Andy and Sarah's Journal

China

Emerging from Beijing Train station on warm and sunny afternoon we immediately started to feel relaxed, despite the usual stresses of finding our accommodation and carrying all our stuff. The plaza in front of the station was packed with people. There was a vibrancy that had been absent during our time in Mongolia. The hum of thousands of people talking and laughing was disarming and familiar. Perhaps in Mongolia people just didn’t hang around much because of the cold.

After showering we strode off to find Tiananmen square. We were immediately impressed by wide tree lined streets, immaculately clean and stuffed full of huge luxury hotels and office blocks. The closer we got to the square the more full of Chinese tourists the pavements became. They were usually in large groups following their flag bearing tour guide and often all wearing the same coloured base ball caps in case any of them got lost. Although unable to understand a word we immediately loved the bustle of these groups. Banter, shouting, laughing and a clearly very expressive language gave us an impression of real energy and enthusiasm.

Tiananmen square was a little underwhelming. Dominated by Mao’s huge Mausoleum it was hard to imagine the events that had taken place there previously. The thousands of tourists and modern Western cars choking the roads on all sides made it feel like any other large square in a modern city. We ambled around as the light started to fade and didn’t really notice the number of people starting to thin out. At 6pm we and a few other stragglers were subjected to impatient rants from the police through their patrol car mounted megaphones. As directed by the policemen on foot we exited through the most inconvenient exit and walked round the outside of the square to return to our starting point.

At the time of writing we have been in China for just over a month. We have just succeeded in extending our visa’s for another 30 days. Good news, as China is so vast and there is so much to see.  To avoid slipping behind I’ll just put a summary of where we’ve been so far. I’ve kept some notes of our many thoughts and observations as we’ve gone along and will try to summarise these when we get a few free days somewhere warm. (We’re currently in Songpan, it’s minus 8 at night and there’s no heating in our room. But we’re luckier than those still living in tents in this area after the earthquake back in May).

7th November – arrive in Beijing at 2pm. Walk to Tiananmen square and have roast duck in restaurant. (£6.80 for whole duck – very good service).

8^th Nov – take metro to the Olympic site. Pay £5 each to go into the Birds Nest stadium. Very busy and according to our tickets we were 110 millionth or so visitors. Very impressive up close.

9^th Go to Sunday market. Very busy and good atmosphere. Full of nick knacks of every description, mostly aimed at Chinese rather than foreigners which is good. Visit Taoist temple and walk back through nice park.

10^th Join a tour from the hostel to go to the Great wall. 10km walk takes about 4 hours with all the photo stops. Both really impressed despite high expectations.

11^th spent day at the forbidden city. Home to generations of Chinese emperors from around 1400 to 1950’s. Very busy but well worth seeing. Ate at specialist dumpling place – really good, although Sarah got food poisoning.

12^th visit the drum and bell towers – they were used let people know what the time was from about 500 years ago (Ming Dynasty). Then caught the night train from Beijing west train station. Absolutely massive place and very chaotic. Thought we were early but most people already on train so luggage space all gone. Hard sleeper bed in stacks of 3 all open within the carriage. Each had our 2 bags with us so not much sleep.

13^th Arrive Pingyou 7.30am – ancient walled city. Very touristy (Chinese tourists) and quite expensive. (£12 each for a 2 day ticket to the major sites – most of which were a bit naff). Enjoyed a walk around the top of the walls – 6km, some good views into the traditional courtyards. Walk out of a café refusing to pay £3.50 for a pot of Jasmine tea when many local people earn just £100 a month. Start of the China tea crisis (full story later).

14^th finish off our 2 day ticket. Enjoyed the martial arts museum – couldn’t understand anything but no one around so got to play with swords and big spear things in the courtyard.

15^th spent the day with a local guy who is managing the restoration of a traditional courtyard. Showed us round the project and a few other hidden courtyards. Ate with him at a local roadside “tent” excellent food – about £2.70 for 4 of us, but freezing cold sitting outside.

16^th  bus to Xian, 6hrs. Expressway very modern and not very busy. Xian huge city. First hostel noisy till early hrs so moved.

17^th Visit to the terracotta warriors, amazing. Also visited tomb of Emperor Jing Di . Equally impressive and even better designed as a museum.

18^th both have heavy colds – didn’t do much. Walked in local park in evening – full of older Chinese people taking their exercise. Park full of exercise machines.

19^th visit the Muslim quarter and enjoy great food from the street vendors. Meet local teacher and drink tea with her for an hour – bit bonkers but very interesting.

20^th Train to Wudang Shan 8hrs. Confirmed we were off the beaten track when there was no train platform and we had to jump the last 4 feet from the train. Stayed in a cheap local place. Not a single word of English but very friendly. Ate in a hole in the wall place round the corner. Best food so far especially noodles. Meal for £2 including tea and beer.

21^st Took bus and cable car to top of Wudang Shan mountain (1612m) and then walked down. Both still not 100% and the 3 hour walk down was quite tiring. Views from the top were good, would be fantastic on a less hazy day. (resisted the temptation to be carried down in a sedan chair – really steep – the porters that carry the chairs are unbelievable).

22^nd point and smile using our book not working here as not many people can read. Our poor pronunciation meant we were set to get on a bus to completely the wrong place. Luckily a woman we chatted to on the mountain arrived at the bus station to return to Beijing and informed us of our mistake. Crowded and knackered bus to Yichang took 5 hours (freewheeling at every opportunity added a couple of hours). Continued new found confidence with hole in the wall eating, excellent food again.

23^rd spent day in Yichang before boarding our cruise boat Victoria Star at 7pm for start  of our 4 day Yangze river cruise. Our booking was through the manager of hostel in Xian. We hadn’t seen tickets and when the driver collected us and drove into the night in the wrong direction (we thought) we were both convinced that we were being taken off to be mugged (we had the balance of the cruise to pay in cash). Our relief at arriving at the boat meant we handed over the money without thinking. When we got on board there was no reservation for us and the driver had gone. After a fraught half an hour the Xian hostel manager put things straight and all was well.

