Spreading from Beijing

Beijing Diaries April 25, 2004

“We don’t have religion in China, we believe in the Communist Party,” said Shelley, and this week I got to be in a film about a Party legend, reflect on my life in China, and visit Chengde; summer home of the Mongolian Emperors that ruled before the Party took power.

“Religion is the first topic I want to discuss with you,” directed Shelley, a rather imposing finance clerk, studying English here at BLCU. “I believe that the majority of people in your country are Christians – that is right?” My British reserve at discussing this caught me by surprise as much as her question. Israel, my American flat mate, is actively involved in the church and it seems as though western groups are filling the vacuum that exists as Party doctrine gives way to more freedoms. “What is the one priority of all of your people?” she continued, peering at me through her serious spectacles. My attempt to reason that different groups have different life issues was met with a slight impatience; I wondered if individuality is still principally a western concept – rather inefficient and extravagant for a nation of 1.4bn people.

Tuesday 20^th

‘Although believing the battles against SARS and avian flu have not yet ended, Lee said he was quite impressed by China’s quick control of the two diseases.’ (China Daily)

Jean, whom I met climbing Mount Kinabalu (Xmas day 2000) pressed me for my real feelings about being here. At 37 I no longer feel as though life is timeless; I want to be getting on with something meaningful – a family and a valuable project. The wonderful unaccountability of my young student life has been replaced with a desire to maximize time. I must juggle study with client work, balance financial prudence with fatigue at splitting US$10 restaurant bills 8 ways, and a disappointment at being considered by the girls as an uncle, not a prospect. The wild sow like sound of people clearing their throat still makes me cringe, and I miss the civility of Singapore and the culture of Europe. But I still believe that I am growing and am energized by that growth, and for now that outweighs the frustrations that accompany this journey.

On Wednesday I went to the Beijing Aviation Museum, to take part in the final episode of a 30-part TV drama about Deng Xiaoping. In 1977 Deng came to power as Vice Premier, Vice Chairman of the Party and Chief of Staff of the Peoples Liberation Army. It was Deng who famously proclaimed in 1993 “to get rich is glorious,” twenty years after implementing the ‘Four Modernizations’ programme that included the ‘Responsibility System’ which allowed farms and factories to sell their surpluses; the thin end of the broad wedge of the capitalism today. CCTV was going to air 6 months after commissioning, with filming in China, Japan and America. It didn’t appear to matter that an American woman played Margaret Thatcher, while I sat next to a Frenchman and Russian as advisors to Thatcher; aboard Mao Zedong’ private plane; which was pretty cool. I got the part, without audition, as ‘agents’ roam campus looking for western faces; and after a full day of waiting, and 5 minutes on set, I was paid the princely sum of RMB300 (US$25) – and got a great photo of myself with Deng.

That night at my local takeaway, Xiao Song had his books ready for me, and his homework done. Last week while waiting for my dinner, I asked the 21 year old delivery lad, who lives in the basement bicycle garage, to read the text with me. An hour later we had worked on a short dialogue he could use to greet people in English when they entered the sparsely decorated, neon lit canteen. Sabine came to meet me there; Xiao offered her a menu and a cup of tea, with a beaming smile. Almost every child here has taken English from the age of 11 for six years, and Xiao is one of those that just have no chance to use it; but is delighted to try. My favourite line was when he introduced himself as ‘Barbeque’ instead of ‘Barbara’ – part of a textbook dialogue that had healthy looking Americans sitting outside talking about engineering jobs at IBM – it might as well have been talking about astronauts.

Thursday – word on campus is that there are some confirmed cases of SARS. People are nervously waiting for news.

Friday I put the SARS news aside, and looked forward to an evening at the Forbidden City Concert Hall. I spent several hours in the Quantel office, reconnecting with EASTWEST by signing cheques and reviewing performance. As planned, Derrick and the team are managing the shop excellently. In the evening, Maria, Megan, Marcello (Argentinean, American and Uruguayan) and I went to listen to Irwin Hoffman conduct the Beijing Symphony Orchestra. Hoffman, gray-haired and grandfatherly, inspired the orchestra to play Brahms and Respighi with hypnotic gesticulations and warm encouragement. I noticed he conducted the 3 pieces and 3 encore without a score which Maria and I thought impressive. People talked, moved seats, and even left during the performance, but mercifully no one took a phone call.

