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: