China Witness (62 page)

"Words heard on the road" have always been a part of my social education, lessons that give me food for thought.

– Wangfujing bookshop, Beijing, 18 April 2007:

SON:
Daddy, what are these dolls for?

FATHER:
They're called the Olympic Dolls, they're the mascots for the 2008 Olympics.

SON:
Why do they look like that? What country are they from?

FATHER:
Um . . . "world citizens", maybe? I think this must be "bringing China in line with the international community".

SON:
Oh . . . I get it, our Olympic mascots are the cousins of the foreigners' Transformers!

*

– Starbucks coffee house, next door to the presidential palace in Nanjing, 4
May 2007:

CHINESE-SPEAKING FOREIGN CUSTOMER:
Gosh, what a beautiful building.

SERVER:
Isn't it? It used to be part of the presidential palace in the republican era.

CUSTOMER:
Why haven't they made it into a museum?

SERVER:
That would be a waste of resources, wouldn't it? Then this house couldn't be used to make money.

CUSTOMER:
It's a real pity, using such a beautiful building as a coffee house!

SERVER:
No it's not. What we're doing here is allowing the best-quality goods in the world to mingle with Chinese traditional culture.

*

– Train from Nanjing to Shanghai, 7 May 2007:

GIRL A:
How do you know that your dad has a lover?

GIRL B:
I bumped into them, yuck, they were all over each other.

GIRL A:
Did you tell your mum?

GIRL B:
What would be the point? She said it herself a long time ago, all men eat what's in their bowl while eyeing up what's in the wok!

GIRL A:
Not necessarily, not my dad.

GIRL B:
That's because you don't know. My mum says, what man with money doesn't keep a mistress these days?

GIRL A:
So what're we going to do when we have men?

GIRL B:
If they can keep lovers, so can we!

*

– Ladies' toilets, Shanghai Hongqiao Domestic Airport, 11 May 2007:

MANAGER:
Why is this paper dispenser so loose?

CLEANER:
I thought that it would make it more convenient for the customers.

MANAGER:
You can't do that, it has to be tight, or it's easy for the customers to pull out a lot all at once, and we're the ones who have to pay for it. Have you wiped down all the pictures?

CLEANER:
Yes, all of them, even the new ones they've just hung up. It's just that one over the soap dispenser, there's a mark on the man's face, I can't get it off.

MANAGER:
Don't you scrub that off, I put that tape over the man's eyes myself. Whatever were they were thinking of, hanging a picture of a man in a ladies' toilet? How come the floor in that cubicle isn't shiny?

CLEANER:
I've just mopped it.

MANAGER:
Not hard enough, you should mop the floor until you can see the face of the person in the next toilet!

*

When I heard this, I congratulated myself that there was no one in the cubicles on either side of me; I could hardly imagine performing my private natural functions "face to face" with my neighbours.

*

–
Zhengda Shopping Centre, Shanghai, 12 May 2007:

YOUNG WOMAN:
This brand's no good!

YOUNG MAN:
It looks really great on you.

YOUNG WOMAN:
What do you know about it? Nobody takes this brand seriously, I'll crash and burn in the interview, for certain!

YOUNG MAN:
Well, can't you wear that one from Next?

YOUNG WOMAN:
That brand's too old-fashioned – as soon as the boss sees it he'll know that I'm behind the times.

YOUNG MAN:
Things are really expensive here, and money's tight for me this month.

YOUNG WOMAN:
So do you really love me?

YOUNG MAN:
Of course I love you!

YOUNG WOMAN:
Do you? Then you couldn't let me show up in clothes that aren't even brand names and lose face in front of a foreign boss, now, could you?

*

– Shanghai Pudong International Airport, 15 May 2007:

MAN A:
Aren't you going to buy her that necklace?

MAN B:
It's too expensive. I can't very well claim the money back at my work unit.

MAN A:
Get the attendant to write you two receipts, one for books, one for souvenirs, and that'll be the end of the matter!

