Beijing, Songyuan and away with me

March 17: The night i came down from Hua Shan i caught a train to Beijing. Most of that journey's waking hours were spent in conversation with a peach promoter from Pinggu district.

An announcement on the train's PA system as we pulled into the station boasted of Beijing's "complete" subway system. Unfortunately i was on one of the very large number of Beijing trains that go to Beijing West Railway Station, which the subway system as yet does not reach. So my introduction to the capital consisted of being rudely jostled into a corner by peasants on a bus, followed by the bus driver opening the bus door, which opened into my corner and forced me to rudely jostle the peasants to get out of its way.

Beijing's not that dense a city - the buildings aren't really that tall and as a result, it's geographically massive. From the bus stop it took another 25 minutes' walk to reach the hotel. From there the nearest subway station was 15 minutes away. But walking had its advantages: all around i found wonderful breakfast foods - baozi, jiaozi, congee, flatbreads, chilli chicken burgers. I almost felt what might have been a more general ambivalence to or even animosity towards foreigners - glances averted, people shuffling away at the bus stop. Actually that comment pretty much confirms me a country bumpkin. Or maybe i was just subconsciously missing the celebrity-style burning attention i tend to get almost everywhere else....

But my roommate, a "trader" (he refused to be more specific) from Cameroon who wants to spread the Good News, told me of the racism he had struggled with in China. He claimed it was because Africans were poaching all the Chinamen's girls. Strange, i've only ever had Chinese men encouraging me to go after Chinese girls. Anyway, whatever the reason, he spoke of "deliberate humiliation", being ignored as a customer, etc., and i could certainly see it happening, although for his part he himself didn't come across as very willing to adapt to China. He saw it as "very uncivilised and very backward", particularly because of the spitting in the streets, which people presumably don't do in Cameroon. Have heard about good cheap French baguettes in Cameroon... and no spitting in the street too? This Cameroon sounds like the place.

I spent my day in Beijing in an internet bar where i met Mr Liu, from Jiangxi Province, who had come to lodge a petition against a local government honcho he said had ruined his life.

He told me it started in 1994 when his family added a side door to their home, allowing them to enter via a communal strip of land shared with the neighbours. Who happened to be relatives of a powerful local official who intervened on their behalf.

Unfortunately Mr Liu and his family were a little too justice-bent - they tried to bring a lawsuit and things got serious. His brother had half his face slashed off and went insane. Thugs attacked Liu on several occasions, and he considers himself extraordinarily lucky to be alive.

Since then he says he has been constantly watched and followed, prevented from getting a job or getting married. Needless to say he was an angry man and i asked him if he knew about the "black prison" phenomenon in which petitioners are known to have been arbitrarily and illegally arrested in Beijing. He just didn't give a shit, and i feared for his safety in the internet bar as he yelled obscenities about the government to the foreigner.

This - and the man himself - all seemed pretty reasonable, and, more importantly, perfectly sane, given a Chinese professor's recent claim that more than 99% of petitioners are mentally unsound.

Then he sent me the "full story" via email. Poor Mr Liu.

I don't have much doubt that what he told me is true, that he's been menaced, followed, intimidated and attacked. But the full story was heartbreakingly insane - involving roommates dispatched by a hidden puppet-master to disrupt his studies for 2 years before eventually killing him. The would-be murderer had decided against completing the job. That was more than 10 years ago.

I would speculate that Professor Sun is just about right, most petitioners probably are insane to some degree. Not 99+ percent, but would it be any wonder if you went through the harrowing, soul-crushing shit that these people go through, that you ended up disturbed. How many of these people are being driven insane? Or is that actually Professor Sun's theory, and the reason for his apparently crazy comments? It's unlikely he would have been implying that his petitioner-insanity correlation was a coincidence.

Poor Mr Liu, that's all i can say. I don't know what to say to him now. If anyone happens to read this (at any time) and also happens to know someone or some NGO who helps petitioners, i've been looking for you. Please leave a comment down the bottom, or contact achubb|at|gmail|dot|com


The exchange probably was a timely reality check because i went from the internet bar straight to the Olympic Park. And there it was. I don't know whether it was Liu's tale or the fact i'd been up country too much lately, but i wasn't impressed. As incredible as these structures may be as feats of human imagination, skill and effort, they really pale in comparison to nature...