24^th/25^th and 26^th cruise on the Yangze. The trip included the 3 Gorges Dam. 1.3 million people relocated and this may yet grow to 4 million as the new river banks are eroding faster than anticipated. However the Dam generates as much power as 18 Nuclear power stations. The Gorges are beautiful, but must have been even more so when the river level upstream of the dam was 100m lower.

27^th Cruise ended in Chongqing city – a massive city of 4 million crammed onto rolling hills overlooking the river. Survived the most chaotic bus station so far and caught a bus to Chengdu (5hours). From Russia with love was the movie on the bus with Chinese subtitles…..followed by Moonraker!

28^th Early morning trip to the Panda breeding centre. Had about an hour of just us and the Panda’s before 1000’s of noisy school kids arrived. Amazing to see so many Pandas up close especially 12 aged between 3 and 4 months in the “nursery”. They seem to be successful at breeding but not much luck with re introduction to the wild yet where numbers remain very low. They do seem to like giving Pandas as gifts to other countries though!Visited very active and interesting Buddhist temple and spent a few ours in the tea house there. Sunny and warm and a great place to spend time. Pay once and have your tea cup refilled all day from huge copper kettles being brought round the tables. Soon learnt that leaving your lid off means more water….even if it’s already full!

29^th Spent Saturday in the people’s park with much of the rest of Chengdu. Nice strolling – met some students and bought some pictures with their help from an old man. The tea house was packed but the staff made a fuss of us and got us a table. Drank tea and played chess for several hours before this forced a visit to the park toilets……let’s just say there’s not much privacy!

30^th Long walk through town – really enjoying sun and laid back atmosphere. Walked round the Tibetan area, lot’s of Monks begging for money which we couldn’t really understand. Yet another tea house – definitely liking the lifestyle here.

Sichuan province is known for spicy food and the restaurants left our lips burning most nights, but enjoyed some really good dishes.

1^st Dec -  Bus to Leshan (2 hrs). Our visa expires on the 5^th and in most places an application to extend takes 5 working days. Leshan has a reputation for doing it in 24hrs. All goes well and we are told to return in the morning. Got a bit stuck trying to book into a hotel without passports, the receipt we had been given didn’t seem to convince them. Some other guests (Chinese) bullied the reception staff into letting us stay. Leshan has the largest Buddha in the world, carved into a cliff face. Spent the rest of the day walking and exploring the park around the Buddha. Visit our most “local” place yet for dinner and enjoy a very cheap but delicious meal whilst providing endless entertainment to the staff and other customers.

2^nd Dec, pick up Visa extensions. Have been granted a 30 day extension from the day of application and so will need to leave China on the 31^st December. Seems to be quite a lottery – Australians in particular are often given 60 days. The British and French are more tightly monitored. Probably due to our outspoken views about Tibet. Head back to Chengdu – make the decision not to go to Tibet. Would cost us £1500 to be there for 5 days and we would be accompanied by a “guide” at all times. There is very tight control over who goes there and who they have contact with – this has been in place since the riots last March. Hope to go there again in the future when we can travel more freely without Chinese control.  Tried a Chinese massage, both somewhat bruised afterwards but does seem to break down any nodules along with everything else in your back.

3^rd Depart for Songpan on 6.30am bus, doesn’t leave till 7am and then breaks down twice before driver get’s it sorted. Usual scenario where officials count the numbers on the bus as it leaves the station and then the driver picks up extra fares all along the route – sometimes by the minivan load from touts. Presumably they can avoid some tax element of the ticket price paid by those who get on at the station. Journey to Songpan takes 11 hours. Used to take 7 but as it passes through a significant part of the area devastated by the earthquake in May this year the going is slow. There is a major diversion and many of the bridges that collapsed have been replaced with temporary ones. Piles of bricks are all over the road and lots of lorry’s are driving up and down as people are rebuilding their homes and lives. Some of the valleys are very steep and the landslides were huge, we had never seen anything like it. There are still thousands of temporary homes in use as the rebuilding goes on.

4^th  Dec – People pleased to see tourists in Songpan as they have had a very difficult year with no one going there. Freezing at night (-9) and no one has any heating, shared a single bed and piled the blankets on. Window thick with ice in the morning from our breath. Used the thermos of hot water we were given to make tea and to fill empty coke bottles to be hot water bottles. Spent the day horse riding into the next valley and back. Really good and nice and warm from 10am till 5pm when the sun was in the valley. Temperature plummeted again once the sun had gone. Finished the day and last of the sun at the local tea house…..we thought 50p was cheap for bottomless tea but later learnt it should have been 20p.

5^th Dec – Walked for a couple of miles out of town in the morning and then caught the bus to Jiu Zhou Gou about 2 hours along icy but scenic roads. Whereas Songpan is a market town Jiu Zhou Gou is a resort town catering for the national park with the same name. As it was out of season the town felt like a deserted seaside town. The wealthy from Beijing and Chengdu fly in to the small airport nearby as a part of an organised tour. For us arriving at the local bus station we had some difficulty finding a hotel that was open. The one we found was empty and like all the hotels we stayed at all the windows were open (to avoid damp or to air the bad smelling drains – we aren’t sure). Needless to say it was freezing despite having a sort of warm air blower in the room.

6^th Jiu Zhou Gou national park, very beautiful but done in a very American style with concrete steps or wooden walkways everywhere you are allowed to go. All the interesting routes were closed off for the winter which meant that we could only take the shuttle buses from one stop to the next and then walk around for a short while before going to the next scenic spot by bus. This seemed to suite many of the Chinese who had all the latest walking gear but clearly no intention of actually walking anywhere. For us it was quite frustrating having the countryside given to us in such a controlling manner.