Up 06.30 on Saturday to travel to Cheng de by train, 255km north east of Beijing – in Mongol territory. On the train, an American visiting professor showed us the article – four confirmed SARS cases and one death in Beijing. We all read it slowly, anxiously exploring our options. Finding Chengde at the confluence of 4 rivers and surrounded by stunning rocky outcrops, Emperor Kangxi liked it so much that in 1703 he built his summer palace there. His grandson, Qianlong, had a policy of building replicas of architecture from around China, and we went to see the stunning replica of Lhasa Potala palace; with some interesting directions – my favourite sign was for ‘Genitl Emen.’ With so much construction and reconstruction, I felt the monuments were beginning to lack authenticity, if not credibility, and at a hefty RMB50 – RMB90 (US$5-10) to enter each location, Cheng de was becoming more a theme park than a noble retreat. The best memory for me will be when Megan and I rented torches and ascended steep green carpeted steps to view the Guanyin (goddess of mercy) statue; at 28 meters high it is the biggest wooden sculpture of it’s kind in the world!

End-note:

If SARS does rear it’s ugly head again, then we will all need to believe in the Party and it’s ability to contain it. On a personal level I don’t want to leave Beijing before my time. Another outbreak of SARS will be terrible for business. The ‘Meet in Beijing’ music festival is being joined by the ‘International Drama Festival’ – having found this enjoyable element of Beijing, I would be sad to not to be able to go to anything. Most things spread from Beijing to the provinces, I hope this SARS outbreak is not one of them.

Creativity and Heaven

Beijing Diaries Sunday 18 Apr 2004

After nearly two months of living in Beijing, I had what felt like my first routine week, but routine is relative in a city with over 2,000 years of history, and many very present problems. I met a PR professor who teaches at the Humane College, the first HIV Positive patient, and visited the Temple of Heaven.

A couple of readers told me that the diary skips rather, and so I have inserted days to form natural breaks, which I hope will read better.

Tuesday 13th
Study at BLCU hasn’t been going so well. Dwindling class numbers led to the warning that we could not take the final exam if we missed 60 hours, and on Friday young Jiang Dan declared that she really didn’t know how to teach us using the dedicated text – not at all inspiring. When asked about the validity of two classes on family structure, teacher Yuan Jin Chun told us “in England people discuss the weather, in China we talk about family; it is important.” I missed if she had been to the UK. Education at BLCU appears to be based on repetition, memorization and standardization; as Western educated students we just can’t get our heads around this approach, and so we have a hiatus; the college has students that it doesn’t understand, and the students don’t understand the University’s inflexibility and lack of creativity. I am worried that after 3 weeks we have studied no grammar, just a constant stream of new words that we don’t know how to assemble.

Friday 16th
I got to practice my limited business vocabulary on Vice Professor Jing Qing Hong of the Humane College Beijing Forestry University, also a Member of the Academy Committee of Chinese Association of Public Relations, Correspondent and Columnist Specially Invited by “China Sons and Duughters (sic).” Jodie, an earnest young PR student and friend of Nicole, introduced me to him. It seemed impertinent to ask why the Forestry University was home to a PR course, and I spoke with the formal ‘Nin’ (like vous in French) as Jodie sat anxiously waiting for my faltering sentences to cause offence. Jing told me that there are over 1,000 PR firms in Beijing and that the largest, ‘Global,’ is the result of a merger between a government agency and an American firm. Having encountered Jodie and other students unsure of their careers in the new field of PR, I offered to give a presentation on the industry. “I think he is more interested in business with you, than your presentation” confided Jodie. Everyone wants to do business; the issue is with whom to do it.