I crossed the road and got drunk in a supermarket that ripped me off. It was the ethnic minority hangout next to Ethnicity Park. My drinking partner in the supermarket, a Mr Zhang, fluent in German and shakily ok in English, introduced to me these peoples' minority wonders:

Me: "So what goes on there, in Ethnicity Park?"

Zhang: "They can dance."

Me: "Anything else?"

Zhang: "Umm..."

Me: "Surely they do more than just dance?"

Zhang: "They can do service."

Behold, the splendour of China's 56 ethnicities! I was feeling a tad cynical that night.

I took a bus to Sanlitun, a well-known centre of foreign debauchery. I didn't have any spare cash so i settled for sauntering up and down the street and street drinking in front of "Bao An", or public security police, who, in their camouflage uniforms looked a lot more like an army. Their rule was far from martial though as they paraded up and down in military formation past the pimps, drug dealers and underage drinkers (and street drinkers).

I got chatting to a Dongbei pimp (from the Northeast, where we started in China) who, with his partner/wife, was hustling the best way he knew how - calling obscene propositions in English at every foreigner who came within earshot. Particularly, for some reason, People of Middle Eastern Appearance.

But his phrases were all jumbled after repeating the same mistakes every night, as though he had been playing a months-long game of Chinese Whispers with himself. I offered to help him renew his arsenal and asked him in Chinese the phrases he would ideally be using, from a marketing point of view.

His wishlist:

1.) "Have you fucked a Chinese girl?"
2.) "She swallows cum," and
3.) "No pubic hair!"

The big three - he was very confident thereafter. I may have made him a rich man.

On the way back to the hostel in a taxi, without my even mentioning the pimp, the taxi driver of his own volition just launched into a random, vicious rant on the evils of Dongbeiren (Northeasterners). People in China seem to see fellow-provincials the same way we westerners see fellow-countrymen; they sometimes appear to look at people from other provinces as we look at foreigners. That would make foreigners in China the equivalent of space aliens. China is its own planet.

My flight to Dongbei was the following morning. It started with a near-disastrous wrong-terminal problem. It never occurred to me that there might be another terminal at Beijing Capital Airport besides the glittering, cavernous new one. But upon finding my flight missing from the departures board i made inquiries and was redirected to a shitty little rolled aluminium shed of a Terminal 3 that reminded me a lot of Perth Airport.

By the time i had transferred from Changchun Airport to Changchun Bus Station to Songyuan City, i had about 11 hours to "play" with my old friends in Songyuan, and i have to say it was very good to be back. Songyuan seemed a lot more rural than i remembered it, with the donkey carts and various classes of "agricultural vehicle" roaming the massive 8-lane boulevards freely. Outwardly, it just looks like a very rich "Xian" (county capital) - it essentially is 2 separate Xians joined by a bridge. It really is rich - so rich that its inhabitants even admit it, and as far as i remember that's rare in China. And Feiyu Jinlun Huayuarrrrr, the luxury apartment complex we lived in, has taken over two more villages and is now so massive it takes about 10 minutes to walk from one side to the other.


Predictably, most of the people i knew from the school had left - especially the Chinese staff, of whom only 3 remained from 2007. Had a time catching up with those who were there, which became especially fun when i made the mistake of insisting on paying our own bill in a place called Kebab Bar.

Two blokes next to us had been engaging an American teacher and me in riveting conversation regarding New York policewomen and other matters, and had taken to keeping our beer glasses full. Then they said they were going to pay the bill and i asked the American teacher if she was happy with that and she was ambivalent.

I went up to the counter and insisted on paying our bill ourselves. The fuwuyuarrrr, however, couldn't be bothered with the bill-paying games, and as the two drunkards had already given her money for our bill, she took the money i gave her and slapped it down on their table.

Suddenly the drunks were deathly silent. They didn't touch the money, and i instantly realised i'd fucked up...this was a mortal insult: two guys get drunk, build face by stacking up the beers on the table to show how much they've drunk, foreigners come in, they win even more face by engaging them in conversation for an hour, they generously express their appreciation by paying their bill, and the foreigners not only publicly shun their generosity, an insultingly small sum of money gets thrown at them as though they need it. A truly disastrous loss of face...