7^th Took the 7am bus back to Chengdu, again going up and over some huge passes en route. Pleased to be back in Chengdu with hot showers and relative warmth!

8^th Sent parcel home, £25 for 6 kilograms. (3 months surface). Went to Carrefour (French supermarket) and enjoyed French bread, cheese and wine in the room. Cheese is almost unheard of in china and was very enjoyable for a change. Red wine was Chinese and wasn’t too bad!

9^th  Flew to Lijiang, another tourist hot spot, but quite interesting for pottering about and eating some good local food.

10^th December – took a bus 2 hrs to the start of the trail for Tiger Leaping Gorge. Plans to Dam this gorge have apparently been shelved for the time being – good news as it is a fantastic 2 day work along the edge of the gorge. Enjoyed really good accommodation on the way and also the local Naxi food that was excellent. The Naxi (pronounced Nashi) people are one of china’s 50 or so ethnic minorities. They are unique in having a Matriarchal society, all the elders are women and can be seen socialising and hanging out around the town wearing their traditional gear. Apparently channel four filmed a documentary here a few years ago, will have to try and find a copy when we get home!

11^th completed the second days walking and then over did it a little on the Chinese whiskey and other local specialities.

12^th a very slow start to the day and then 3 hours back to Lijiang.

13^th walked up to the pagoda overlooking the town – had to pay an entry fee as with everything in China. Refused to go into the park (famous for it’s mountain views) because of £8 each entry fee. You can live very cheaply in China but many of the tourist attractions are expensive and sadly well beyond the reach of most Chinese (although in this case the park was free for locals).

14^th A long day – fly to Kunming and then on to Hangzhou with a short stop at Gianzhou. China Air very impressive. Arrive Hangzhou about 11pm and take bus into the city. Hangzhou is one of several cities of 4 to 5 million people within an hour or 2 of Shanghai. In the taxi to the hostel from the bus stop we passed Porsche, Ferrari and rolls Royce dealerships and countless posh restaurants. It’s a very nice area, with rolling hills, tree lined streets and a huge lake (West Lake) this is home, or second home, to many of China’s super rich. A certain irony as it was originally built as a summer playground for the emperors and their entourage before communism did away with all that privilege.  

15^th The hostel was nice enough, but the staff were less friendly and helpful than we had become accustomed to in China. The hostel was also a bit out of the way. We were keen to experience the contrasts that modern china has to show, but we were quite quickly missing the less flashy and more down to earth parts of china we had been enjoying. We took a taxi to Lingyin Temple and after paying £3.50 each to enter the grounds discovered that each of three temples had a further charge. The grounds were nice enough and we decided we could cope without seeing another Buddhist temple. My feelings about Buddhist monks have become more mixed, in both Mongolia and Chine we saw fat monks driving posh cars (even new range rovers) around temples with steep entry charges. Yet in Chengdu the Tibetan monks had been begging for food. I’m not convinced that many Buddhist temples are offering much back to the communities they are based within and it’s almost out of superstition and tradition that people seem to keep contributing to their local temple.

16^th All the bikes at the hostel were broken, so much to Sarah’s relief our cycle round the lake turned into a walk. We found a cheap locals tea house on the lake side and had our best few hours in Hangzhou playing chess and chatting to the locals whilst eating sunflower seeds. The Chinese have mastered the art of squeezing the seed case and sucking the nut inside out, we were till a bit slow in comparison.

17^th Caught the express train into Shanghai. Very fast, clean and modern taking just 1 hr 20mins. On arrival we found out that the last express train back was at 8pm – too early we felt so booked seats on the slow train at 9.20pm. Enjoyed walking along the Bund – historic riverside area where many of the British building remain, good views from there of the ultra modern towers on the other side of the river. Walked through the old town, amazing street bustling with people and food stalls. All with 2 storey dilapidated buildings with a back drop of modern sky scrapers. I wonder how long this part of town will last with the desire to modernise everything. Shanghai has its share of tourists and foreigners working there, but it has nothing of the cosmopolitan flair and vibrancy that Hong Kong has. Good to have seen it but 1 day was enough. The slow train was packed to the rafters, although those in our seats readily moved when we got to them and we enjoyed chatting and banter with them and others until our stop.

18^th bus to Tunxi and then onto Tangkou. This is the starting place for walking up Huang Shan. Ended up in a 4 star hotel thanks to the Chinese on the bus who grouped us all together to increase out bargaining power. Ate with a couple from Beijing and tried our best to maintain chopstick etiquette. They didn’t seem too offended so we think we did ok. They were tea connoisseurs and after dismissing the restaurants tea invited us to share theirs. It was really good and for £300 for 500g it probably should be. We were horrified at the price but they assured us that 500g would last them several months and compared to our wine bill at home this didn’t seem so bad. They gave us a generous donation of tea leaves when we said goodbye the next day. We also learnt that although the green and white teas we had been drinking did have only a little caffeine in, they do contain another natural stimulant. The name for this didn’t have a  translation that we understood, but we had wondered if there was a connection between the many hours we had spent in tea houses and some restless nights sleep.

19^th Cable car up the mountain, 8km circuit around the summits and then a 10km descent. A fantastic day with some stunning scenery. Good company with the Chinese couple and learnt a lot from them. (See later).

20^th  local Bus back to Tunxi and then bus to Likeng village. Quite a small place built around several streams. On the schedule for Chinese tour groups but once they had passed through for the day it was lovely and peaceful. The 2 hours of sunshine we had on the balcony the afternoon we arrived soon evaporated and it was freezing. It snowed on the second night and we had no heating again. But it was lovely during the day and the place we stayed was really good with the owner, Shindi rustling up great food for us each night.

21^st/22^nd walking round the village and the surrounding fields. Shared the occasional heated seat with the locals – wooden seats with a metal tray holding hot coals in the bottom.

