Season in Red: My Great Leap Forward into the New China

A Season in Red

A Season in Red

My great leap forward into the new China

KIRSTY NEEDHAM

Author’s note Some names have been changed and character details altered to protect privacy. Minor shifts in chronology have also been made to assist narrative flow.

First published in 2006

Copyright © Kirsty Needham 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Needham, Kirsty.

A season in red: my great leap forward in the new China.

ISBN 978 1 74114 755 1.

ISBN 1 74114 755 7.

1. Needham, Kirsty, 1971– . 2. Travelers—China—

Biography. 3. China—Description and travel. I. Title.

915.1

Internal design by Lisa White

Set in 10.5/15 pt Sabon by Bookhouse, Sydney

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Peter Svehla

Contents

Prologue: Laowai, 2004

1 Red Fever

2 Yellow Dust

3 China Daily

4 Certified Expert Foreigners

5 Dragon Gorge

6 SARS and Propaganda

7 A Captive Audience

8 Sky

9 The Campaign Against Youth Spiritual Pollution

10 Street Scenes

11 When Red Means Go

12 Hot in the City

13 Gaining a Name, Losing Face

14 Checking Out

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Laowai, 2004

Sanlitun Lu, Beijing. Partying people spilled out of the bars in that other Party’s republic, and into the dark dirty alleys. It was more like a maze than a thoroughfare. I took midnight bearings from the giant beer mug that glowed on the corner of Workers’ Stadium Road and headed south to where the shadows hid a gauntlet of blue jackets. ‘DVD?’ demanded a crimson-cheeked entrepreneur with a bulging sack at her feet. ‘Yangrou chuan?’ implored the next wizened face, his scraps of spicy, fatty mutton roasting on coals. I slipped into the black, around rubble-strewn corners, as old neighbours disappeared into old brick apartment blocks. Metal rockers in vintage sidecar motorcycles rumbled by.

Ahead was the roar of a dusty, loud mixing pot. Neon shacks that overflowed as young Chinese and foreigners converged on the street to unwind. The crowd gasped for air on hot summer nights like this, and sucked up warm Yanjing beer as a substitute. ‘Ganbei!’ cried a friend with a bottle in his hand. ‘DVD?’ called the shadows. I was mesmerised by Sanlitun’s light and dark. The street was sordid, haphazard and uncomfortable, everything the gleaming but soulless towers overrunning Beijing were not. And like every other dirty, unplanned, well-loved nook in the city, it was doomed.

By 2.30 a.m. I was in Poachers, where tabletop dancing and swinging off the stair rails were obligatory at this kind of hour. A hundred arms thrust into the air with the techno beat, sweaty bodies twitched as though an electric current, not music, was coursing through their veins.

But the tall Chinese boy standing next to me wasn’t dancing. He had a beer in his hand and he had a question. ‘Are you a spy?’ he asked.

Two goateed Chinese musicians played air guitar. I watched as students, local and foreign, hailed the DJ. This was cool Beijing, cosmopolitan Beijing. And still that question. I felt disbelief.

‘Why does everyone in China think foreign journalists are spies?!’

The boy laughed, but he didn’t answer. Which was a pity, because by this point I really wanted to know.

When the lights came on, we headed into the night for stomach-soothing bowls of noodles, doujiang and hundred-year-old eggs. ‘You’ve got a car?’ someone asked incredulously as we piled into my accuser’s white sedan.

‘This is nothing. When I studied in London, I drove a BMW,’ he bragged.

The noodle shop was packed with weary groups of friends washing in at 3.30 a.m. When I stepped out the door half an hour later I was shocked to see the pre-dawn light.

I made it home as the sun rose, a glowing orange ball greeted by a jack-hammer chorus. Across the city workers climbed scaffolding like soldiering ants, clocking on to the next shift—no time to rest—to build the new China.