My mind flashed back to the taxi driver in Beijing the previous night, and it gave me an idea: rectify the situation by cravenly stoking regionalism. "I'm sorry," I said, taking the money off their table and stashing it in my wallet, "I owe you an apology. I've been out of the Northeast for too long and, well, people in the South are just not as polite and kind as you Northeasterners. Actually they're really very rude. They don't have your level of culture. Or quality."

"We'd heard that too," one of them replied. And all was well.

I was out of there at 5am the next morning, back to Changchun, a short reunion with Mr Robert, airport, plane to Pudong (i agree with the departure boards in Chinese airports - Pudong doesn't count as Shanghai), then Maglev to Shanghai in six minutes or something ridiculous:

Hua Shan

March 15, 2009: I had come to Xi'an with the intention of heading north onto 2007's Great Wall journey route and catching up with a couple of nice people in shitty polluted towns.

But somehow instead i ended up at the second completely unreal scenic location of the trip.

When i reached Xi'an i found that a timetable change (it was actually much more likely a case of a Chinese train info website being plainly wrong on the existence of the train in question) meant would mean i would only get to one place - and that, i decided, would be Shenmu County. In fact, flying in the face of my "shitty and polluted" description, Shenmu was recently crowned number one among Shaanxi's 10 "Super-Counties" 强县 in social and economic development in 2008 - although in Shaanxi obviously the competition isn't as strong as elsewhere. The provincial government said it was based on a combination of 30 indices, including those of 'economic institutions, social development and ecology and environment'. Going by my recollection of the state of the environment up there, i think it's probably safe to assume it's the economy and society that are propelling Shenmu to the top of the ratings.

Actually, all of our North Shaanxi favourites from the Great Wall trip were right up there at the top of the list - Dingbian and Jingbian, Shenmu and Fugu. (One day 30 years from now, when the bored grandsons of today's coal miners find themselves hangin' on street corners and hatin' on the (clean) air they breathe, i predict some little red-guard-without-a-cause will end up rapping about those four places.) Even Hengshan, which gave me the impression of being somewhat closer to Burundi than Beijing, was there at number 14, and the whole thing appears to be saying (i may simply be misreading it completely) that sandy, barren, mountainous, rotten North Shaanxi 陕北 is doing significantly better than the rest of the Shaanxi countryside. I continue to rant at people about China's miraculous elevated superhighways (don't worry they all deserve it - especially the foreigners - after asking the question, "What's China like?"). The one between Xi'an and Jingbian County just ploughs through range after range of steep, sandy mountains, bringing the whole "Shaanbei" region within 5-10 hours of the provincial capital, where before it was days - conceivably weeks in many places - distant. The idea appears to be "maintain elevation at all costs", with 400-500km of alternating tunnels and bridges. Mountain in the way? Tunnel straight through it. Deep, wide valley on the other side? Keep the road going straight outwards, Wile E. Coyote style, just add concrete legs underneath, getting longer and longer as required. Just awesome feats of engineering that bring massive social benefits:--


So i messaged my Shenmu County "Taiwan Hand-pounded Pancake" chain store dude (actually "chain sign" would be a more accurate description as the franchisee doesn't need to have anything more than a table and a hotplate) and wondered how he was going. He replied that he was pleased i had remembered him but he "wasn't in that place anymore," that he was now a policeman, and he wished me a safe trip. This i interpreted to mean he was not in Shenmu and didn't have time to see me, and now, reading back over the messages i'm not so sure. Still, i had to make a decision at that point, and the decision was that instead of sitting for a whole day on a train, stopping for 2 hours in a coal town, turning around and getting back on the same train as it crawled back, i would go to Hua Shan, one of China's five Sacred Tourist Mountains.

While in Xi'an that night, i visited the backpackers bar that was the scene of "what's my cat gonna do now?", definitely my personal funniest moment of the last two years. Insanely, one of the two poms from that episode was there in the bar playing pool! He wasn't overly keen to talk it through in detail in front of the other people he was with...perhaps he was fearing i would bring up the bit where he's jumping around like a gazelle trying to escape Randy...

