Surviving in China, a few tips for the would-be flaneur...

After a round-trip journey of several thousand miles, via Hong Kong and Beijing, I find myself back in the UK at a favourite watering hole from times past, Caffe Nero in Epping. The ambience is pleasant, the staff friendly and very helpful and the atmosphere convivial for a slightly tired flaneur. Some three years ago, I spent much time in this particular cafe both researching and writing a novel, a period that I have fond memories for. Oddly, many of the staff who were there back in those far off days still seem to be in place.

Now that I have left China, for the time being at least, I thought that I would offer a few of my own tips for anyone planning to visit that country. My list is of but ten items, as space permits, but I feel I could offer twenty more quite easily. There are many aspects, and many challenges, that the would-be traveller will come across unless he or she is of the type to go on the most organised of organised tours. So, with further ado, here is my list:

1. If you wish to purchase fruit or vegetables, look to buy them literally off the back of a lorry! Often, particularly near market places, you will see flat back vans selling just one or two fruits or vegetables. As likely as not, these can be farmers, or people working on farms, selling goods directly. Often their prices are far lower than the market place, although their scales are also not always that accurate. Still, all in all, usually one finds there are bargains to be had.
2. Keep a supply of small change, one yuan coins or notes, for the bus. Most city buses in China charge either one or two yuan for any length journey within the city. This translates to 10 or 20 pence (15 to 30 cents). As these journeys can go on for several miles, this can be an outstandlingly economic way of getting around.
   
3. Although there may be markings on the road that look very much like zebra crossings, in China these do not seem to mean a thing to the motorists. Beware, they will not stop! (It's only slightly better than 50/50 for a red light, so be cautious there too).
   
4. On a similar note, at night one must be aware that many Chinese drivers will not turn on their headlights or, indeed, any lights at all. I think this is to save their batteries. Obviously, it leads to certain dangers. This is often particularly the case with the riders of electric bikes and, as these bikes are near silent in their actions, it is easy to wander into the path of one.
   
5. Most taxis within cities are obliged to run on the meter. Make sure they do so as negotiating a fare (or, more accurately, an 'unfair' in this particular case) is often highly disadvantageous. Those of a nervous disposition should avoid taxis altogether though – they drive like complete maniacs (well, to be honest, everyone drives like a complete maniac in China, but the taxi drivers even more so).
   
6. Smile. The Chinese people are a pretty friendly bunch who value social interaction highly. Be relaxed and friendly, even if you cannot speak the language, and be assured of much pleasant, albeit confused, social intercourse.
   
7. Stay away from Chinese officialdom as much as you possibly can. They have rules, a lot of rules, far too many for the comprehension of this humble flaneur, and falling foul of any one of them can invalidate, or render impossible, whatever it was you were trying to do or obtain. Try to make sure that all your documentation is in order before you deal with such folk. I would advise, if at all possible, have little or no contact with these sticklers for detail.
   
8. Join in! One of the pleasanter aspects of Chinese life is to be found in the local town squares and the recreation parks. Often of an evening you will come across groups of people dancing en masse. In Shenzhen there must have been two to three hundred people to a group, at the very least. They really don't mind if you join in and will even find it a cause for much mirth, usually at your expense but in a very friendly and inclusive way. If you care to play table tennis or some other such sport, again as a foreigner you will be the object of some interest and be made to feel very welcome to play. Beware of table tennis in particular though, they are very good at it ...
   
9. Keep some tissues on you at all time. This particular tip reminds me of 'The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy' where the first piece of advice given was to always carry a towel. Chinese loos are nothing like as bad as their reputation, many guides are quite out of date as far as this particularly aspect is concerned. Indeed, I have to say that in my various trips to China I have been pleasantly surprised. You will often find, however, that if there was originally a roll of loo paper it would have been purloined long before you got there! Kinda embarrassing to get caught short in such a way. Also, many of the restaurants charge extra for paper napkins, so having your own supply will save you a few yuan each time you sit down for a meal.
   
10. One needs to know that, for the most part, there is no Google, no Facebook and often even articles on the BBC are blocked. The Great Firewall of China is all-embracing, omnipresent and very powerful, and also very, very annoying! A blogger, such as myself, has to find inventive ways around the restrictions if he wishes to continue to publish. Thankfully, I have able and helpful friends who have assisted me in this endeavour. Also, perhaps because of the sheer amount of checking that goes on with the internet in China, it is much, much slower than we are used to in the West. One wonders as to the damage this must do to Chinese commerce but, hey ho, that is Chinese politics for you.
    