23^rd 13hrs 2 taxis and three buses. Likeng to Wuyuan to Jingdezhen to Nanchang to Changsha. Arrive about 9.30pm, pretty exhausted and stay in a pretty grim place near the bus station.

24^th No bus to Guilin till 3pm (although later realise we’re at the wrong bus station) and it take 8 hrs not the 6 we had read about. When we get on the bus it’s a sleeper bus – horrible and we’re right at the front. We endure Chinese techno music followed by a Bruce lee film that keeps jumping. All Chinese buses are smoky but this was the worst ever. Relieved to finally arrive at 11pm, but get dropped at the roadside not at a bus station (the bus was going elsewhere). Have to get angry with the taxi driver who was “waiting for us” before we luckily see our hotel and get him to stop. Get into the room with a couple of beers from the local shop just before Christmas day.

25^th -31^st – we had a couple of days in Guilin before taking the bus to Yangshuo and then on again to Xingping. A great little riverside town with great views from the hostel roof. The whole area is beautiful, the thousands of limestone hills with sheer cliffs and rivers running below are amazing. Yangshuo and Guilin are very touristy but we could have stayed here much longer despite the rainy weather.

China – thoughts and observations

Customs and Habits

Loud and strong throat clearing followed by spitting out the resulting phlegm is completely normal in China. Men and women of all ages are accomplished clearers and spitters. Some of the best technicians of the discipline savour a slow spit, dropping their prize around their feet. Others prefer a good head movement to project their gooey mess away from themselves. Buses provide spittoons in the aisles or plastic bags on the back of each seat. On the sleeper train we took from Beijing to Xian two of the men sharing the same area of the carriage as us spat onto the carpet throughout the night rather than walk to the sink at the end of the carriage. It’s fair to say that most Chinese people would also find this offensive. Spitting is much less common amongst younger people, especially in the cities. They are very in tune with Western fashions and seem to be aware that spitting everywhere is not the done thing. Air quality is generally very poor in China. Lots of cars, burning coal for cooking and heating and vast coal burning power stations make most of the cities very dirty and polluted. After a few days in China you develop some sympathy for the throat clearing. But the spitting everywhere never quite feels normal.

Queuing is not known in China. It was quite common to be talking to a receptionist at a hotel and for someone else to come up and to start talking to them as well, usually resulting in them getting served before you. If waiting for an ATM, you need to have your card out ready and ideally touching the back of the person in front. Otherwise it will be assumed you are not ready and people will stand in front of you. Apparently an attempt to introduce a ticket based queuing system in some of the banks was shelved because “local entrepreneurs” were taking all of the tickets and selling them to the highest bidder. This free for all approach is also applied on the roads. Mostly people go in the right direction, but push bikes and motorbikes often go the wrong way, or on the pavement and sometimes cars, buses and trucks will do the same. A small number of traffic lights have police cameras and drivers usually stop for these, but otherwise they are largely ignored. This applies to pedestrian crossings in many cities as well. In Beijing the American right turn at a red light rule is used. Except that the car making the turn has right of way over the pedestrian crossing on a green man.

Often in China it felt like ideas were copied from the West in order to look good or to give an impression of safety or good practice, but usually with rather obvious flaws. For example an impressive and expensive looking speed monitoring vehicle sitting by the side of the motorway with 4 or 5 policemen sitting next to it on deck chairs and very little going on. Presumably enforcing some kind of speed limit is to do with road safety and when they were actually working these policemen might pull over and fine drivers they found to be going too fast. The Mum, Dad and three young children on a motorbike together with no helmets on the motorway, that passed this police team at the same time we did, held no interest at all for them. Neither did the weaving and undertaking drivers who were carving everyone up.

In Beijing before you enter the underground system your bags have to go through an x-ray machine. This is manned by what looks like a school kid, in trainers and casual clothes who is either too bored to look at the screen or too busy saying hello to you to look at the screen. You and what you are wearing is not searched in any way. Bus stations also have x-ray machines. But if catching an early bus you are exempt as the people running the machine haven’t started work yet. It is very common to catch buses outside the bus station or along the route the bus is taking. That way the price can be negotiated directly with the driver and his conductor. This cuts out the bus company and also additional costs for the running of the bus station that are included in the official ticket price. Presumably in response to this, each bus station exit has a barrier and before a bus can exit a very official looking person in a uniform comes onto the bus and counts the passengers and ticket stubs before allowing the bus to leave. However as soon as the bus pulls out of the station it stops and takes on new passengers. On one occasion the official person got off the bus, we pulled forward and stopped half in and half out of the bus station with the barrier up, whilst several new passengers got on. Needless to say that their bags had not been through the x-ray machine!

The One child policy

This is still in force and parents face large fines and also a loss of future benefits if they have more than one child. The law is upheld much more strictly in urban areas than in the countryside where infant mortality is higher and a large family is still necessary to ensure your care in old age. Those more effectively engaged with the system (those in urban areas) are entitled to a pension and retirement age is 55. The expectation is that grandparents at this age will play an important part in raising their grandchildren allowing both parents to work. This is somewhat confirmed by the large numbers of grandparents waiting at the school gates each afternoon. If two single children marry then they are now permitted to have two children.

The one child rule has resulted in a significant imbalance in the genders, there are millions of missing girls (through a range of means) and the natural balance is out by around 3%.This phenomenon has become quite empowering to women, if you want a nice girlfriend you must treat her well as there are lot’s of other lonely men willing to take your place!

Tradition places the responsibility for the care of aging parents with their sons. However it is becoming more widely acknowledged that daughters are actually better at taking care of their parents (and parents in law). Many urbanites are now keen to have a daughter rather than a son. As elsewhere in the world girls also appear to be outperforming boys academically. Invariably in the places we stayed the girls would have excellent language skills and would therefore have the more interesting (and better paid?) roles working directly with tourists. The boys would have the more menial roles and when they did spend time talking to us their English was often much poorer and their outlook less mature.