I set off the next morning.



It's a very civilised mountain, as you can see above - the paths are all paved and probably have been for eons. Most tourists take the cable car straight up to the north peak from the other side, bypassing probably half the climb. As i neared the north peak, through the silence i started hearing a buzzing noise like a swarm of bees. It became louder and louder until it finally took form as the sound of swarms of people - although as you will see further down if you get that far, this being low season, these swarms would certainly not qualify as such.




Even now the taming of the mountain continues. This guy and his mates were constructing a new paved viewing platform, presumably out of the mountain itself.



Although there are a few crazy vertical ladders (e.g. above), i saw nothing at Hua Shan that really matched the danger described by this dedicated anti-Huashan website. My biggest danger came from my heavy backpack, whose shoulder straps snapped three times. Whenever this happened i would be dragged violently towards one side of the path, which on occasions meant towards a massive drop. However, the backpack may have actually saved me too: most of the climbing was above the snow-line, on the couple of occasions when i did slip over, my backpack ruled out the possibility of cracking the back of my head.

Most of the time though the bag just made me labour like an old-time coolie. Actually, beyond the cable car station a few times i found myself overtaking or being overtaken by a porter carrying supplies up the mountain for the numerous mini-shops and guesthouses up there. These guys would just about be the coolies' closest contemporary relatives, but given the prices up there (Coke 12RMB, pack of biscuits 20RMB, "convenient" noodles 15RMB) i would hope they were very well-paid. Shame i forgot to ask one his income. Somehow, despite the presence of these hardy, hardy troopers, Chinese fellow mountain-goers still saw fit to comment - sometimes to me, other times to each other thinking i wouldn't overhear/understand - on my "ferocious" European body strength. When i pointed out that most of the people climbing the mountain were Chinese and that their bodies were holding up just fine, the reply would invariably be to the effect of, "Yes but your bodies are better than we Chinese'." After a few times i started inquiring as to the status of Africans' bodies - and indeed, black bodies are physically better than white ones. Although that assessment seems to play out true in the form of the Olympics and ball games, i still find the Chinese tendency to rank the races very interesting. In terms of civilisation Chinese people will sometimes say the Chinese are more civilised than blacks and less civilised than whites, though of course they're more than well aware that the Chinese were civilised long before Europeans. Taking, then, China as the longest-running civilisation, and Africa as the most recently civilised (or uncivilised) continent, China with the worst bodies and Africa with the best, i wonder if many Chinese people would perceive a link between civilisation and bodily decline. And of course, physical degeneration in the form of obesity and no exercise has been a status symbol in China in the past. This idea even Orwell touched on, when he discussed his fear of "progress" leading to brains-in-bottles, in the second half of The Road to Wigan Pier. Impeccable timing, thinking of this now as i'm just about to leave China for years!

The top of Hua Shan is just beautiful: the three main peaks, South, East and West, are clustered together, with a triangular bowl of forest between, covered in snow at least a foot deep. It's dotted with temples, and quite a few trees are marked as being over 300 years old; one was 800. I stayed the night in a guesthouse on top of the mountain, sharing a room with an extremely generous fellow from Hebei who showered me with biscuits and other sustenance-related products. Soon we were joined by another guy who was keen to shout us 15RMB beers (actually probably more like 20RMB - i wasn't paying), and even keener for us to share his long-life chicken feet. We got up early to watch the sunrise from the East Peak, along with about 40 others, mainly students it seemed. I think they got even more of a kick from it than i did: whooping noises reverberated around the peaks all morning, long after the sun had peeped over the pollution line.






Mountains made of this kind of rock must have been the inspiration for the Mario Bros. mountains, no?--


I descended by cable car, which must have increased the number of visitors tenfold when it opened. It's quite a blessing that many visitors don't even climb at all, instead just taking a look at the view from the North Peak cable car station and then going back down again. As i mentioned above, the North Peak was buzzing this time, and just imagine in summer when even these racks, this stockyard, can't control the cable car queues....


...actually it was a local tourism bureau official who told me that, and he told me rather enthusiastically. Maybe he just felt he needed to justify the empty racks. Or maybe to him crowded mountains, as tourist attractions, are, well, touristically attractive.



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Photos