Saturday 17th
Song Pengfei has the calm presence of a person who is at rest with themselves. Apparently the first Chinese person to publicly declare himself HIV positive, Song and his team run the “Positive Art Workshop” based in the Beijing Youan Hospital (http://www.paw.org.cn) First established by a Spaniard and Ecuadorian in Dec. 2002, the unit has funding from the Ford Foundation (Song was unsure, but we assumed it was founded by former president Gerald Ford not the motor company). “We want to help HIV patients with the psychological problems that they face, spread the word about the disease and raise money by selling their works,” Song told me with the help of a translator.

The Government publicly acknowledges 850,000 HIV patients, but the figure is believed to be 5 times higher. Rural people, apparently unaware of their own infection, have sold their blood to middle men, and this enters the health system; and this is how Song became infected. Drug use and prostitution are now the main catalysts, with the Government reportedly cutting down on blood selling, and no mention is made at all of homosexual activities. Song told me that Government officials are involved in virtually all NGO’s, and he was diplomatic about their role; I am learning to listen for what is not said, rather than what I am told. “A lot of people do not know that they have HIV,” Song said, and with the recent history of SARS illustrating the paucity of the health infrastructure in China, I sense that the true scale and future of HIV remains to be seen.

Sunday 18th
Sabina, a classmate and great companion, and I went to see the Temple of Heaven. First built in 1420 and covering an area of 273 hectares, the Cyprus forested area lies south of Tiananmen, and is based on the ‘Theory of Huntian.’ Luo Xiahong (1st & 2nd Century B.C.) developed the theory which ‘holds that the shape of heaven and earth is like a bird’s egg. Heaven wraps around the earth on the outside like an eggshell that wraps a yoke.’ Heaven, therefore, was believed to be round, and earth a square, which is why the Temple is constructed as a circle, with a large square courtyard. I wondered how it must have felt in 1911 when the Republican revolutionaries entered this place and saw the splendor as the people were hungry. The older Chinese tourists would have lived through the Cultural Revolution, and I wished I could speak with them about what, if anything, they were allowed to know about during that time. In the English guidebook it read, ‘the tablets of ancestors and offerings to heaven remind us of the blessing of heaven and benevolence of ancestors – something we should be mindful about.” I wondered if they were on the same page, as they were marched off, wearing identical baseball caps, following their young guides toting yellow flags on car radio aerials.

Endnote:
As I prepare for the next weeks class, I can’t help but think I am not prepared, and that the more I see of China the more fascinating and complex it is. The kind of creativity that is lacking in the education system is of course creating graduates that struggle in the knowledge based jobs like Public Relations. As China comes to grips with socially complex issues like HIV, and allowing a middle class to emerge, it has to change the way things are done. History casts a long shadow, and it seems that balancing loyalty to the past with the needs of the present will demand creativity and some gifts from heaven.

The price of progress

Beijing Diaries 11 Apr 04

Unit #7, Dongwang Zhuang, Haidan District. Beijing

CHEN Hao had written to me in great earnest after reading my Beijing Diary ‘We are both changing,’[1] and so I gladly met the quietly confident young to look at change through his cultural lens, and used that lens to view my week that included: a hutong party, a Beijing Duck feast and tasting the dust of the parched earth north of Beijing.

CHEN Hao, a bespectacled, tidily dressed 27 year-old, has a Masters from Xiamen University, and is one of the first people that I met in the administration department here at BLCU. “There are three faces of change in China, and I want to tell you how I see them,” he told me, “These are political, economic and cultural, but I will not talk about political change.” In itself this told me about the climate of discussion here; it is increasingly tolerated, even encouraged, but it appears to be within a considered framework of organizations, rather than outspoken individuals.

“Ten years ago a good Chinese family had three things: a TV, a refrigerator, a telephone. Today a good family, a wealthy family, has: a car, a computer, and an apartment. This economic progress is changing our lives.”  Chen sees the shift away from the inefficient centrally planned economy to the market driven one, a move initiated by Deng Xiao Peng in 1978, as being good but, “now, not finished, it is in the process.”  While pointing to the near 10% GDP per annum growth of China for the past decade, Chen also worries about the “floating population.” Nearly three times the population of America are rural peasants, 800 millions. In Beijing Chen estimates some four million people are from rural areas, escaping relative poverty and absolute hardship, bringing with them the social problems of a large subculture that is unregistered and scavenging for work on building sites or in restaurants or worse.

