down a somewhat confusing set of alleys in an old - although rapidly being torn down - neighborhood just south and east of Tienanmen Square. There are plenty of big, garish, popular tourist palaces for Peking Duck. Eat here instead.

The Bookworm. An island of calm and intellectual sensibility. A combination bookstore, lending library, cafe, bar and event venue run by the extremely personable and smart Alex Pearson. If you're pining away for actual, fresh, raw greens - a regular occurance for Westerners travelling in Asia - they have really good salads. Every city ought to have a place like this.

The Great Wall from Jinshanling to Simatai. See the photos section. This is a tough 10 km hike, but worth every last panting, groaning, knee quaking step of it.

The Weekend Flea Market. Kitsch, kitsch and more kitsch. Here's where the Cultural Revolution really went to die.

Hello T-Shirt!

Beijing

There are some things I am enjoying about Beijing. The Bookworm, where I had my event, is one of them. Every city would be lucky to have at least one. It's a cafe / bar / lounge / event venue / lending library / bookshop, run by Alex Pearson, an extremely smart, funny, pleasant person to spend some time with. You can also get a really good salad there - a rarity in Asia.

The event itself was well attended, maybe 45 or so people. At the end they asked a lot of questions, mostly to do with prostitution; about which it seems I am assumed to be some sort of expert, or at least willing to talk honestly about from a male perspective. One shy young Chinese woman in a lot of frilly pink wanted to know why I wrote The Living Room of the Dead, then she wanted to know if I'd been influenced by writers like Kafka. I could only guess that she hadn't read the book, but she was so charming and ernest that I answered her quite seriously. Later, after the event, she came up to me and wanted to know if I liked writing strong moral messages into my books. I told her no, but that I hoped my books would stimulate people to think for themselves about a variety of issues, including moral ones. I asked if she liked reading books with strong moral messages. She said "no." I then teased her a little, asking if she liked books with "immoral messages," to which she giggled, turned tail and ran out of the room. Hmmmm.

The day after the event was spent at the Summer Palace, which was largely closed for rennovation - no doubt for the Olympics year in 2008. They do need to do more than simply renovate though. The feeble efforts at informing visitors about the places they are seeing, are just not enough, especially when for the most part all you can look at is the exterior of buildings. Even if you were let into the interior, most of the historical artifacts are long gone.

After that we walked around in a slightly less bombed out looking hutong. Maybe it was that it was the middle of a weekday, but the old neighborhood was far from lively. Like nearly everything else in Beijing it was drab, colorless, desultory. We did walk alongside a small lake where there are a great many bars and pubs. At night it might be festive. We'll try to go back on the weekend. We ascended to the top of the old Drum Tower - sort of a huge, municipal clock from which the time was announced by drums. From it there were views over all the city. There isn't much point. It only drove home what an ugly and uninspiring place Beijing is.

Yesterday we had a car and driver take us on a three hour drive to Jinshanling, up in the mountains, from where we hiked on the Great Wall for ten kilometers to Simatai. This, if you are physically capable of doing it, is something I can unresevedly recommend. Although it might be nicer in the mid to late spring or the fall when there is some color in the landscape. Some of the wall that you walk on has not been restored and it is remarkable to know that you're walking on something massive that was built anywhere from 450 to, for a short while, nearly 2000 years ago. The hike takes you up some extremely steep portions of the wall and down others, as it snakes along ridges above deep gorges, through 33 watchtowers.

As you leave Jinshanling you first run a gauntlet of vendors. Their shrill greeting of "Hello t-shirt!" is quite familiar to any foreigner who walks around nearly anywhere in China. (In nightmarkets that have a lot of food stalls you will hear the variant: "Hello dumpling!" which I don't think is meant as either a term of affection or a comment on the shape of many foreign tourists.) As you pass through the welcoming committee, a tag team duo will attach themselves to you. Even if you make it clear that you want to walk alone, they will be nearby - either in front or behind - as you walk. Every so often, as you pause to catch your breath, they will come up and in tortured English tell you small facts that you are very likely to have already read in the most abbreviated guidebook, or can read for yourself on the poorly written signs along the way: "Ming Dynasty, 450 year. Mongolia north, China south, brick, 33 guard tower..."

The good ones don't try to sell you anything until you've reached the halfway point -where the torturous path turns, mostly, downhill. Then it's out with the photo book, the scrolled photograph, the postcards and finally, the t-shirt - in just that order of descending profit margin for them. If you say no, you don't want to buy, much less carry any of that crap, even politely, out comes the hard luck story. They're simple, poor farmers. The crops are terrible. All they can do every day is come to the Great Wall and sell to tourists or their families will go hungry and their children won't go to school. They won't leave you alone. They won't take no for an answer. If you speak to them in some language other than English, they don't care, they either speak enough of it too to sell you something, or they are pretty good with sign language. Finally, wanting to be left alone, you have to buy something to make them go away. (If you simply give them the money and tell them to scram, it is extremely insulting, even though that's, in essence, what it's all about.)