Millions of only children who have lived through the last 2 decades of such rapid development seem to be almost lost at times. The internet in particular has opened up a world that their parents often know little about. Modern China with all its technology and bustle comes as second nature to this generation. But for many of their parents it has come so fast and so hard that many must still hanker after the quieter, simpler more isolated China of 20 years ago. Perhaps this is what the 60’s were like in Europe and the US. China has a generation of well educated and highly skilled young people who are being given a glimpse of a wider world. It remains to be seen whether the country can keep moving fast enough towards allowing them to live the lives they aspire to or whether unmet expectation will grow into civil unrest and confrontation.

Many of the recent graduates we met gave a sense of treading water, often in quite poorly paid jobs, but with an increasing awareness of their ability and skill in international terms they seem to be waiting for the day when the barriers come down and they have the freedom to fulfil their potential in the way they choose. Graduates all over the world go through similar difficulties making their first steps onto the career ladder, but China still controls its population much more firmly than countries in the west.

University in one of the smaller cities was described to us as follows:

“Everyone is woken at 6am by the loudspeakers throughout the campus. All students must go for a run. Everyone lives in a dormitory and this is shared with 5 others. At 7.15am all dormitory doors are locked and no one can return there until lectures are finished for the day. Lectures start at 7.30am. Teaching quality can be mixed and classes can be large. At 4pm everyone is involved in cleaning the classrooms and sweeping the grounds etc. this is strictly enforced by student monitors. Every class has a party member present. No one knows who they are, only that they are present. Their role is to report any inappropriate teaching or discussion in the class. In classes there is little or no discussion and few questions. Students listen and take notes or fall asleep. The heating is activated on a fixed date in November and turned off on a fixed date in April. It may be well below zero before the heating is turned on”.

Some of the people we met clearly came from rather more forward thinking Universities and had enjoyed a little more freedom to think and challenge. 30,000 people are employed by the authorities in china just to monitor the internet. Many pages are blocked or altered (The BBC website was allowed during the Olympics but banned again after the games, the World Service radio broadcast is blocked with static). Chat rooms are monitored. Young people love the chat rooms and find it a really useful way to share information about what is going on around the country. They also like to play spot the agent. Several people will be chatting together and a new person will join, they will start making pro party comments and generally singing the praises of the authorities in relation to whatever is being discussed. This was described as sometimes being quite good fun. A degree of teasing and winding up the agent is good sport. But there must also be the constant fear that if you overstep the mark too much then you could be traced and arrested. (Openly discussing politics in a negative manner in Beijing can still lead to your arrest. There are many plain clothes listeners in the city who undertake this work).

Christianity is booming in China. Apparently 40 million bibles are printed each year but this is not enough to keep up with demand. Soon, we were told, Christianity will be China’s biggest religion and China will have more Christians than any other country. We generally tried to avoid this subject as it was a sad and frustrating one. The opening up of China has allowed the more negative elements of Christianity to roam free. A young and rather lost generation that has been given a dictatorial education and isn’t equipped to question and challenge is easy prey for the likes of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Perhaps this is where China’s greatest challenge for the future lies. It will be a world power, simply by capacity and determination. But with the exception of a very few, China lacks innovators. They will always make it faster and cheaper than anywhere else, but they may rarely own the idea or the development.

Aside from the growth of Christianity China has been busy rebuilding many of the Buddhist temples and monasteries destroyed during the cultural revolution. Buddhism never really went away and remains important to many people. Some of the younger people we met described being less interested than their parents but acknowledge the part local temples play and participate in certain ceremonies or ancestor worship to please their parents.

The national psyche appears to be born out of a blend of Buddhism and Confucianism. Although around for a relatively short period Confucius appears to have laid down a moral code that the Chinese have adhered to ever since, despite the dictatorial regime, violent destruction of the cultural revolution and widespread corruption. As a people they are warm, gentle and caring. The attitude is largely do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Many countries have harsh penalties for crime, as does China, but this doesn’t prevent theft and harassment. The harassment from Touts in China was of the mildest kind and yes foreigners are robbed some times, but we felt far safer than just about anywhere else we have been.

Another more subtle aspect of Chinese culture was the expectation people have about their rights. We are familiar with the rights of the individual carrying great significance. This is much less the case in China. Perhaps it’s a result of one party communist rule or perhaps it comes more simply from being part of such a vast population. In Chinese society the needs of the majority override the needs (and “rights”) of the individual. This is demonstrated by laws such as the one child policy and projects such as the 3 Gorges Dam. 1.3 million people re located in the quest for energy. (The official line is that it was built for flood control and that the energy is a bonus – but this seems somewhat unfeasible). The number may yet rise to 4million as the new river banks are eroding faster than expected. The guides at the dam give a well polished ramble about how happy everyone is, how quickly everyone was moved and how everyone now has better housing than they had before. This is all too good to be true, some people are yet to be re housed and of course there were winners and losers in such a massive shuffle of the pack. The more skilful people able to bribe or use the system to their advantage no doubt came out on top and the vulnerable or less well educated got what they were given. Comparing this to the possibility of a new run way at Heathrow with 5 years of talking and 100’s of millions on legal fees, puts the event into some perspective. Is China’s ability to carry out such projects just down to fear and suppression or is there also another factor, some degree of acceptance that as the largest population on earth they have to cooperate to be successful? They are a hugely patriotic and proud nation and I suspect all of the factors come into play in many of their achievements.