For an extra tip, I would urge people to be careful when using the roads in any situation, whether you are a pedestrian, a driver or even being driven. Before I came to China I checked which side of the road they drive on. The answer given online was the right side but, this being China, that only seems to be a general rule to be ignored whenever convenient. Even to ask 'which side of the road...' is a bit misleading in itself as it makes the presumption that the vehicles will drive on the road. At times, for instance when there is some kind of blockage in the road or they would have to wait in a queue, then the pavement is blithely used without a care of any sort for the people walking there. You may believe yourself to be having a pleasant stroll on a Sunday afternoon, as befits a flaneur, only to have your ruminations rudely ruptured by the random recklessness of a driver who not only feels he has the right to the pavement as well as the road but will even be very demonstrative about exercising that right. The Chinese Highway Code need only consist of a single page and three words, 'Might is Right'.

I hope these tips will help keep any budding traveller to the People's Republic of China safe and assist in the enjoyment of this fascinating but frustrating country. There is nowhere else quite like it that I have ever come across in my travels, both from the positive and negative points of view. It is perhaps, the most capitalist country that I have ever been too, both on the micro and macro levels. It is nominally communist but only nominally. There are some aspect of state capitalism, as opposed to the strictly privately owned variety, but little evidence of any communism whatsoever.

If anyone intends visiting China, my recommendation would be to get away from the East Coast and large cities such as Shanghai, Beijing or Shenzhen and head inland several hundred, or even thousands, of miles. The aforementioned are all completely over-developed and highly polluted. On the other hands, there is much that is beautiful further to the West. My own recommendation would be Yangshuo, but China is a huge country with many beautiful areas and fascinating sub-cultures to choose from. Over time, the governments desire to cover everything in concrete will erode away the character of even these areas, so I would recommend going relatively soon before everything that was Chinese is turned into an ersatz West by the powers that be.

Come into my web

This weeks blog copes not from the comfortably cosy confines of a cafe but from the copiously cavernous capacity of Chang An library, a sprawling public building over five floors in the administrative centre of the town. Reliable internet connections are not the easiest things to come by in the People's Republic of China but this place is better than most.

          Frustratingly, even simple communications seem to take an age in the PRC. Because of rumours about the 'Great Firewall of China' and notions of intense supervision of each and every web search, one is never sure whether the laboriously slow speed of the internet here is more due to the nefarious activities of those given the role of surveillance or is simply a technical problem that one could put down to an inefficient infrastructure. In many ways, most of the infrastructure here would be the envy of the West, so it comes as something of a surprise that the internet is habitually so preternaturally slow.

         To be fair in this, one should not criticise China alone when Western governments such as those in the UK and the US have shown a similar weakness in regards to the temptations to pry into people's online communications or other activities. These two countries managed to come to a rather neat arrangement to get around the fact that US agencies spying on US citizens is illegal, and likewise in the UK. The two countries simply arranged to swap their data when each spied on the other's citizens - GCHQ spied on American citizens whilst the NSA spied on the British, thereby making their activities legal(ish!).

         Whenever challenged, the governments of these two countries trot out the usual excuses of terrorism, paedophiles and organised crime, thereby ensuring that many of the more naïve citizens will support the latest clampdown, but the reality is that those in power tend to love power and want to keep a firm grip on it. People communicating freely online is seen as a threat to that vice-like grip so the temptation to take more and more control over the means of communication becomes irresistible for such folk. In this way, one could at least say that the Chinese are being (relatively!) honest in their repression, unlike the other two mentioned.

Another aspect that makes using the internet in China a frustrating experience is the sheer ubiquity of the advertising. If you, dear reader, are anything  like myself, and yearn to simply use the internet without having to undergo a visual, or even verbal assault, each and every time you try to visit a site, then China is no place for you. One needs a degree of patience verging on the superhuman to endure the constant bombardment that one suffers each and every time one puts fingers to keyboard.

Of course, advertising is at the very heart of the capitalist process, an attempt to persuade the viewer/listener that he/she need lots and lots of things that, in reality, they don't ('because your worth it' as one particularly insidious offering puts it). It is everywhere here in China – from the internet to hoardings, from smiling greeters at shop doorways to incessantly repeated slogans from loudspeakers. This last technique is very common here, one might think that the originator of this particular method of advertising learnt his trade on the Korean Peninsula in the 1950s...