MAN B:
That brain of yours is good for something, anyway!

MAN A:
Oh, we all do it. You tell me, are there a hundred honest officials in our China, officials who've never used public funds to pay for private expenses?

MAN B:
Officials who've never claimed on expenses? A hundred? Not that many.

*

On 16 May 2007 I was in the departure lounge of Shanghai International Airport, reading a Chinese newspaper and waiting for the plane for New Zealand, where I was going to start the launch tour for my fourth book,
Miss Chopsticks
. The main headline in the papers was still the
China Petroleum and Gas Group's discovery of oilfields of up to 1 billion tonnes in the
Tanhai area of the
Bohai Gulf: apparently the Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, had been "too excited to sleep". This reminded me of the worries Mr You had mentioned in his interview, that China's future strength and economic staying power would be determined by its oil supplies.

The most noticeable pictures in the illustrated part of the news were of the Chinese stock market, full of beaming faces after a series of rapid rises, juxtaposed with the gloomy faces of car salesmen; people were putting all their funds into the stock market. Many of the stock owners' faces were worn by the years, but the car dealers were all healthy young people who looked tasty enough to eat. By the side of a group of photos of ostentatious and extravagant "International Labour Day" marriage ceremonies was an old woman's face, full of grief and rage – another 91-year-old woman in Jiangxi province had made public her humiliating status as a Japanese "comfort woman". The old lady in the photograph looked agonised: why did they humiliate so many of us girls, and how can they still not admit it?

I put down my newspaper, and a song that was being played on the loudspeakers drifted into my ears. This song, "Dyed with my Blood", was written for the soldiers who died in the
China–Vietnam War in the 1980s, and it had been forgotten by many people, before international politics had once again painted it with fresh colour:

Perhaps after this farewell I will never return,
Will you understand? Will you see why?
Perhaps I will fall and never rise again,
Will you wait for me forever?
If that is so, do not grieve,
For the flag of the Republic will be dyed with my blood . . .

I was thinking: is not the flag of today's China dyed with the blood of our forebears in the same way? Do China's young people understand this? Will the flourishing crown of leaves and branches that has grown up from their roots, watered by China's violent storms and rains of blood, retain any memory of the roots?

*

The "Beijing Olympic torch storm" had been going on for three days in April 2008 when I did my final editing of
China Witness
with my London editor. I could see how much Chinese people had been constantly shocked and hurt by the mainly one-sided news "selected" by Western media in its coverage of China; only a very few exceptions, such as
Frans-Paul van der Putten's letter in the
International Herald Tribune
on 6 April 2008, showed a real and all too rare understanding of China and its inherent problems in the last century.

On the BBC website, which became accessible in China just a few weeks before the Olympic torch went around the world, Chinese emails flooded in, showing the confusion and passionate hurt experienced by young Chinese:

– The
Dalai Lama supports The Beijing Olympics, as he has stated many
times, and agreed that Tibet could be a part of China. Why, I wonder, do
both sides, Tibetan and Chinese, never listen to him? And why does this
complication almost never play a part in the news I watch in the UK?

– The 2008 Olympics was voted by the world democratically seven years
ago, the UN recognizes China as a country including Tibet. How do we respect
that democratic process, both UN and Olympic, when we see the sort of attacks
on China's human rights record and democracy constantly reported in the
news?

– What will be said, I wonder, if someone points out that the London
Olympics in 2012 should be cancelled because British troops invaded Iraq, are
illegally occupying it?

– What's the difference between "freedom fighters" and "terrorists"? By what
standard are we judging? The Western news coverage on the Beijing Olympics
seems to follow an agenda as clearly set as any propaganda.

– There are hundreds of thousands, millions of people who speak English in
China. I'd like to know how many British people speak Chinese. Most secondary
school children in China know Shakespeare, Dickens and are aware of a wide
range of Western music. How many Westerners know of Chinese books or music?
Is this because of Western press controls, a deliberate policy by the government
or simply arrogance?

