Improving Buddha's corporate standing - Chagan tourist hell - peasants are bad

MAY 1, 2007: We started with a plan. Rather a good one, i thought. Photos

It was follow-up to the original, 'Buy a motorcycle and travel around China on it' plan that was canned by a combination of scaremongering and Robert Xiansheng's blatant disregard for the safety of motorcyclists. (Really, it was quite weak. There are swarms of motorbikes here, the riders almost never with a helmet and it's quite common to see entire families clinging on to one 50cc scooter. But, to be fair to us, we didn't cave in until we had a better idea.)

What an idea it was, too, when it came: Phase in one of the ubiquitous blue 3-wheeled trucks (they're literally all blue, all the same blue at that) and take it round the countryside - its natural homeland. I looked them up on the net, and a new one consumes 3.5L of petrol per 100km. That's less than my scooter back in Perth. And they're only 10,000RMB ($1650) new. Not to mention how downright hilarious it would be, box and guce gallavanting around rural china in a peasant truck.

So when we started out this morning to see some local tourist attractions, the logical next step seemed to be to ask one of the school bosses where we could get one. This fucked our plan.

As i informed him of the details, after a few intense guffaws his face turned to stone when he realised i was serious. "No," he said. "You cannot do this. The, uhh, agricultural truck is only for the, uhh, peasant."

"But that's okay," I protested, "we want to do things as people do them here."

"No but you cannot do this."

"Okay...but what's the reason?"

"We will go to Chagan Lake. I will tell you 10 reasons then."


We suspected he was more intolerant of the battering our peasant truck might cause the school's image. After about a half-hour, he brought the subject up again. "So, you want to buy the, uh, agriculture vehicle," he said, smugly.

"Yes."

I was buried under a Guatemalan mudslide of 'reasons': "The police on the highway do not like this vehicle. They will give you many fines," (But i see so many of them on the highways!)
"The agriculture vehicle is not allowed in the big cities," (We don't want to go to big cities, we want to go to the countryside.)
"The safety is not good." (Surely better than 2 wheels, which they were even going to help us to buy.)
"You can go to many tourist places on the train." (We don't want to go to tourist places!)
"The police in the other province will not like this vehicle. You will have to give them lot of money," (What can i say? No idea if it's true or not.)

Then he pulled out the brick-wall tactic: "This vehicle is only for the, uhh, agriculture use. Only peasant can use." (Welcome to China, where things just are.)

But his last reason was so ridiculously hilarious it was almost worth abandoning our dream just to hear it: "If you go to some village, the peasant there, they could think you are spy, and may be they hit you." God-dam Mong-gorians! "Because the education level is not high," he quickly added.

Well i'll be damned.

Anyway, defeated, i slumped in my seat and yielded to traipsing around the tourist spots. It wasn't as boring as i had anticipated, and it served the purpose of showing us just how dominant oil is here.

Jilin is not a particularly rich province, but oil just might be the reason for the abundant tractors we saw on the way to Bill's village. There are oil pumps (those big rocking metal arm-type ones) in city streets and in the fields. There are oil pumps in wetlands and at tourist spots, on construction sites and in back yards. And the oil is surely the reason for the Shanghai-esque number of cranes here.

Around here even Buddhist temples have cranes in the sky and oil pumps on the ground. The first tourist spot on the itinerary can only be described as a 'temple complex'. On a patch of Mexican scrubland stand a couple of smallish, inauspicious temples, corrugated-iron wood sheds and hay-walled latrines with roosters inside. This much appears to have been the same for centuries. But among all this a dozen oil wells pump steadily while at least 4 more massive, ornate new monuments to the enlightened one are rising from the dust faster than levitating monks - we were there on May Day, one of the biggest public holidays of the year, and work was pressing ahead on these 4 new Buddha megaplexes in true China style. It's gonna be the Greater Union of Buddhism.


Even the scenery around touristy Chagan Lake, our second destination, is dominated by oil wells and giant gas cylinders and heavy earthmoving machinery. Very few peasants don't have an oil well in their fields, many have 20 or more.

The most interesting feature of this tourist flashpoint (there was a catfight that drew a crowd of well over 100) was the incredible arrays of weapons on sale at the souvenir stalls. Flickknives, switchblades, swords, daggers (yes, the FURY!), tasers, coshes, telescopic batons, vicious, vicious crossbows, BB guns, fake pistols, and...wait for it...baseball bats being sold specifically as weapons. That fight could've gotten so ugly. I was there with my video camera too.




Stewing over the 3-wheeler defeat on the return journey, I concluded peasants must be a kind of enemy within China. They feed the country (though that's changing with a lot more imports coming in) but in the eyes of the authorities they constantly threaten to spark unemployment and poverty by 'descending' on the cities. Except in a few places where it's openly flaunted, the system of toll booths on highways sytematically stops people from moving about the country freely. It's 28RMB to get through one, which is at least 2 or 3 days' income for even a relatively well-to-do country person. And if what we were told today is true, the giant "JI"s (for Jilin) painted on the back of the 'agriculture vehicles' will ensure that no vehicle within reach of the rural poor ever gets too far.




My purchase of 4 Chairman Mao badges and medals at the weapons stalls sparked a Chairman Mao discussion that continued through dinner back in Songyuan. "Nicky", a Chinese girl, says he was 99.9% right. She, along with many Chinese, believe the government only says he was 30% wrong to pacify those who were fucked over by him. According to western history (wikipedia) that was a lot of people. They're mostly dead of course...

But the interesting point about this is how much these loaded, capitalist Chinese love Mao. These guys probably have similar money in nominal terms to us, i.e. they're fucken rich here. Fucken rich in terms of spending power (like us), but not exactly elite or anything. They do live in a desert backwater, after all. But they're pretty numerous (supposedly 100-200 million in China - 10-15% of the population).

They loaded us up with a massive table of food. The price, as always, was compulsory Baijiu.