A pair of Western eyes look East

As the plane left the familiar territory of western Europe and the comfortable city names of Copenhagen and Moscow ceded to the decidedly more exotic Irkutsk and Ulan Bator, I was forced to confront my ambiguous feelings about my end destination: China.  On the one hand a sense of fascination and an almost hysterical anticipation, which had been building for months on end.  On the other, something akin to fear: no knowledge whatsoever of the language and a shamefully sketchy knowledge of the history, culture and geography of the country I was fast approaching.  Like many of us, my knowledge of China had been drip-fed over time by the media and, of course, by innumerable recent dramatic headlines: riots on the streets of Tibet, earthquakes in Sichuan Province, the Beijing Olympic flame making its unhappy way around the globe, demos and controversy in its wake...

What I found in the days and weeks following touchdown, however, was a country that provoked more emotion in me than any I remember visiting. 

Some cities on your travels are so unique, so perfect, that they stay in your memory like exploded postcards: the taut elegance of Paris; the fascinating merging of Aztec culture with that of its colonial conquistadors in Mexico City or the ethereally beautiful strangeness of Venice.  But China couldn't be encapsulated in this way: its myriad and deceptive layers only seemed to deepen the more you looked.  Like experiencing a kind of rebirth, its newness and difference were so overwhelming that it really was like looking at life completely anew.  At the end of my journeying there, I felt I had discovered the yang to my western European yin.  My understanding of the world felt infinitely more complete - and a long-lasting fascination with this marvellous, beautiful and brutal country had slotted into place.

To start with, simply being Chinese is drama enough: the legendary phlegmatic survivors of cruel and autocratic dynasties and seemingly endless natural disasters, from the world’s worst two earthquakes ever to the 1958 famine, which claimed the lives of over 30 million people.  Man-made disasters, from the horrors of the Japanese invasion in the thirties to the paranoias and purges of Mao’s 1966 ‘cultural revolution’ pockmarked the face of the last century.  Now, in the 21st century, the Chinese peoples are facing a new kind of trauma: a dizzyingly fast-paced change of life, within a bizarre and surely unsustainable hybrid of cultural communism and economic capitalism - to the evident delight of some (mainly the young) and to the great distaste of others (often the old...).

You can feel the incredible energy this lifechange is bringing everywhere you go, with the chance of economic betterment spurring people on and the newly world-facing ambition of the Chinese state finding expression in a series of superlatives, from Sir Norman Foster's Beijing Terminal 3, now the world’s largest airport terminal to Tianamen Square, the world’s largest square, to the soon-to-be world’s tallest building in Shanghai, standing out (just!) amongst the other architectural marvels of China’s intergalactic skyline along the shores of the Huangpo river.  The Maglev train – the magnetic marvel that is now the world’s fastest passenger train - can take you to Shanghai airport in just 7 minutes, causing just the lightest sensation of G-Force at the top of your cheekbones as it smoothly reaches speeds in excess of 430 kilometres per hour.

Of all the hackneyed clichés about the Chinese, the reputation for incredible industriousness rings the most true.  Everywhere you look people are busy, busy, busy.  By every roadside trees are being planted and soft landscaping is being undertaken everywhere in a huge expression of civic pride – and not just around Beijing for the sake of the Olympics. 

But contemporary China – the one that has sprung up in this extraordinary decade of growth – still seems poised precariously atop traditional China. Building sites are everywhere, yet they are inhabited not by gigantic tonka toys with caterpillar tracks, but by an army of men – and women - with wheelbarrows.  Labour is cheap and labour is plentiful and yet this ‘workshop of the world’ is not just about the willingness to make it - and make it cheaper.  Make no mistake, China is not only one of the world’s greatest new luxury goods consumers but the world’s new commissioning patron, especially of architecture.  Shanghai and Beijing are paradises for archi-watchers, with the cream of the crop showing their wares here, from the UK's Foster and Rogers, to Rem Koolhaas, Jean-Marie Charpentier and Paul Andreu, not to mention Switzerland’s Herzog & de Meuron and Australia’s PTW, creators of the Olympic ‘breadbasket’ and ‘watercube’ stadia respectively.

Other hackneyed stereotypes – especially of a xenophobic, rude and ‘inscrutable’ people – couldn’t be further from the truth.  Of course, the Chinese people have seen enough ‘big noses’ (westerners) for them to be little more than indifferent at the sight of us most of the time, but they are certainly friendly enough and genuinely solicitous if you need help, for example, in the vast supermarkets, where the Bladerunneresque food displays, including live fish in tanks, are a vastly more entertaining than their western counterparts.  Some are wildly curious, however, and not afraid to show it – especially if there is anyone in your party who is young or blond or both!  People here are also very straight-dealing – what you see is most assuredly what you get and, far from being unexpressive, disputes are approached with an uninhibited sense of street theatre that would shame the inhabitants of Naples and Rome.