A word of advice: buy something from one of them right away. Overpay a little for it and tell them the money is for the both of them. Then tell them to go away and they will. Buy something light though, it's a hard hike. You don't want the book. You don't even want the postcards. The t-shirt or the rolled up photo aren't so bad. You can also use what you've bought to ward off the vendors from the town you're walking to who meet you at the halfway point and threaten to accompany you the rest of the way.

Yet again, it's the Communist worker's paradise in action. Villages have all been told that they have to fend for themselves. They have to provide for their own health care and education and sanitation and pretty much everything else. They are not given very much money from the central government to do any of this. So, instead of getting together to find reasonable ways to raise money, they in turn tell their residents to fend for themselves. So, when you leave Jinshanling you pay a 30 yuan (about US$3.75) fee to start the hike; and you're pestered by Jinshanling vendors. At the halfway point you must pay - or turn back - the 40 yuan (US$5) fee to Simatai; and get pestered by the Simatai vendors. Then you get to a suspension bridge not far from Simatai and you must pay five yuan to cross it.

None of this is a lot of money - although it would be to a typical Chinese tourist. The question is, why can't the two towns get together and charge one higher fee to make the hike, and organize the vendor gauntlets at either end leaving tourists alone in the middle, and find a way to share revenue to the benefit of everyone in the villages? I guess that might reek too much of socialism, or just plain common sense; or maybe it doesn't provide enough opportunity for graft. I also suspect, among other things, that the central government finds ways to discourage cooperation between villages - that might give them a chance at a little power of their own.

Communism was a really dumb idea. The sad thing is that for a great many Chinese people, especially those who don't live in the big, fast developing cities, they haven't come up with a better one yet.

Administrative Malaise

Beijing

Of course this isn't going to be fair. Opinions don't have to be fair. We arrived in Beijing at 6:58am today having taken the train from Shanghai.

We were sorry to leave Shanghai. We walked a great deal on our last day there, much of it along Suzhou Creek which is very interesting and may, if the urban planners have their way, become very attractive. We ate the very finest xiao long bau, juicy pork dumplings, that we have ever had the privilege of eating. At a mere five yuan (about 62 cents U.S.) for eight perfect dumplings, we couldn't help ourselves and went through three servings and just barely managed to stop ourselves from a fourth.

We must have covered five or six miles and nearly every block had something that stopped us, at least for a little while, to photograph or gawk or admire or ask about.

Then the train was great. Modern, comfortable, fast, quiet for a train - everything that Amtrak in America isn't. We enjoyed ourselves and slept reasonably well.

Entering Beijing, all was bleak. The apartment buildings and slums we passed looked run down and very used up. A lot of areas, pretty much all the old ones we passed, looked like they'd been saturation bombed. The people we could see walking through the dense haze and dust were hunched over and colorless. As we got into the center of the city, the big buildings, even the new ones, looked no better than one might expect of mid-1960s Soviet architecture.

The boulevards are broad with overly long blocks, lined with uninspired and uninspiring buildings and the occasional monument that it's hard to imagine anyone really takes all that seriously anymore. The crowds of people everywhere - in a country where people are not usually known for common courtesy - seem to aspire to even greater depths of spitting on the street, belching in your face, pushing and shoving while cutting in lines.

The Forbidden City was forbidding indeed. Jam packed with tour groups, the scene of a great deal of noisy and dusty restoration work and ill-served by the feeble attempts of the signage - brought to you by American Express - to explain the significance of the place, much less such matters of interest as daily life or anything else that took place when it was something more than a tourist site.

Tiananmen Square is, as advertised, enormous. It used to be bigger until they stuck the Mao-soleum (as it is sometimes called) in the middle of it. It is utterly barren, carpeted in a good plush inch or two of dust and manages to feel - if a place can be said to express such a thing - arrogant. It is also lousy with cops - and, reportedly, plainclothes cops. They're ready to pounce on anyone who might dare raise even a minor stink in public about the oppressive government here.

On the way to the Forbidden City and the Square we walked down Wangfujing Dajie, a huge pedestrian (in both senses of the word) shopping street. Until relatively recently it had been the site of an old, renown hutong - a traditional neighborhood. Now it reminds me of the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California - only a lot wider and with fewer and less interesting shops.

For dinner we did manage to find our way to a truly superb, small, family-run roast duck restaurant called Li Qun. It was down a meandering route through narrow alleys running through an actual, remaining hutong. Not for long though. About a third of the small shops and houses looked as if they'd been totaled in an artillery barrage; two-thirds had suffered some sort of damage. It is an area over which Beijing's rapacious developers are greedily licking their chops.

