Daytime television, Chinese-style

The other day we got second-row seats to witness the bizarre, saccharine fantasyland that is the Chinese charity talk show.

We were allowed to watch the pre-taping of a show set to air around New Years on the English-language International Channel Shanghai. The show profiled a Pudong migrant children's school's English-language program and the corporate volunteers doing the teaching. It was an orgy of tut-tutting, back-patting and self-righteous cooing. It was a painful and fascinating spectacle to watch.

The show started out credibly enough. The host began with interviews with politicians, educators and academics about education for the children of Shanghai's migrant workers, who consistently fall through the cracks in the state's ostensible nine years of compulsory public education. They chatted and passed around softball questions and answers about what a terrible situation it is, how all levels of government are doing all they can and how great it is that there are volunteers and private organizations more than happy to pick up the slack.

The second round of interviews was with people from the private organizations co-ordinating and supplying the volunteers doing the teaching. This is where a lot of the back-patting came in, as the head honcho of this one company waxed lyrical about making the world a better place by bringing English to the masses.

Mmmkay.

These interview sessions were interspersed with videos of lucky migrant children in these underfunded, resource-poor schools, with perky Anglophone volunteers talking about how great it is to work with kids who're trained to behave in class and respond in unison.

The most excruciatingly cringe-inducing block, however, came when a sister and brother were led in front of the cameras, along with their mother, as the host posed condescending questions about their sick father and their New Year's wishes. All three hapless individuals were brought to tears when the children were asked about their dreams--to become doctors and help their dad, who has had two strokes and can't work or even leave the house.

The whole thing felt like an eerie cross between The Maury Show and World Vision commercials. Icky, syrupy and insincere in its hypersincerity.

But the kids got complimentary sweat bands at the end...so that makes it all better, right?

You can't have your sexism and eat it, too

Pity Chinese men: They're set on marrying women they consider their intellectual inferiors (there's actually an awful saying here--"There are three kinds of people in China--men, women and women with PhDs)", but thanks to decades of female infanticide and sex-based selective abortions, the male:female ratio here is an astounding 119.25 men for every 100 women. By 2025, there are going to be 30 million more Chinese men between the ages of 25 and 40 than women in that same group. Marriage-market beggars, one would surmise, can't be choosers.

I was laughing at this absurdity in class when I realized I was laughing at a potentially devastating demographic time bomb. And am actually a terrible person.

'Scuse me, I'm looking for this really big wall...

Beijing's one of those hilarious cities with countless, fascinating layers of history that have been systematically razed to the ground by centuries of conquering regimes, only to have its latest leaders realize, a couple of decades ago, "Oh crap, guys--we need something to show the tourists."

As a result, you can check out ancient, culturally rich places like the Forbidden City, the Drum Tower and a dizzying array of temples to marvel at the brightly coloured, meticulously restored architecture and the total lack of anything actually all that, um, old.

All these places have been plundered by previous generations, including in some cases the predecessors of those who've gone to incredible lengths to restore and prettify 'em for the hordes of tourists that flock to their doorsteps. 非常 有意思。

The Forbidden City is a really good example of this. I'm not sure if it's Beijing's most oft-visited landmark, but it certainly feels that way as you push your way through hordes of crowds to get a glimpse of the various freshly painted buildings that, captions assure, once housed the emperor and his kitchen, harem, temple and courtiers in the verboten heart of the Chinese empire. There are precious few original artefacts from any of these sanctums, however; many were destroyed in a fire in the early 20th century and others were taken by the Guomindang on the party's way to Taiwan in 1949; others just weren't preserved after the Qing fell. But the buildings are purty.

One intruiging thing about the sightseeing hordes, though, is that the majority (or at least the plurality) of them are Chinese who've made the trek out from other provinces to ooh and ahh at these national icons and wait in line for hours to put a rose near Mao Zedong's meticulously preserved corpse. While they're posing in front of various landmarks, they also snap photos of the exotic foreigners wandering around.

My first attempt to check out Tian'anmen Square proved a total failure--the biggest "public square" in the world is closed from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. When it is open, the crowds who flock to wander its concrete pavestones and pose for photos in front of the ginormous Mao Zedong portrait across the street hanging from the Tian'an Men have to pass first through a security checkpoint, complete with an X-ray machine and stern, uniformed guards posted at each of the square's intersections. I saw several military patrols, decked out in green fatigues, marching to and from the area.

Tian'anmen Square was built originally to convey a sense of the Communist Party's enormity. It succeeds, but perhaps not in the way Mao intended.