Mao is still surprisingly revered, appearing as a Che-like icon on T-shirts, bags, caps, watches and alarm clocks.  Occasionally he is joined by a rogues gallery of others, including ‘President' Stalin and even occasionally Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden – a sharp reminder that you are on the other side of the world and playing behind old enemy lines.  Old-style communism is by no means reviled and night-time gatherings, especially of the elders, to sing old Communist songs chronicling the vicissitudes of the Long March, with spontaneous dancing and accordion solos are not uncommon and are obviously real, spontaneous and heartfelt.

The sense of community amongst the elders here is a truly beautiful thing to watch and inspirational for westerners, used to seeing their elderly holed up in retirement flats, afraid to put the electric fire on and desperate for a bit of a chat at the local post office whilst cashing their pension.  Mornings in the public gardens, such as Beijing’s Temple of Heaven, will see older people not only indulging in the oft-reported sessions of t’ai chi, but also in wonderful choreographed dances with fans and umbrellas; musical sessions ranging from singing Chinese opera and playing the Erhu (the Chinese violin) to the grand furling and unfurling of long flags, wonderful dancing with the lightest of steps and highly emphatic theatrical card games, with bird cages brought along for show.

Street-life is also quite incredible here in pace, variety and sheer knockout visual stimuli.  Taking a taxi in the central industrial city of Wuhan, where the automobile doesn’t yet rule quite as regally as in the wide avenues of Beijing or the extraordinary sky-highways of Shanghai, means swerving wildly with no particular acknowledged right to the road, whilst avoiding pedestrians or cyclists or animals or market porters, carrying unbelievable bundles of wares from stall to stall in a rough and ready anything-goes streetscape.

Being on the streets at night is also extraordinary.  I have never been in a city the size of Beijing and felt such little sense of threat at night.  Maybe the absence of litter, graffiti, junkies and winos on the pavements helps – as does the paucity of bars and leisure offers beyond the obligatory Chinese restaurants for people to get drunk in – but it’s amazing to feel so safe, even in concrete underpasses that would be piss-stained and plain scary in other major cities.  It takes a while to spot what else is missing compared to a western city.  There are no prams or pushchairs being pushed along the streets for example: babies are simply kept at home or held until they don’t need holding any more.  Disposable nappies are nowhere in sight: children of the potty age simply have trousers that split down the middle, so that opportunity can follow on very quickly from urge!

Spiritual references are everywhere, but the hard realities of life dominate still.
As one middle-aged lady said to me in a tone that brooked no argument, ‘we are not a religious people’.  This seems to be true.  Chinese society has traditionally been built on a triumvirate of ancient beliefs: Buddhism (imported from India), Taoism and Confucianism – all essentially philosophies rather than religions, although giving rise to some extraordinarily beautiful holy sites, from Shanghai's Jade Buddha Temple to the Taoist Ghost City of Fengdu and the Sacred Path at the Ming Dynasty Tombs.  The Chinese are always seeking knowledge, but mostly of how best to survive our time here on earth - with a particularly profound dose of reverence, as in many societies around the world, for the 'ancestors', with communal burial shrines elaborately tended in even the smallest of villages.

If western eyes were expecting to see a people here bowed in their demeanor by life without polling booths, they would be very much mistaken.  The absence of true political freedom has its price though and the lack of true creative self-expression within the city streets is certainly one of them.  Life here is hard in many ways we can’t imagine.  One very successful college graduate told me of his impoverished childhood in the southern reaches of China, where he would get up at 5am as a very small child and walk down one mountain and up another for his two hour daily trip to school.  On his return, his family were too poor to offer him any source of protein to eat until one day, when his mother offered him a deep-fried ‘treat’ which she said was chicken and which he loved, becoming his daily welcome home treat after school.  It was years before he discovered the ‘treat’ was in fact deep-fried left-over silkworm cocoons.  Whilst repulsed at the discovery, he has become grateful over time and was the tallest child eventually in his school thanks to his mother’s exceptional inventiveness!  Limited rights of movement between regions because of work permits, the discouragement of romance whilst studying and the uncertain future of a whole generation thanks to the one-child policy have added further to the difficulties faced by his generation in China today. 

Aborted or foreigner-adopted female children have created a whole generation of bachelors – an estimated excess of 40 million men by 2020 - commonly called ‘the bachelor bomb’, as no one really knows what the effect of this imbalance will bring for the future.  This tragic policy has been made more poignant by the recent earthquake and the shattering loss of life of children in poorly-constructed school buildings – as they would of course often be the only child in the family (although the policy has been relaxed in many rural areas in recent years).

But China will survive because China always does; its toughness one of the many extraordinary faces of a country we seem hell-bent on lecturing – whilst it seems to me it holds just as many lessons we would do well to learn from, in a more productive and reciprocal two-way cultural exchange.