P.R.C: Pretty Real China

P.R.C – Pretty Real China

By Denis Lejeune

Copyright 2013 Denis Lejeune

Smashwords Edition

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Ni hao – introduction

The High Note – enjoyment in China

I Stand Corrupted – the culture of bribing

All’s Well That Bends Well – the travails of quality

We Don’t Give a Sit – the trouble with Chinglish

Chinese Delights – manners and habits

Of Books, And Their Covers – the surprising supremacy of superficiality

Arrghchitecture – how not to build a country

Lowgic – thinking with Chinese characteristics

Lust, Caution – sex and love behind the Great Wall

Zaijian – conclusion

Further Reading

Endnotes

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By nature, men are nearly alike;

By practice, they get to be wide apart

Confucius

She hated injustice and thus easily offended people. In the past, many people had been willing to help her, including some foreigners. But today foreigners like that have disappeared – none of them want to upset the Chinese Communist Party. Foreigners willing to risk offending the CCP don’t get a visa.

Chan Hoonchung, The Fat Years

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Li lai ai ni Ai Lan

To all those who came to visit in Chongqing

And would have

To the people met in China, passing and otherwise

To those who are going

And would have gone

To twists and to turns

And to my granddad who passed away then

Whose candle still burns bright on the Yangtze

Xie

Xie

Foreword

FROM June 2007 to June 2010 I lived in Chongqing, South-West China. Three years and four days. A trying time for me, and on the whole not so enjoyable. This book will try to explain why.

The reasons why I felt compelled to write about my experiences and share my impressions are twofold: first, with China changing so fast and furiously, to leave a record of what the country was and felt like to a foreigner at the close of the first decade of the 21st century. Second, with China becoming such an important economic and political player, to forewarn future expatriates of what they should expect – or at the very least of what they might find. As us Frogs like to say, ‘un homme averti en vaut deux’ (a person in the know is worth two who are not).

Since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, more and more foreigners make it to China every year, and more and more books come out. But because of a mix of political correctness, economic interests, love for the myth and a self-punitive aversion for being honest, a lot of them paint what I discovered to be an overly rosy picture of China. While I enjoyed most of the literature on the subject, I did feel betrayed after arriving, as none had prepared me for the shock. My intention in writing P.R.C – Pretty Real China was both to help rebalance this bias and ready prospective expats and visitors to the real, contemporary, ‘Middle Kingdom’.

Due to the overall tonality of this book, it will likely have its critics; it might also hurt the ‘sensibility’ of some people and be perceived in a way that is not intended. It is therefore important to try and clearly lay down my intentions before starting. With P.R.C – Pretty Real China, I am certainly not out to maliciously discredit China, give it a bad name or engage in any kind of smear campaign, but I do want to be true to my own feelings, impressions, observations and experiences. That these are not all complimentary might not be to China and its admirers’ taste, but that is no reason to repress, nuance or hide them – lest we start following the Communist Party line on freedom of speech and opinion and blind ourselves to the facts.

Among my detractors will be those who accuse me of ethnocentrism – of looking at contemporary China through my own frame of reference, my own cultural background instead of adopting the Chinese view. Quite right. And there is a good reason for this: this is the book of an expat written for expats – past, present and soon-to-be – and I would never pretend it to be anything loftier. So what is in the word? An expat is someone who gets posted to a foreign country for a few years then leaves, never to return. Most expats have a job in business, education, the charity industry or diplomacy. They are busy, working long hours before returning home to their family.

In other words, expats rarely have the time or inclination to embark on a socio-anthropological study of what is around them. The majority do not read Weber and Lévi-Strauss, Durkheim and Malinowski – they go about their daily lives in as usual a way as possible, and what they take away from their adopted country is not what PhD theses and post-Structuralist round-tables and Neo-Con think-tanks conjecture about in New York and Paris, it is what they see, hear and smell. This book is the story of what I saw, heard and smelt in China.

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Ni Hao

Introduction

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MOVING to China in 2007 was an easy decision: at the time I was tired of London and in serious need of a change. Besides, having lived in various countries and visited many more, I felt justified in thinking that China, however challenging, would present nothing insurmountable. After all it is a country like any other, with cities, people and trees and good and bad points.