Despite China's near constant nagging reminders about its great and glorious past, there seems to be very little real sentiment in favor of preserving the remnants of it. There are some sites, such as the Forbidden City, that cannot be levelled to make way for a shopping mall. But I would guess that within the next five years there will be expensive boutiques lining the courtyards of the Forbidden City. It is already reported that Starbucks has breached the City gates. Although I must admit that we didn't see it ourselves.

So, so far Beijing has not made a good impression. Not even close. We have been told that there are a lot of good, avant garde art galleries here, and a wide variety of interesting cultural events to be viewed. We'll see. Meanwhile our feet hurt, and in the service of not much gain.

An Astounding Place - The Planet's a Goner

Shanghai

Another day of wonder and delight in Shanghai. Eva couldn't get through to Bank of America in the U.S. to report her stolen ATM card so we decided to go to their office in Pudong - the new part of the city across the river - to see what we could do. An espresso was required to kick start the day so we went to a gleaming new huge Starbucks. It tasted just like it does in the U.S., which is, I guess, the point. We found our way to the Shanghai Stock Exchange building - a vertical hollow square - and the BofA people there could not have been more friendly and helpful.

Mission accomplished, we went to lunch. We went to the Grand Hyatt - the world's tallest hotel. It occupies floors 54 to 87 of the Jin Mao Tower - a beautiful building that looks like sort of a modern update on the Chrysler Building in New York. First we admired the 30-story indoor atrium. (I've got great photos of a lot of this stuff but unfortunately it seems that they are going to have to wait for my return to the U.S. to make it onto the website.) Then we went to the hotel's Shanghai restaurant on the 86th floor for lunch. The haze outside prevented us from seeing much. The wild vegetables with tofu were fantastic, everything else was sort of typical hotel food - perfectly cooked but kind of dull. A relatively light lunch cost us about as much as we'd spent on all our meals put together up until that point.

After lunch we descended and looked across the street at the beginning stages of construction of what will be the world's tallest building - 150 or 170 or 210 floors or something like that. The pictures look like it will be a slender, graceful, angled tower with a huge hole in the top to let the wind through so that it doesn't sway too much. I'm looking forward to going up into it one of these days - after it's been successully in place for at least a few years first.

Off to the Pearl Orient TV Tower - the monster spire with red bubbles built into it at various stages. It's something else that can only be described in superlatives - although variations on the word "ugly" are certainly among them. In the basement is a Shanghai history museum that is very well done. It has some of the best dioramas and small scale complete shops, buildings and neighborhoods that we've ever seen. A number of the dioramas come complete with moving, talking holograms of people at work, play or simply hanging around the house and arguing with each other. It does a good job of portraying the history and daily life of Shanghai from around the mid-1800s to just before the revolution in 1949. I want to see how they portray their history since 1949, but we're not sure which museum to go to for that.

We had a much better dinner than lunch, for about a quarter the price - Yang's Kitchen, if you should ever be in Shanghai. Then we strolled around a neighborhood that had a small Chinese-Moslem night market and was also a red light district. There were a whole lot of small barber shops, complete with revolving red and white poles, staffed by a number of young women wearing a lot of makeup. They weren't there to cut hair. We stopped in front of a restaurant that was selling baked goods. Among other things they were selling bagels. That's not what they called them, but that's exactly what they were. Really good and fresh ones too.

Another fascinating, fun day in a city that I am increasingly enamored of. We're even toying with the idea of living here for at least a year or two.

So, what's the problem?

The planet is sunk. Literally. Goodbye Seychelles and Mauritius. Hurry up and build that sea wall Manhattan. There's no stopping this kind of development in time. It won't happen. No one can reasonably ask them to stop it, or even cut back. Maybe if the U.S. got serious itself and said: okay, we're going to cut back on our waste and pollution and lifestyle; we're willing to accept a lower standard of living; maybe then we could convince China and India and other developing countries to slow down. Although I doubt even then they'd listen to us. But we are not going to do that and we have no solid ground to stand on to ask anyone else to do that and global warming is the real deal.

Much of what is making Shanghai one of, if not the most exciting places in the world today is causing long term problems for the planet. That's true in every single big city. And it's not going to get better. It's going to get worse. And it's going to get a lot worse - fast. You think last year's hurricanes were bad? Just wait. The tsunami's got nothing on a rising ocean.

The only hope is for some sort of sci-fi technological miracle and there is at best a very slim chance of that. We are not at all likely to invent our way out of this one, or to be able to finance the invention in time on a world wide level if we do.

So, I'm learning to love this place and to fear what it means. Then again, I live in Los Angeles, a place with much the same longterm implications.

Ah well, it's time to shower and hit the streets again. To enjoy this place while I can.