– Why Western media hate China so much? We are not living in the same
China as our parents and grandparents had, even though under the same name
as PR China. Why none tell this difference to the world from those highly
respected and luxurious living foreign media in China?

'Why' has become not only a word or a question, but symptomatic of a deeper questioning and shock in young Chinese hearts and minds . . . It could turn China towards a better political system in the future, or, simply destroy their trust in the developed Western world.

I wonder how many people have realised that the naivety and ignorance of some Western media risks damaging the belief of young Chinese in democracy, and that it could also possibly force the Chinese authorities to slow down the faltering progress of the democracy movement which began in 2008. I don't think most Westerners have any idea how much the Chinese had suffered in the hundred years up to the late 1980s . . . Twenty years is a very short time for this nation to have the chance during relatively peaceful times to change its thinking, and to learn about freedom and democracy, including how to be with Tibet and Tibetans . . .

I believe it would be a great chance for the Chinese people to touch and feel the world through the universal language – of sport and music – if the Beijing Olympics were to succeed. Otherwise, there is a risk that young Chinese may feel the same confusion about democracy and find themselves in conflict with the Western world in the same way as the previous three generations after the Opium War, when China lost its national pride.

This world will not be in peace if we don't really understand and respect democracy everywhere, if we don't give people all of the information they need to make a choice, and then move on to a peaceful future. This is true all over the world. Humanity has paid so much for its past mistakes because we are too often taught to hate one another.

As a Chinese media person I struggled with Chinese censorship for a long time before I moved to London in 1997. Now, I feel the same sense
of struggle again, but in the West, not with censorship, but with ignorance about my motherland.

Please, let us all think and work towards not producing more darkness with hate. Only light and the brightness of understanding can destroy darkness.

*

At about 10.30 pm on 12 May 2008, as I was going through the mountain of emails that had built up while I was at a conference in France, one subject with many exclamation marks jumped out at me.

"North Sichuan
,
Wenchuan, a 7.8
earthquake at 14:28 on May 12. The tremor
was felt in all but three northern provinces but the whole of China has been
shaken!!!!!!!!!"

For the first few seconds, I couldn't believe what I had read, and then, almost immediately, I thought of the
Tangshan earthquake in 1976, when nearly 300,000 people lost their lives. (Chinese government statistics list 240,000 dead, though I was told that figure does not include the military, those travelling through the area, or the un-registered migrants who worked in the coal mines.) I felt a chill through my whole body and I couldn't help my tears. Tangshan was a terrible blow to the Chinese people. In my book
The Good Women of China
, one chapter is about my interview with a group of mothers who all lost their children in that earthquake. Every single morning since then, those women have set an alarm for the time when their beloved children disappeared so that they could pray.

At the time of writing this on the 18 May 2008, over 32,000 deaths have been confirmed in this latest earthquake, and over 17,000 bodies are still covered by rubble. Thousands of children will have died because the earthquake took place at 2.28pm during afternoon school time. One town, which had a population of tens of thousands, has only 2200 survivors, and their homes have been completely destroyed. Today, China's State Council has decided that 19–21 May will be a national time of mourning for the earthquake victims of Sichuan Wenchuan. It is the first time in China's history that a natural disaster will be mourned nationwide.

I can see the huge difference from the government's response 30 years ago, when they banned news of Tansghan to save political face and refused international support out of a misplaced and distorted sense of national pride. This time, the Chinese government announced the Sichuan earthquake witness
within 58 minutes and asked for international help immediately. The images of crying mothers in amongst the ruins of Sichuan on the front page of Western newspapers have drawn the world's attention from the political chaos of the Olympic torch and I sense a huge sympathy for China's loss. Also, many Chinese have learned and realised that human lives are far more important than any political or editorial angle, as the BBC and other Western media put the Sichuan earthquake as their top story.