Equally cool and much more intimate are the city's hutongs--narrow alleyways lined by small grey brick houses that date to the Mongol period (many of the ones still standing have been restored so the tuk-tuk drivers can tour hapless foreigners around them). I met a family from Shanxi province that came to Beijing to run a noodle shop. Of course they miss their home province, they said. But leave the capital? Not a chance.

Most of the city's migrants, however, still haven't returned since they were cleared out before the Olympics. The ubiquitous banners, buildings and security overkill remain as a visible legacy to the games. For all the ads plastered around this city, you'd think the Olympics were still going on. Except, of course, for the glut of cars zipping through the downtown core. No more even-odd switching for jet-setting Beijingren.

I didn't expect the Great Wall to be a highlight. The name itself is so oft-repeated by tourists and would-be tourists that it has passed almost beyond cliche into the realm of larger-than-life mythology.

But we decided that even if we gave in to the myth and made the trek out to the country's most famed tourist attraction, we were going to go in through the back door. We caught a public bus out to the Beijing suburb of Miyun, knowing nothing except that this city was close(ish) to a less-traversed part of the wall. It didn't take us long to find a local only too eager to drive us to Simatai--for an exorbitant fee--and we were barrelling down a narrow road through small villages and the odd cringe-inducingly out of place tourist resort. Simatai itself boasted the same arresting conrast: About a dozen tiny concrete and brick houses, a resort, a youth hostel and a flurry of souvenir stands.

The wall doesn't look real from the bottom of the rolling hill on which it's perched. But in the thin air following the trek up, its sinuous enormity is mind-boggling. It's hard to imagine an emperor crazy enough to press millions of his citizens into forced labour as they killed themselves building a really big freakin' wall.

It's also hard to imagine this being the best possible way to defend a massive territory from myriad threatening, spear-wielding forces. If I were a Mongol warrior (as obviously I often imagine myself to be), I'm pretty sure the wall would be more of a psychological barrier than anything else--daunting, and peopled by guards in those kick-ass stone watchtowers, but scaleable.

But really, if the Mongols wanted to save time, they could have just bought Tilley hats, walking sticks and disposable cameras and pretended to be tourists.

You say you want a revolution...

It reads a little like a Chinese version of Germinale.

Last week, dozens of Dongjiang residents took to the streets to protest a government resettlement plan. They trashed public buildings in the tiny village in Gansu--one of the country's poorest provinces--and more than 70 people were injured in the ensuing melee. Thirty protesters were arrested.

No biggie, on the surface. But it's a telling sign of how Chinese people are changing the way they interact with their government and shape public policy. Increasingly, people who have for hundreds of years been acculturated to obey authority and respect societal hierarchies--and who for the past 60 years have been taught that any opposition to the Party line would earn them a one-way ticket to prison, if they were lucky--are getting together and making trouble when they're upset.

The Ministry of Public Security reported 87,000 "mass incidents" in 2005, up 6.6 per cent from 2004 and 50 per cent from 2003. And despite their disruption of the government's desire for societal harmony, these incidents seem to be working.

Last year thousands of residents in Xiamen, a southern city in Fujian province, protested the construction of a chemical plant near their homes. After several public demonstrations organized online and through text-messages, the government agreed to relocate the plant.

In Shanghai, middle-class residents have been vocal in their opposition to the local Maglev--a high-speed commuter monorail--being expanded through their neighbourhoods. Although the city still plans to use the Maglev to connect Shanghai's Pudong Airport on the eastern edge of the city with Hongqiao Airport to the far west, it appears they'll have to try to find a compromise with the people over whose houses it's supposed to run.

Last week's protest was much more violent: According to official reports, protesters attacked police with iron rods, chains, axes and hoes; they threw stones, bricks and flower pots--everything, in other words, but the proverbial kitchen sink. Was this increased hostility and violence due to these residents' anger and desperation? Did they lack more sophisticated modes of protest, such as financial clout or Internet access? I don't know. Perhaps their fear of government repression of active opposition was overridden by their desire to vent.

Either way, it'll be interesting to see how the Chinese government responds to these increasingly vocal protests as more of them occur. One notable change is the way the government controls information surrounding these events. I read about this on Xinhua, the day the protest occurred. That's crazy: Whereas previously the strategy was to prevent as much information dissemination as possible--as late as 2005, news sources weren't even allowed to report the death toll from natural disasters--now Beijing is not only permitting (albeit often limited) reportage, it's doing its own news-breaking. The International Herald Tribune has an interesting piece on this. The main reasoning behind the increased press freedom seems to be pragmatic: It's easier to control the message when there is a clear message, as opposed to a sea of rumours surrounding a clammed-up government and state media source. This was evident following the Sichuan earthquake last spring, when the government allowed state and foreign media sources unprecedented access. Of course, that changed when people started reporting the deplorable state of schools that crumbled to the ground while neighbouring buildings survived.