One other strange aspect of life in China that we saw repeated in every town and city was the dentist. We could only assume that being seen in the dentist is a sign of wealth or status. The dentist chair would always be in a room with a full length window onto the pavement outside. Often there would be a screen showing a close up of the work being done, also facing the public on the pavement. Those waiting their turn with the Dentist would be in the same room and if the practice was a large one then there would be a row of Dentists’ chairs in the same room each with its own waiting chairs. Perhaps to build trust with their patients Dentists in China need to create a environment where there is nothing to hide? A trip to the Dentist in the UK for a Chinese person could be very frightening then, as they are led into a private room where anything could happen and no one would know!

Language

Those in Beijing consider themselves to speak the purist form of Mandarin. The type and pronunciation varies greatly around the country. Shanghai in particular has a very different Mandarin based dialect and people from Beijing and Shanghai find it very hard to understand each other. In more southern areas Cantonese is spoken (including Hong Kong), although most Cantonese speakers can also get by in Mandarin. There are also some 50 additional languages spoken by China’s minority ethnic groups. There is a huge divide between the City dwellers and rural people in China. This is seen in terms of wealth and lifestyle and also language. Rural people are said to speak a much rougher version of Mandarin and when they move to the cities in search of work it is one of the ways they are identified and looked down on. English is a standard part of studying at University and many people we met were very keen to practice with us. China has a rapidly growing middle class and it is not unforeseeable that English will become the standard language for them. This would give a common language for people throughout China as well as enabling communication with foreigners. It would probably also be an elitist language, separating the wealthy from the countryside people who they generally look down on as ignorant or backwards. Communication and business with the outside world also requires Chinese people to speak English. Not only do Chinese in different provinces find it difficult to understand each other, but Mandarin is a very difficult language for foreigners to learn. There are four tones and depending on which one is used, the meaning of a word can be dramatically different. These tones are very difficult to learn. As a written language Mandarin is certainly beautiful, but also quite impractical. It is said that you need to know several thousand characters in order to read a newspaper. The characters can be quite difficult to decipher. The symbol for “male” as you might see on a toilet door, is a square divided into 4 smaller equal squares. This represents a paddy field. A curved line comes down from the middle of the bottom of the big square bending to the left. This represents a strong arm. Together a paddy field and a strong arm make up the character meaning “male”. Characters are written from left to right, but there are no gaps between them. Direct translation into English is often very difficult as the characters are constructed from different elements to create an overall meaning, almost in a pictorial fashion. This is why, both in spoken form and written form (including many official signs) Chinese people speak such strange English.

Ancient Chinese is written top to bottom on a page, rather than across. The characters are also very different to modern day ones. Some Chinese people are very interested in studying these characters, rather like Latin or Greek in Europe.

Everyone in china appears to have a mobile phone and many young people in the cities also have laptops. These use western style keyboards. Each word is typed out using Pinyin, a system developed to translate the characters into the western alphabet so that foreigners could pronounce them. (for example most road signs have place names written in characters with their pinyin translation written underneath – with some practice at sounding out the pinyin, Chinese people can understand where you are trying to get to). As the word is typed in Pinyin on a computer or phone several options appear below in a drop down box. Each of these options is a Chinese character that could represent the word, phrase or meaning the person wants to use. The more of the word the person types in Pinyin the fewer possibilities are displayed, as soon as the desired character is available in the drop down box it can be selected and the next word/character started. Whilst this sounds rather clumsy most people are able to type or text with amazing speed. Those without the ability to write in Pinyin are not able to text or write on a computer. (usually a further divide between city and country people).

Food, Eating and Drinking

There are a lot of rules in formal Chinese dining, we didn’t do much formal eating but a couple of the customs we learnt about were as follows:

Eating out is very common and an invitation to eat together is equivalent to an invitation to go for a drink at home. Whoever makes the invitation to dine out is then expected to pay for the meal. However those invited out to eat must first make a show of offering to pay before allowing the host to pay. We saw this acted out a few times in restaurants and it was quite funny.

At very formal meals, usually linked to business of some kind, there will be a hierarchy at the table. No one can eat until the most important person starts to eat and as soon as he (usually always a he I’m afraid) stops eating everyone else must stop. This might be one of the reasons that people eat so fast in China.

A waiter will bring a menu and then stand by the table waiting for the order. Usually there is one menu and this is given to the host who then orders food for everyone. All dishes are communal. If there are more than two of you then there is usually a spinning surface on the table for all the dishes to be placed on. Each person has a bowl into which they load food from the various dishes on the table.

You pick up food from the communal dishes with your chopsticks. As these also go in your mouth it is considered polite to pick out individual pieces from the communal dishes and not to fish around. As novices we usually ended up picking up and dropping most of the contents in each dish before getting some into our own bowls. Our hosts would usually request a spoon for us, probably for their benefit as much as ours.

It is good form to pick up your own bowl and hold it close to your mouth. A shovelling motion with your chopsticks is then used to fill your mouth. Slurping noises are the sign of a good meal, noodles can be bitten in half so that the remainder falls back into your bowl. Over enthusiastic shovelling, resulting in food down your front and over the table is not good form, but is a frequent outcome for beginners.

Our favourite places to eat were small “hole in the wall” restaurants. Simple places with one side open to the street and a few plastic tables and chairs inside. At the front there would be the cook and a very hot Wok. Laid out next to them would be all the fresh produce they had bought and prepared that day. You indicate to the cook how many dishes you want and what combination of vegetables, eggs, meat that you want in each one. It is then cooked for you with a choice or soy or spicy sauces.

This is a very hygienic way to cook. Only produce bought and prepared that day will be on offer and meat is fresh or even still alive. Everything passes through the red hot wok and the oil within it before it is served to you. All of this takes place in front of you. We never had any ill effects after eating in these places and had our best meals in some. The most we would pay including a couple of beers would be £3 and that would often be something of a banquet.