For the urban Chinese that are enjoying the results of China’s economic growth, mainly in the eastern seaboard region, values are changing “fast and greatly” according to Chen. For his parent’s generation, and into the 1980’s, Chen says that Confucian values held sway, a central belief being filial piety. “Now the main value is money…like for American people,” he laments, while still also himself within the grip of this rapidly encroaching value system. Chen’s family is a rendition of modern China in itself. His father left the countryside at 16 to study, met his teacher-to-be wife, and became a government official in Hunan province (S.E. China). Both Chen and his sister went to university (the one child policy, which Chen supports, was implemented in 1977) and now both have management jobs. Chen wants to study a Doctorate in Public Administration in America, intending to return to China to contribute to its progress.

“I want to talk about love,” he says. Girls it seems have abandoned the “honest, warm-hearted, and independent” values of his parent’s generation, and instead are driven by three things: “Money first, then appearance and finally that the man loves her.”

“What of the future?” I asked Chen. “Certainly better and better,” he said, referring to the accessibility of the Internet, opportunity to own a car, and China’s growing success in sports and culture. “Once the government have solved the problems of an unbalanced society, higher education, unemployment, security, society becomes very good.” I admired Chen’s commitment to his nation, and realism about many of its problems, but also observed a reliance on the Government to solve so many of them; Chen had been right when he had said change is a “process.”

Kristian Kender is one of a cadre of multilingual expatriates here, speaking fluent Mandarin, a director of a research publishing company, and host of a party at his hutong on Friday. Beijing social life has an entirely different feeling to that of Singapore; it is a harsher urban environment, but also maybe because people here appear to be even further away from where they came from. There is an intensity and to some degree a battle weariness that I don’t encounter in Singapore, where the talk is of convenience, island get-aways and money. In the courtyard of the hutong, a mixture of overseas Chinese, European, North and South American and Indians spoke a bewildering array of languages about how to get things done and how to stay sane in the process.

Saturday night fourteen classmates and our teachers went into town, an experience for us all. We invited our Chinese teachers, Miss Dan and Miss Wang, paying the princely sum of RMB65 (US$8) per head, and afterwards coaxed our 20 something teachers to come to the chic Cloud 9 bar.  It transpired neither of them had been to a nightclub before; it was an effort to convince them to accept bottled water to drink. As they sat perched unnaturally on the deep blue couches, looking at these people drinking and burning their money, it struck me that as foreign students we were potentially initiating a process of change for our Chinese teachers, and wondered where that might lead, praying it would be in a positive direction.

The farmers in the hills on which the Great Wall lie, are praying for a change in the weather, after a four-month drought. Today I went to the Jin Shan Ling section with a coach load of Philippine students, and was automatically accompanied by a Chinese woman in her 50’s with a shammy leather face and hard worked hands. Her husband was a farmer she told me, and as it has been too dry to plant crops, she and the other women were helping tourists along the wall, selling books, T-shirts and post cards; anything to supplement their income of around RMB500 (US$60) per month. Beijing made 23.8m cubic metres of artificial participation last year, and experts say this year the Capital has the worst droughts since 1949. When I first arrived I felt Beijing was like Las Vegas – a city built in the desert growing at such a rapid rate, taking ground water and reservoir flows from the mountains 2 hours drive away – and full of speculation. For the 75-year woman from whom I bought two T-shirts in the withering village of Jin Shan (ironically Gold Mount), rain or tourists can’t come soon enough.

As Chen said, change is happening in China, but I end the week concerned that much of progress is not including many of the people, and that no process can influence nature.

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[1] 29^th Feb.

A Sporting Chance

Beijing Diaries – 03 April 2004

This week I was inspired enough to join ‘Fusion Fitness’, and perhaps coincidentally I became aware how exercise is an integral part of Chinese culture, and how sport is becoming a huge business at least in the metropolitan areas. Joining the gym on campus was part of my attempt to throw off a chest infection that has dogged me since I returned from Singapore, and to regain an appetite when I don’t find the food enticing. ‘Bring your CD’s and get a free day at the Gym. We copy them, and give them back to you the next day.’ Tempting though the offer was, I decided to part with RMB300 (US$35) per month, and was reminded how intellectual property rights seem to have no meaning for some people here.