In this respect I was like ‘Chris’, the subject of a British newspaper article published in January 2010. Intent on producing high-end electric scooters for the British market, he uprooted to the city of Wuxi in Eastern China with the aim of finding a suitable factory. The venture proved so arduous, costly and stressful that the entrepreneur declared: ‘if I had known back then how China works, I would have used a factory in England’. Likewise I was not unlike Mark Kitto, who in China Cuckoo recounts the grueling experience of doing business in China, and eventually losing his magazines to the Party. Concluding his article ‘Fingers caught in the presses’ in the Financial Times, Richard McGregor comments on Kitto’s cautionary tale that ‘even though the legal environment in which business operates has developed substantially in the past decade in China, most investors remain at the mercy of the bureaucracy, rather than any body of settled law’.

In fact, I was like the great majority of Westerners who set foot in the country: delusional. Or else misinformed, and not just about the business environment. The West’s knowledge and awareness of China is so crass and disconnected from reality that an alien paying Earth a visit would probably think China as important to us as Malawi, a small, inconsequential and long-forgotten banana republic. Yet it is not: as of 2011 China is the second largest economy in the world ,and is thought likely to catch up on the USA in the coming years. The Dragon has entered all right.

Provided our extraterrestrial visitor is a sensible being, his first reaction upon hearing this would be to laugh at the discrepancy. But before long, seeing the face of his interlocutors, he would stop and ask, incredulous: ‘you cannot be serious?!’ Alas we are, and that is precisely why the contradiction between what China is and what it is to us Westerners is at best baffling, and more generally detrimental. It cost Chris a dream. It cost Kitto an annual turnover of 4 million dollars and a hundred staff. And it cost me my usual ataraxy, along with three years of my life.

Our ignorance of China has many reasons: distance, both geographical and cultural; the keenness of the West to project its fantasies onto this most foreign of lands; the societal set-up; a character-based language; a peculiar history; confusing politics; not to mention its recent, quicksilver evolution. Yet in light of the crucial role the country plays in our present as well as our future, in all logic the impetus for quickly addressing this ignorance would seem all too obvious to require telling. Indeed, more and more foreigners move to China every year; people do not end up there any longer, that is where they go, attracted by the tales of outrageous success or dispatched by their employers to grab a share of the ‘new Eldorado’.

However we would be well advised to reject the notion that this is the only way the West interacts with China. With Chinese companies and businesspeople getting wealthier by the month, increasing numbers of Western firms, public contracts, foreign exchange reserves, properties and jobs now fall into the thankful hands of the Dragon. China is in fact so important to us today that Europe has gone cap-in-hand to Beijing to buy it out of the financial crisis it is in – a gesture that, if agreed upon by the mandarins, is likely to come with strings attached further damaging the West’s standing and influence. The Chinese are not the idiosyncratic population of a remote country anymore: they are fast becoming part and parcel of the fabric of life in the Western world too.

For all these reasons, what the West badly needs, and fast, is a crash course in today’s China. The pupil might be reluctant – arguing that ‘it means nothing to me’ – but for his own good in the years to come, updating his archaic knowledge of contemporary China is the least he can do.

P.R.C – Pretty Real China is organized by themes and not as a narrative, as I felt the latter would have introduced a smoothness and fluidity that are found wanting in China. As French philosopher Pascal put it about another – yet similar – topic, ‘I would show too much deference to my subject if I treated it with order, since I want to show it is incapable of it’. Slowly but surely these themes imposed themselves in the course of the three years I spent in Chongqing, a burgeoning metropolis of 9 million in the South-West of the country, and my aim in expanding on them is to give an on-the-ground account of today’s China. Ignorance is no more a valid excuse today than it was a century ago.

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The High Note

Enjoyment in China

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IT would be tempting yet wrong to infer from my introduction that China was all bad. There are nice things in China, some even amazing, and to be fair it is also human nature to try and make the most of what is on offer. So no, I didn’t wallow in misery for three years. But one doesn’t need to be on the verge of suicide to realize that he’s been better, and enjoyed life more, before, elsewhere. So what is it I liked?

Scenery. Despite all the accurate talk of polluted China, there are a number of incredibly beautiful natural places to see, wild and as yet relatively untouched by human activity. My jaw dropped on a few occasions like nowhere else before: on the road to Tashkurgan and in the town itself, set in a wide and long valley on the border with Pakistan; in the dunes of the Taklimakan desert; in the mountains of Yunnan and on the grasslands of Sichuan; among the sugarloaf peaks of Guangxi province, or by the lakes of Jiuzhaigou. I had seen mountains, lakes and deserts before, but nothing like in China.

Ethnic minorities. China comprises 56 ethnic groups, with the Han representing around 90% of the total population. The other 55 can be as different as Koreans (in the North-East), Miao (in the South-West, related to Thai and Vietnamese groups) and Uyghur (in the North-West, Central Asian in appearance, culture and beliefs).