One downside of cooking in this way is that each dish is prepared one by one and brought to the table as soon as it’s ready. Our trip was in winter and many hole in the wall places were freezing cold. This meant each dish had to be eaten quickly before it went cold. Steamed rice was usually always ready and sometimes free or just a few pence. But if you ordered fried rice it would often come at the end of the meal when you had eaten everything else, when ordering you had in mind that you would be mixing each dish with some rice.

The pot noodle rules in China. You can buy them everywhere and there is always boiling water on offer at the same place. This was great for me on many long bus journeys, but sadly for Sarah we never saw one vegetarian pot noodle amongst the 1000’s,

Dairy products don’t feature in the Chinese diet. Cheese and milk were only available in certain supermarkets (including the French chain Carrefour who seem to be doing rather well in China). When we could find it, cheese was very expensive and our treats would normally be the less outrageously expensive cheese triangles with French bread.

Tea

Tea to the Chinese is rather like wine to the French. It is intrinsic to the culture and way of life. Chinese tea is green, white or red. Black tea is available but is mostly for foreigners and not generally popular with Chinese. Loose leaves are used either in a cup, tea pot or most commonly in a sort of clear thermos flask that people carry with them throughout the day, topping up with hot water as they go. Tea prices vary massively and it is very hard to know if you are being ripped of as a tourist. Early on we walked out of a café where the price for a pot of tea was £3.50. Local people were earning less than £100 per month and this price seemed wrong. Later we did pay £5.00 for a pot of tea. We spent a couple of days walking on Huang Shan mountain with a couple from Beijing who were tea fanatics. We learnt that the quality of the tea depends on the year it was grown (weather that year), the place it came from – quality of plants, soil and climate and the age at which it was picked. The baby leaf green tea from Hangjou that they shared with us costs the equivalent of £300.00 for 500g. It was very nice! They claimed that 500g was enough for 6 months and when we considered our wine bill at home for 6 months this didn’t seem so expensive.

The equivalent of the pub in china is the tea house. Usually in gardens, parks or temple grounds, tea houses involve lots of tables and chairs and a kiosk where you pay for a china cup filled with your choice of tea leaves (usually £1 to £2 in the city, less in smaller towns). Sometimes you are also given a large thermos flask of hot water to refill your cups until you have enough or request another thermos. More fun was when the hot water came from big copper kettles carried round continually by the tea house porters. Cups come with a lid to keep the tea hot. Leaving your lid off means that you require a top up of hot water. We didn’t realise this on our first trip to the tea house and having left our lids off to let the tea cool down we had to have more water added in true Chinese style, even though the cups were full and the extra water spilt over the table! Particularly at weekends but pretty much any time the tea houses are lively and noisy places full of bustle. People come for hours at a time to relax, play Chinese chess, dominoes and cards and just to chat with family and friends. A good selection of nuts and fruit is also usually on offer. Common to most tea houses is an ear cleaning service. Men and women in white tunics carrying an array of pointed objects and long tweezers will “perform miracles on your ears”. We enjoyed several long afternoons in tea houses, playing chess and drinking gallons of tea especially in Chengdu. We found that after such days we didn’t sleep that well. Later our Beijing friends confirmed that green tea does contain some caffeine along with some other stimulants.

Alcohol is readily available throughout China. Beers tend to be a bit weaker than we are now used to, but Chinese whiskey and rice wine can be very strong. Groups of men tend to drink especially around business deals and rice wine appears to play an important part in weddings, certainly as gifts. But apart from that drinking is not really a big thing in China, the emphasis is very much on tea. Unlike in the UK where particularly at weekends most towns and cities are full of drunk, rowdy and often intimidating people, this element is not present at all in China. In all of the places we went to, we never once experienced any alcohol induced aggression or intimidating behaviour when out late at night.

Travel in China

China has a large network of International Youth Hostels. They are run like hotels. The accommodation is good quality and the staff are very helpful. Most are graduates in tourism and speak excellent English. They book your next train, plane or bus ticket (for a fee) and a room at the Youth Hostel in your destination. The staff from that Hostel will often meet you from the bus or train at the other end and take you to the hostel. The Hostels often have their own bar and restaurant selling pizza and burgers alongside Chinese dishes. This makes travel between major destinations in China very easy. Quite soon though you desire to talk to people other than bright young graduates keen to please and practice their English and you also wish to avoid the other travellers that you first said hello to 1500 miles away in another Youth Hostel.

At this stage people head off to smaller towns without Youth Hostels and life gets much harder. The big cities all have modern centres that appear much as any European city centre. The small places are invariably market style towns and are from a different era. Arriving at our first such town there was no station platform and we had to jump the last 4 feet onto the trackside. We soon discovered that no one spoke English and pointing and drawing pictures did not result in the successful acquisition of onward train tickets (even though our goal was to get back on the same train we had just got off but in 3 days time). Accommodation was basic, but clean and friendly. Food was excellent and very cheap, here the pointing was more successful. Climbing the well known mountain near the town we did meet an English speaker (from Beijing). Luckily she turned up at the bus station the next day moments before we boarded a bus to a town 5 hours in the wrong direction from our desired destination. The pronunciation of the two town names was a little similar and the army of helpers we had acquired at the bus station over a few hours had been a little surprised that two foreigners had wanted to go to such a small and remote place, but only too pleased to help us out. We learnt a lot from this first step away from the beaten track and made sure we were better prepared with pre written requests and directions for future forays.

These sorts of experiences did bring us into contact with ordinary people and we were always warmly welcomed. Smiled at, waved at and encouraged in such places. The lack of any common language was frustrating though as it would have fascinating to learn more about their views and feelings about China. We did visit some smaller towns and villages in this way and enjoyed it immensely. But this was still limited to where we could get ourselves using trains and buses and no language. In terms of the divide in china between urban people and countryside people we did not feel that we were able to really access and spend time with people in the countryside. Inaccessibility and a lack of communication make this very difficult. But in some of the smaller places we gained a sense of the simpler life, the reliance on the land to feed yourself, working communally to grow rice for sale into the market. Of the 2 lifestyles in modern china this was the one that was harder to learn about, but in many ways held much of the charm and peacefulness we associate with China.