Every morning when I walk to class at 07.30 I see a regiment of pensioners, mainly women, taking exercise of Tai ji, and a kind of concentrated dance whereby they make the sound of gun shot by snapping open a paper fan. By the side of the roads in town and in these small open spaces are blue and yellow exercise apparatus apparently donated by a lottery company. Now that the weather has turned warmer (5°) students are out in force playing basketball, volleyball, and in Tai ji classes. Inside Fusion Fitness, the 4 treadmills have signs in rotation saying ‘Sorry, this machine needs to rest a little.’ So every 20 minutes we have to stop and let the machine have breather – it must be the only thing in Beijing that is resting for so long.

Certainly rest is not on the agenda for Beijing and all the people involved in the XXIX Olympiad taking place in 2008. Beijing alone is starting 22 new projects including 4 new underground rail lines. The final tarmac is being laid on the Shanghai F1 track. A report estimates US$16.39bn of business will be generated, and one of the biggest contests will be between those that paid for the rights and those that are taking them. The Vice President of International Market Development for Major League baseball has been promoting an agreement signed with the China Baseball Association to start the grass roots development of the game. Apparently 30 male students were sent to America by Emperor Qing in 1872 to pick up the game, but were recalled in 1881 for becoming ‘too Americanized.’ It is interesting to watch China courting the American sporting and business communities, while trying to hold back the cultural influences that inevitably accompany them.

Defending the intellectual property of companies involved with the Olympics, and of the Olympic organization itself, is becoming a preoccupation of the Government. Last year 270,000 symbols violating the copyright of the Beijing Organizing Committee were seized, and fines of US$64,000 levied; at US$0.23c per item the fine is hardly punitive. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was fined US$42,000 for publishing Peter Rabbit books. The Government reports that 90% of all pirated music and movie discs come from overseas – but while government linked agencies themselves are involved in infringements and places like Fusion Fitness offer in kind rewards for ‘sharing’, it is hard to believe that the problem lies overseas. Jin, my friend in Singapore who has a software company, asked if he should sell his products here for S$3,000; having seen the speed and efficacy of piracy here, a different business model must be considered.

I was worried about theft as Nicole and I negotiated for my new bicycle, but I have been reassured that it is not very attractive to thieves. I bought a Shanghai made Hong Jiu black beauty with a wide sprung leather saddle, metal brake rods and a rack on the back built for carrying a Daisy or two. The laoban (boss) and I, with an exasperated Nicole looking on, negotiated for over an hour to get the price from RMB350 to RMB300, a massive saving of US$6; I really just enjoyed the banter and, declining the offer to smoke Chinese cigarettes, laoban and I shook hands and had a photo taken together. I wrote down ‘Good Bike Shop’ in English and he said he would paint it above his shop. The Hong Jiu gets plenty of looks, and I was sure it was because it is the Rolls Royce of bicycles, but Nicole deflated my joy saying it was because Chinese find it funny that westerners like to buy Chinese brands; when they are preoccupied with buying foreign ones.

A fascination with this complex culture is what keeps me at my studies, however slow I prove to be and however insurmountable it seems. I listen to my Degan Taiwan made radio and avoid China International Radio and Virgin radio pap music. DAN Jiang, our young and inexperienced teacher, wants us to learn 40 characters a day, and I have another 50 days of lessons to go; but I console myself that there are some 1375 principal characters to learn. News this week that a hill parrot in Changsha, Hunan province, beat 200 other avian competitors by imitating Putonghua, Hunan dialect and English, and reciting a Tang Dynasty (618-907) poem makes me even more determined to prove I have more than a birdbrain. While I am not in training for an event at the Olympics, learning Mandarin at the BLCU and getting fit at Fusion Fitness are both giving me a sporting chance at taking some of the opportunities in China.