So, okay: What was once a micromanaging, paranoid and close-lipped administration is now a micromanaging, paranoid and (mostly) forthcoming administration. But I would take the latter over the former, any day.

Is this a step towards a freer press and the right to protest, or even a quasi-legitimate public say in government machinations? No idea--我不知道。But the "100 Flowers Campaign" it ain't. And I bet Emile Zola would be pumped.

Oh baby, the socialist realism

On a whim we went to Nanjing on our way back. Naturally, this involved a detour through Bengbu, which is apparently the Las Vegas of Anhui: Within three blocks of the train station we encountered half a dozen glitzy hotels with neon hearts encircling their doorways and filtering through acres of gauze and other kitschy wedding paraphernalia. Weird.

But we met a group of Qi Gong practitioners marching in a public square. For reasons I still don't undersand they were delighted to see us and sorely disappointed when we wouldn't let them massage our kidneys. One man had a photo of himself and Vladimir Putin in his robe pocket; he was very pleased when we recognized the former KGB dude.

In total we had about 20 hours in Nanjing. It's a lovely city--smaller and more comfortable in its own skin than Shanghai, it feels more like a city you would live in rather than a city you would develop at a breakneck pace in order to do business in. Of course there are soaring skyscrapers and construction sites galore; but there are more small neighbourhoods and, of course, oodles more historical sites.

The former capital of the Ming dynasty and the Guomindang has been transformed into a hub of CCP nationalist iconography. Our first stop, the memorial museum of the Rape of Nanjing, was (just our luck) closed. But the arresting sculptures outside, which depicted victims of the 1937 massacre by invading Japanese troops, were beautiful and harrowing in and of themselves and made clear just how tender this wound still is. It doesn't take a psychological mastermind to figure out that a lot of Chinese people just don't like the idea of Japan (especially because Japan has never been all that eager to own up to some of its less-than-honourable actions during the Second World War). I'm still confused as to how this translates into business transactions; I'm pretty sure it doesn't.

In the south of the city, the memorial to CCP martyrs slain in the Guomindang's purges brings out more traditional socialist realism. The sprawling park is chock-a-block with granite sculptures and friezes depicting stoic citizens with--literally--chiselled abs, gazing in equally stoic adoration at Marx who, of course, is the sun. Hordes of Chinese tourists thronged to have their photos taken posing beside an enormous phallic memorial and stone slabs engraved with the national anthem.

In a small restaurant a few blocks away from the suffocatingly touristy Confucius Temple, we tried to eavesdrop on a heated debate between blinged-out older men--heavily ringed fingers madly gesticulating as they downed one bottle of Tsing Tao after another. Apart from references to the economy and, at one especially tense point in the conversation, Mao Zedong, we had no idea what they were saying. But they seemed to like us: They kept nodding in our direction, and one of them decided what we really needed was some of the cigarettes the half-dozen of them were chainsmoking like it was going outta style (which, in China, it isn't). So the man sitting nearest to me began chucking cigarettes at us. It was a friendly if disconcerting gesture. We bought them a couple bottles of beer before we made our exit into the blinding, bustling Nanjing sunshine.

I never ended up smoking the cigarettes; I get enough tar from the second-hand smoke that pervades just about every public space here. Carcinolicious.

Waiguoren run amok

It was pitch dark when we arrived. At 5:30 a.m. dawn hadn't yet begun to crack in Hefei, and the murky black added to our disorientation as we staggered out of the train station.

Gloria and I made the short journey to the capital of Anhui province hoping to get a glimpse of the China you rarely see from the uber-urban confines of Shanghai--the rural areas that, according to official Chinese government statistics, still house about 60 per cent of the country's population.

Of course, in China things don't really work like that. A huge number of the millions of people currently classified as "peasants" under China's demographic system are migrant workers, many of whom have moved numerous times to various better-developed urban areas where they can earn a much better living working in masochistic conditions for well under the official minimum wage. In doing this, they studiously ignore the hukou system designed precisely to keep them in the countryside, growing cheap produce to feed the industrial workforce. Lacking hukou, they aren't supposed to get any social services in the cities where they live, but an astounding feat of wilful blindness and double-think on the Party's part has given rise to a raft of parallel services--many of them government-sanctioned. Don't ask me why this makes sense.

The plurality of Shanghai's "floating population" hails from Anhui. We wanted to see what they were leaving behind.