News and Politics

China TV channel 9 has an English language news programme that we watched a number of times during our time there. The presentation is rather different to what we are familiar with. The limited foreign news is kept very factual and short, this was dominated by the US election and the economic slump during our stay. News about China is all good news. If something bad has happened then the news is about how well people are coping or how well the authorities have responded to the situation. During our trip we passed through the area of Sichuan province devastated by the earthquake in May 08. The government made a huge response to this disaster sending in 80,000 soldiers as part of the rescue effort. Some of the young soldiers died of exposure during their efforts to rescue those trapped and reopen roads to enable aid to reach the more remote areas. The local people are very proud of this heroism. The government continues to pour aid into the area and there is a massive rebuilding programme underway. The two untold parts of the story are the schools and the death toll. The BBC covered the school story at the time but local people were kept quiet on the subject. A number of people raised it with us. The earthquake happened during school time and in the 3 minutes it lasted all of the schools collapsed killing and injuring many children. The local authorities chose the cheapest contractor to build their schools who in turn cut corners to maximise his profits. The concrete wasn’t reinforced properly and readily fell apart when the earthquake ripped through. To date this story remains absent from national headlines and we can only assume that no investigation into these claims will ever take place.

We talked to many people throughout China about the earthquake. They were all very moved by what had happened and generally pleased with the level of response from the Party. Often people drew comparisons to the cyclone in Burma and the lack of response from the “government” there. One interesting theme that emerged in these conversations was that no one knew the death toll for the earthquake. People would say things like “we heard it was very bad, maybe 10,000 people died”. The answer varied hugely but was always significantly below the BBC estimate of around 86,000. Maybe it’s a cultural thing or perhaps just another example of controlling the bad news, but in western news the death toll is a key piece of information readily presented after any disaster.

During our time in China the trial began for those deemed responsible for the baby milk scandal. Mixing a cheaper substitute compound to save money the company sent out to market a toxic mix. Many babies were killed and seriously ill as a result. A rather large number of men from the company were on trial and could face the death penalty (often by shooting in China and your family are required to pay for the bullet). The trial was screened on TV and widely reported, the Party presumably keen for the people to see that justice will be done. There seems little doubt that someone will pay the ultimate price for the lethal baby milk fiasco.

We couldn’t help but reflect on the contrast to the collapsed schools in the earthquake zone. It seems that justice extends to private companies but not to anything connected to the Party system.

The lonely planet is the most popular travel guide in China and fairly essential in planning your movements around the country. Entering from Mongolia we had no problems crossing the border. Others we met had different experiences. The most challenging crossing people talked about was from Vietnam. Here Lonely Planet guides to China we sometimes confiscated. Others had to agree to the removal of half of the two page map of china inside the front cover. The cause of all this fuss? The map shows Taiwan as a separate country. Everyone we spoke to in china assured us that Taiwan is part of China and most were certain that all Taiwanese people want to rejoin China. The universities and TV broadcasts have clearly done an effective job in spreading this message as the answer never varied. We met two American students from California, both were very American but travelled regularly to Taiwan where many of their family still live. They explained that the majority of Taiwanese support the current government in their position of remaining independent (of course this is what America wants and the propaganda machine in Taiwan is funded by them to support independence). However the opposition party, which has a significant minority, is in favour of re joining China. The greatest fear has come from the observations of Hong Kong, where although the economy has boomed since the handover, people have seen many of their liberties stripped away.

The other political hot potato in China is Tibet. As with Taiwan, the powers that be have established a fairly consistent view throughout China. This is that Tibet is part of China and that the Dalai Lama is an evil man. The most rounded answer we got was that politics and religion should be separate and therefore the Dalai Lama should not aspire to be the leader of Tibet. No one had any suggestion to make that Tibet was anything other than part of China, even a couple from Beijing who were by far the most outspoken critics of the regime did not appear to entertain any idea that Tibet should be independent in any way. We were very keen to visit Tibet and one of our hopes was to gain some impression of how the Tibetans feel about the situation and what their hopes for the future are. However since the riots in March 08 and with this March marking the 50^th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s departure, the Chinese have clamped down firmly on travel within the massive region. For many years you have needed both a special permit and to be part of an official tour. However on arrival you could leave your tour and do your own thing for the duration of your permit, usually 28 days. Sadly the situation now is that you must be accompanied by your tour guide at all times and you cannot get a permit without being signed up for a tour. For us this meant a price of £1500 to travel to Lhasa by train for 2 days, spend 5 days in Lhasa and the surrounding area and then fly out. We decided to wait for a future time when hopefully we can spend a longer period in Tibet and when we can travel independently without a guide to monitor and dictate to us. We were sad to make this decision and can only wonder how few people are making the trip to Tibet now and how limited their access to local people must be. The Tibetans must be feeling the affects of this clamp down both in terms of reduced income from tourism and isolation from others in the world interested in their plight. Of course there are no travel restrictions on Chinese nationals going to Tibet and this is an increasingly popular option for China’s millions of internal tourists especially since the train line was finished all the way from Beijing to Lhasa.

I’m unsure what conclusion to draw about the Dalai Lama. Does he represent a ruling elite who previously enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle whilst their subjects struggled to feed themselves? Whilst he represents many of the Tibetan people he does not represent them all. It is a vast region with many diverse people and as a leader it would be hard to see him as a democratic one. We will never know whether Tibet would have become an isolated, royalist dictatorship along the lines of modern day Bhutan or whether the Dalai Lama acting as a spiritual leader rather than political one, would have been the person to steer the country towards unity and democracy. Most of Asia seems to have had limited success in this area since the colonialists departed in the post war years leaving a melting pot of radicals, royal families and dictators feigning democracy.