A night on the town under the red flag. By day I worked at polishing Chinese national pride. But this journey starts in a different city. Because like so many new Beijing stories, there is no beginning without a wrecking ball.

1. Red Fever

The red marble foyer of the Palace Hotel was a haven in a city under siege from construction sites that devoured ancient stone neighbourhoods whole and spat out grey dust.

Concrete pipes and strewn red, blue and white striped plastic had made an obstacle course of downtown Beijing. Smog obscured the skyline. But from my hermetically sealed room high in the Palace, I could watch the HBO Movie Channel via satellite or peer down into the one remaining peak-roofed courtyard in the block. It was a window onto another world.

Elderly inhabitants ambled in and out of their own crumbling four-walled sanctuary, pushing bicycles, pausing to chat or play chess on small stools, unperturbed as the cranes and wrecking balls menaced ‘progress’ overhead. The old men wore blue caps pulled down over their heads and the same faded blue jackets. I wondered who they were.

It was 1997 and Beijing was ‘under reconstruction’ as the country straddled a Mao-suited past and the newer pursuit of ‘growing rich gloriously’. Bicycles surged along roads marked incomprehensibly in Chinese characters. Bored white-coated saleswomen at the Beijing Department Store guarded the contents of dusty glass cabinets against potential customers, especially foreign ones. At night hawker carts lit up the nearby snack street with the exotic glow of drum fires under woks and the rising steam of dumpling baskets.

Inside the Forbidden City, country women in cotton padded jackets stared at my pointy nose and brown hair that frizzed in the damp autumn air. I took tourist snapshots of imposing red halls and dragon steps. They took photos of me.

I was twenty-five and had been dropped here from outer space, unequipped to step beyond the hotel foyer without the reassurance of a guide or at least a hotel card for taxi drivers to read and return the mute, deaf, language-less laowai—outsider—to sender.

I can trace this as the starting point of China fever. My being there was quite accidental. I had been sent to report on an international trade fair in Beijing, as multinational companies fell over themselves in the race through the door to the elusive Middle Kingdom.

There were military brass bands performing under red banners, and evening banquets with government officials in the Great Hall of the People. But despite appearances, there were no foreign journalists—only ‘tour groups’. White-faced phone-company executives passed through a concrete-bunker air terminal smuggling concept technology in their personal luggage. The import licences needed to display products at the fair had been officially turned down by one arm of the sprawling communist bureaucracy, as another arm had welcomed the foreign investment and issued the invitation to come. The only answer the exasperated organisers could find was, ‘This is China.’

On the way out of the country everyone, fake tourists and executive smugglers, tried their best to ignore the box placed strategically on the customs hall counter and marked ‘accusations here’.

China’s contradictions got under my skin. A nation that was personally warm yet officially forbidding. Eager to move forward, yet suspicious of the world outside its gates. And whose 1.3 billion people were embarking on one of the biggest societal transformations in history. Again. Where would it end?

Back in Sydney, I enrolled in language classes and read Wild Swans. But it wasn’t enough. How is it that the things you know the least about—that on a purely rational assessment you should have the least connection to—can take root in the imagination, and before long grow into minor obsession?

China was my grandmother’s embroidered silk shirts and porcelain, the mysterious orient, an old Peking that fell to Europe’s gunboat diplomacy in a time of immoral opium wars. China was the land of little red books and a long march by women with identical long plaits, all hidden behind a firmly shut door. China was sipping pots of green tea in a kitchen in Trades Hall on Sydney’s Goulburn Street with my laoshi—teacher—after language class, or queuing to see Gong Li films drenched with sumptuous red colour and aching music at Asian cinema festivals. But I really didn’t know what China was, or had been; I could only imagine what it was becoming.

What did I know about communism? I confess only to two red buttons pinned defiantly to my school bag—Lenin and Marx. We’d met in an outer-suburban public library, where neglected shelves stacked with unfashionable paperbacks had revealed an outdated, 1970s bent in the politics aisle. Charismatic Russian figures in cold landscapes plotted in a convoluted language of dialectic theory and struggle that I barely understood. To me, Commie memorabilia was just a pop-culture commodity—another slogan on a T-shirt, badges to buy that shouted out ‘teen rebellion’.