We also didn't have any game plan whatsoever. Nor, we discovered as we staggered in drunken fatigue around the square outside the train station, could we buy a Pinyin-equipped map.

But like the good weiguoren we were, we agonized over the miniscule characters on our overpriced, Chinese-only city plan and wandered early-morning Hefei. The provincial capital, population 1.5 million, is a small city by Chinese standards. It's in the throes of a major residential construction boom, if the ubiquitous billboards promising a joyous, harmonious lifestyle to anyong who buys a luxury apartment are anything to go by. Hu Jintao's an Anhui native, and one of the perks of having the country's president hail from your province is the coincidental flood of infrastructure cash you get. Score.

But most of Hefei, if you avoid the KFC-laden downtown core, still feels like an intimate, small-scale municipality. We watched, and were sorely tempted to join, hundreds of people practicing Tai Chi and dancing in a big public park. Many of the apartment complexes we passed had community gardens or plants sprouting from tiny boxes on balconies or windowsills. We spent hours getting lost in the city's back alleys.

Accompanied by a trio of locals foolhardy enough to offer to show us around, we bused to a remote suburb that was once farmland and is now in some weird rural-urban twilight zone where spanking new apartment buildings abut small, single-family fields of peppers, cabbage and carrots. A gleaming college campus looms in the background. But there's still plenty of mud.

The next day we headed by to a small town chosen randomly on our Chinese-only map. We spent most of the bus ride entertaining a shocked and terrified toddler who kept peering at us, wide-eyed, over his dad's shoulder. Seriously, I need to start charging for this.

The road to Fengyang plows through tiny villages doused in fall leaves, passing low brick-and-concrete houses, tiny plots of land and yards hanging with Hello Kitty- and Kappa-emblazoned laundry. Fengyang itself resembles a weird cross between the wide boulevards and raw construction of a nineteenth-century North American frontier town and the sun-soaked, vine-laden back alleys of a tuscan village. But with a big, pagoda-topped gate on the old stone city wall, which is now smack in the middle of fast-food places and a store with a window full of shiny white sit-down toilets. I'm not entirely sure where the market is for that here.

The weiguoren may as well have dropped in from outer space. Everyone who saw us wore the same expression: "What the hell do you think you're doing here?" When we meandered out of town and into a series of fields of harvested bamboo--now blackened after the leftover stalks were burned, and cold in the evening chill--the people we ran into didn't seem to know whether to look suspicious or incredulous.

This was most hilarious when we tried to get something to eat. Famished, we stepped inside a place that looked like a restaurant (no, I still don't know the character for "restaurant," although I can read with alacrity such characters as "careful," "longevity noodles" and "apple that tastes like a banana").

"Um, 我们可以吃饭这里吗?"

Can we eat here?

Next thing we knew we were surrounded by shelves of vegetables and raw meat, clumsily trying to order before being ushered into a windowless white room that barely fit the single, huge round table it housed. We sat there smiling awkwardly, making heinous grammatical errors in an attempt at conversation as the proprietary family, plus neighbours who dropped in for a chat and some cha, gawped.

The food was delicious.

Power and palpitations from the People's Bank

Do you need $18 billion?

Do you live in the People's Republic of China, and preferably are in a position to undertake a massive, capital-intensive infrastructure project?

If you answered affirmatively to both these questions, best get in line: That's the imperial sum the Chinese government is prepared to dole out by year's end. That $18 billion is only the first batch out of an enormous stimulus plan--China's biggest, ever--that will dole out a lump sum of 4 trillion RMB ($586-million USD) over the next two years.

Where will all those wads of yuan go? That's still kind of vague: Beijing has made references to addressing the post-quake devastation in Sichuan province, low-income housing, electricity, water, rural infrastructure, environmental protection and technological innovation--the kind of keywords most governments like to toss around in official statements. But it isn't clear how much of this will be direct government-to-project spending, and how much will be channelled through largely nationalized banks and lending institutions.

Either way, the idea is this cash will jump-start not only China's slowing powerhouse economy, but also give the global economy a kick in the pants as one country after another (sorry, Japan) slips into recession.

Or, at least, that's what Hu Jintao and just about every finance minister in the world is hoping.

The announcement came at a pretty fateful moment, as leaders of the Group of 20 met in Brazil to commiserate and try to hash a way out of this global economic mess. The only thing summit made patently clear, however, was that the so-called "developing" economies at the table--notably the swiftly growing BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China)--want a hand in drafting a rescue plan. They all more or less agree with Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's statement that the financial crisis "originated in the advanced countries." Damned if these states are going to return to the sidelines, awaiting whatever sadistically termed medical-sounding procedure the IMF proscribes for their ailing economies (Lobotomy? Enema? Or just shock therapy, part II?). They want a sizable say in whatever goes on from here on in, and they know they have the power to demand it.