Each minority has a different history and relationship to the Han. Today, some might seem to be almost completely assimilated, such as the Hui or Tujia, while others still have a strong identity: Yao, Dai, Zang, Qiang, Hani, Dong or Jingpo. Naturally all these minorities are part of Chinese society and none lives in a bubble – some individuals might well be completely ‘hanified’ even though noticeable differences still exist when it comes to the group as a whole, through architecture, clothes, hairstyle or diet for instance.

These particularities are partly explained by the geographical remoteness of many of these minorities. Zhong Liu, a Yao village in Guangxi province, is reached after a 2.5 hour-walk through hilly paddyfields. Wander through the jungle of Xishuangbanna and you will likely come across Dai and Hani hamlets and towns. In fact, isolation from the Han centers of influence, such as big cities and roads, past and present, is a prerequisite for a real ethnic experience, and it is not surprising that most minorities subsisting today are located to the West of the country, that is, the furthest away from Beijing and the populous East.

What’s interesting about these minorities is that they show foreigners something else, something that we don’t know and have forgotten. Chinese cities are, despite obvious differences, nothing revolutionary to Westerners: concrete tower blocks, roads, cars, shops and so on. But minority villages are often set in the middle of stunning countryside; houses are wooden or made of mud and stone; designs original; hand-made and carefully crafted products can be found; traditional ways of life are aplenty; behaviors and reactions can be dissimilar to that of the Han; the pace of life is noticeably mellower (which does not mean that life is easier); animals roam around. There is, on the whole, a visible balance between man and nature.

Some minorities, such as the Uyghur or Tibetan, can also be critical of the government and speak more openly – a nice change.

Photography. China is a tremendous place for anybody with an interest in photography. Its zillion contrasts, big and small, be they cultural, architectural or natural, make it inherently fascinating. But one crucial aspect for photographers is that Chinese people often like to have their picture taken. Of course some may refuse, but China – like much of Asia for that matter – is a bounty for photographic opportunities compared to parts of the Western world, where various factors have turned street photography into a thing of the past. When taking pictures of children in China, I take pictures of children. In London or Paris, I’m bordering on pedophilia.

Contact. In the West the Chinese come across as shy. In China however it is extremely easy to talk to people, engage with them. There do not seem, to us, to be particular rules of bienséance and rituals to be followed in order to strike up a conversation.

Helpfulness. Help always seems to be at hand, especially if you request it. It might not come when you think you glaringly need it, or come in a rather puzzling way, but ask for something and you will likely be surprised by the lengths Chinese people will go to in order to help out. In many cases, I would simply have considered what they thought of as perfectly normal as way beyond my Westerner’s call of duty.

Safety. Sino-Chinese criminality is an issue, more and more so according to the media. But as a foreigner, if you act sensibly - and often even if you don’t - China feels like an extremely safe place to be. First of all open confrontation is not a Chinese thing, and secondly laowai¹ somehow benefit from a privileged status. Of course you can get ripped off, and you just might get something stolen, especially in touristy areas. But I have crossed city districts both day and night that many tend to avoid in Western countries altogether without so much as the hint of something untoward. Women and children can be out and about without ever feeling threatened or intimidated.

Travels. Independent travel is easy in China, provided you speak some Mandarin and have patience to spare (in other words the fact of ‘travelling’ is easy, not necessarily the experience of travelling or what goes with travelling). Provinces are well connected by air, taxis are cheap. Every single air company is more lax than all Western ones put together with regards to baggage weight and size, both in the hold and cabin; rescheduling is a breeze.

Besides, China is ideally positioned in Asia – even more so Chongqing – for big-scale exploring. In three years, on top of many internal travels, I visited Cambodia, Laos, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, Bali, Australia and Vietnam. Certainly not ideal carbon footprint-wise, but who said sinning was not enjoyable?

Cost of living. China is on the whole very affordable. You can eat stomach-filling noodles on the street for 40 cents, and sleep on the cheap – I spent a night in a Miao guesthouse for $3.2. Some commodities are more expensive than in the West, but essentials aren’t and overall the service industry isn’t either.

Three car-related examples: getting my SUV washed inside and out set me back $1.6. The Toyota garage sent someone to change my tire once: I paid $4.8 in labor cost. When I needed to buy two new tires (Pirelli) and have them fitted, it cost me $288 all included.

Speed of service. It would be a lie to pretend that the quality of service is a forte of China. Having said that you can call a plumber, carpenter, fridge-mender, key-cutter or just about any kind of trade and have them turn up ten minutes later. I had to deal with printers for exhibition prints and catalogues and only waited three days for all the work to be done – again, I am not talking here about the quality of