         In the West the techniques are somewhat subtler. On Youtube one has to endure a few seconds of trailer for a game or film before one can assign it to the oblivion it so richly deserves whereas in China one is forced to endure a minute of such assaults with no option to abort. If, having finally reached your video, you dare to pause it you will find that even that gap is felt to be an available opportunity for advertising and some intrusive sales pitch attempting to tell me that I need to spruce up my wardrobe for the coming spring, or some other such nonsense, will tend to fill it.

         To some extent, this mirrors life in China. For a theoretically communist society they are perhaps the most natural capitalists on the planet. Everything is for sale, no stone left unturned if there is an opportunity to make some money, no avenue left untraversed. Oddly, in the West, I think we envision factories and endless production lines. The reality is often far more mundane. One sees old ladies sitting on kerb stones outside shops manually inserting some  item into tiny plastic bags or fiddling with some  trinket, often in this town it will be cheap jewellery, the results to be displayed in the supermarkets and stores of the West a few weeks later. Such people are often piece workers, working their fingers to the bone for a pittance.  One can see them staring myopically at their work, their eyesight and their fingers failing. Chang An is a relatively well-to-do area but their presence is an ever present for all to see.

         So it would seem that capitalism won the argument that raged throughout the twentieth century but... appearances can be deceptive. Capitalism, whether it be the American variety or the Chinese (not much of a difference, I grant you) needs to persuade the 'consumer' (for we are all consumers now apparently, not people any more) that they have wants and needs that have to be fulfilled (by them of course) in order to be happy. Of course it is true, people do have wants and needs but often those needs are far, far less than the advertisers would have you believe, and often for things that money can't actually buy.

         As Samuel Alexander said: 'Simplicity is the new spectre haunting capitalism' – the fear that people will realise that to live well they don't actually need so much endless acquisition. After the crash of 2008 many people, particularly in America, began to question some of the fundamental assumptions behind the advertising and came to realise that the endless chase after ever more 'stuff' and the need to buy ever bigger houses to house said 'stuff' was a very limiting and, in many ways, a deeply inhuman way to structure a society.

         In this sense, I would have to disagree with the odious Gordon Gecko (as played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street), when he said that 'Greed is good.' Greed is not good, greed is simply greed – one of the least attractive traits that human-kind possesses, at best unpleasant and at worse deeply destructive.

         Never before have so many people chosen to start the process of casting off the chains of consumer culture, stepping out of the rat race, and living in opposition to the existing order of things. What they have come to realise is that life gets pleasanter and more meaningful when you value experiences over things, relationships over acquisition, personal growth over greed.

         Back in the library I notice that the battery life of my heroically struggling little netbook is coming to a close as the sun is setting once more over Chang An. I have to admit that it has been a pleasant couple of hours spent in these quiet environs. It felt slightly strange to have to produce a passport in order to get an internet connection in a library, but I guess that is not atypical of China. The staff at least were more than helpful and very polite too, displaying a much appreciated level of patience with my hopelessly inadequate attempts to communicate in Mandarin.

         This has generally been my feeling of China and the Chinese. The people are friendly, almost overwhelmingly so at times, and strangely innocent to Western eyes. There is a pleasant and trusting naivete to many of them which is almost touching on occasion. There are, of course, also times when the sheer rudeness of a Chinese motorist staggers belief but the 'behind the wheel' effect has been noted in many a culture (though I have experienced none worse than here, it has to be admitted). 

         The system... that is another matter. When it comes down to it politicians are politicians – the promise of power tends to draw those people who yearn to wield that power over others. As the old cliché has it, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. In this way, China and Chinese politicians are little different from tens of thousands of other politicians around this globe of ours. Some things never change...

PS. Just after I finished this article I came across a piece on the BBC website (which took much patience to access...). It seems that advertisers in the UK have chosen to partake in the particularly unpleasant American custom of 'Black Friday'. This had patently foreseeable results – greed, violence and a very similar unedifying spectacle as people fought over such things as coffee makers with the promise of £20 off the usual price. These particular items are classic 'stuff' – the sort of thing that people buy, use a couple of times, then consign to the garage to gather dust until it is deemed useless enough for the charity shop or the boot sale. Not really worth coming to blows over....

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-30241459