The major G7 powers know it, too: IMF head honcho Dominique Strauss-Kahn admitted the international body needs to protect growth in developing countries, because it's likely the only economic growth the globe is going to see for the next little while.

At least in China's case, though, that upward movement isn't nearly enough. The Red Machine's economy was surging more than 10 per cent in the first couple of quarters of this year, compared to 2007; now that's brushing dangerously close the magic eight per cent growth analysts say China's economy needs to sustain just to keep its mammoth population employed.

People here are freaking out, in a calm kind of way. A student I met on a train was counting on his internship with Bosch turning into a full-time gig; now that Bosch has trashed its plans to hire more employees in its Nanjing office, he's panicking. And he's not alone: A guidance counsellor and PhD student here at Fudan says the students she's seeing are growing increasingly desperate because there simply aren't any job openings. Add to that the thousands laid off as more than half the country's toy stores closed this fall and you have a lot of panicked people; so much for a harmonious society.

As demand for Chinese goods drops globally, everyone's hoping Chinese consumers will pull through and make up for the drop in purchasing elsewhere.

It sounds like a good idea given the rise, over the past few years, in demand for such higher-end consumer goods as cars and cell phones. But China's large industrial output (which is still way less, proportionately, than it was in 1800) belies its small per capita income--most people don't have the extra cash they would need to consume like Americans. Old habits die hard for millions of people raised under the Great Leap Forward, whose primary aim was to keep consumption as low as humanly possible (often fatally lower) while focusing on heavy industry. Now, Chinese people are statistically more likely to save, and to save more, than their North American counterparts. That's probably a good trait to have, except when you need a ginormous spending spree just to keep the financial world turning on its axis.

Perhaps at least a few million of that 4 trillion kwai would be best spent on posters: "Support a harmonious Chinese society: Buy more stuff!"

Yes, America can (but does China care?)

I spent this morning in an overcrowded, overpriced, smoke-filled pub--the kind of expat hangout that caters to foreigners who would prefer to spend their time in China pretending they're at home in Philadelphia/Leeds/Toronto/Adelaide. Under normal circumstances I wouldn't be caught dead in one of those places.

But this morning's events were certainly not normal circumstances.

By 8 a.m. the three-story pseudo-pub was packed to bursting with Americans, almost all of them sporting Obama/噢巴马 '08 T-shirts, posters and other sundry paraphernalia. They sat and stood, eyeballs glued to the flatscreen televisions on every wall of the joint, and launched into raucous, morning booze-fuelled shouts at every CNN PROJECTION that flashed across the screens (The Virginia table practically burst into hysterics when the state was called--it was kind of alarming).

When the race was called just after West-Coast polls closed, the building went berserk: Businesspeople, tourists and expats cheered and hugged and applauded the TV screens. The exuberance was palpable.

But outside "Malone's American grill," the real world was more or less unmoved. Apart from a handful of fist-pumping foreign students on campus, no one seemed terribly interested to know the United States had just made its most cataclysmic and exciting political decision in a helluva long time; certainly one of the mosy symbolically progressive steps since Brown v. Board of Education (which, hold on a sec--was just 54 years ago. Holy crap. No, seriously. Incredible).

Which kind of makes sense. About half the people asked what candidate they prefer in a poll by Beijing-based Horizon said they hadn't been following closely enough or didn't care; whoever's elected, for a lot of Chinese people the United States will still be a superpower to be feared, emulated, grudgingly admired and regarded with suspicion.

That, or people just find it hard to get worked up about elections in a place where the only votes that occur are foregone conclusions--choices between equally unknown candidates where the winner is guaranteed to be a Party member.

As usual, the blogosphere is way more opinionated. This blog seems to sum up the general feeling pretty well: Cool guy; seems to like Asia; also seems to inclined to protect America from aggressive, cheap (Chinese) exports and may try to bully China into doing things it doesn't want to do--like float the RMB and impose stricter labour or environmental regulations.

This one, written before the election, seems more inclined to suggest Obama's talking a lot tougher than he'll be able to act once he's actually in power and attempting to steer the good ship U.S.A out of the shoals of a global economic crisis and into more friendly, less crappy metaphor-laden waters.

At the very least, the demand for those ubiquitous political posters, T-shirts, buttons and wristbands (cause if there's one thing you need, it's another cause-declaring rubber bracelet) should boost their U.S. manufacturers just a little. Unless of course all that swag is actually made in China.