In 2002, armed with Chinese conversation and a backpack this time, I spent three months travelling a slow, haphazard road across the mainland with my boyfriend. I slept on straw beds in farmhouses, Ming villages rejuvenated by UNESCO funding, a rust-bucket boat plying the Three Gorges tourist trade before a dam deadline. I could see that China was changing fast.

The West was lapping up heart-breaking tales of lives blown apart by the Cultural Revolution, as ‘overseas Chinese’, many of whose families had fled to America, Britain and Hong Kong after the Communist victory in 1949, committed to paper incredible personal stories from the past. But it seemed to me that for the most part those who stayed behind on the mainland were working hard to forget the bad times and were instead looking forward. Life now was as good as it had been in many people’s living memory.

Later, as I sifted through photographs and tried to sort a traveller’s snap impressions into neat plastic album sleeves, I remembered three people, three different faces of China.

Mr Wang had taken us in from a cold and black night thousands of metres above the Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan province, where white water surged through sheer cliffs. High above the golden clumps of giant bamboo that somehow clung to its sides, past the goat herders and the dreaded twenty-four bends in the rocky path, the light from a farmhouse window shone into a darkness that had fallen quickly, catching us out hours away from the guesthouses at the end of the track. Mr Wang appeared at the door and beckoned for us to come in and sit at his kitchen fire.

Strings of maize hung drying in the internal courtyard of the home; piles of pumpkins were stacked against the walls. A belled donkey, chickens and bounding puppy wandered the steep terrace outside. We weren’t the only travellers to stop in that night and were soon joined by three young Israeli backpackers and a group of Beijingers in high spirits. Mr Wang fed us hot plates of vegetable noodles and showed us to sleeping quarters in a large attic room that had been converted for just this purpose. He had established a better living for his family by providing shelter and charm to passing travellers.

Overnight it snowed, and I woke to see gorge cliffs smattered with icing sugar. But the morning brought rain and swelling waterfalls that blocked the onward path. We were holed up, so passed the time chatting to Mr Wang about his life. It was physically hard. The mountain trail I had struggled up the previous day was the family’s only access route. A donkey carried supplies in tins, cans and bottles twice a week, but it was Wang’s wife who portered the fresh vegetables and fruit on her back, careful not to bruise them. The nearest school, although their son was too young to go yet, was just as far. There was no TV or telephone. Rural poverty was a world away from the comfortable living in China’s major cities. Still, the family were content. And the entrepreneurial Mr Wang was making his own opportunities.

By early afternoon the weather had cleared. We left the farmhouse, where a battered Chinese flag flapped proudly in the wind. The path down involved detouring around obstinate donkeys laden with building materials as farmers from the nearby villages carried out running repairs to simple aqueducts that carried water between houses. But it was the construction workers running straight towards me in hard hats that was alarming. ‘Pengyou! Kuai le!— Friend! Hurry!’ they screamed, before huddling into the side of the cliff in the defensive crash position. I followed their example without knowing why. The mountain soon shook with a loud boom. It was a dynamite blast. Everyone kept low and waited, hoping the deafening rumble didn’t trigger a rock slide. My first thought was that they were building a road, but it turned out to be a much grander engineering feat. They were preparing to dam the gorge. It would spell an end to Mr Wang’s simple paradise. So China’s progress had casualties.

Shi Jian was a quietly spoken 25-year-old accountant from Shanghai with a penchant for Kylie Minogue songs and rubber wrist bracelets. He was my room-mate on a voyage down the Yangtze River in an old boat that bore no resemblance to the luxury tourist liner advertised in the brochure. Villagers were stowed in fourth class, camping with doonas on the filthy floor next to the cargo hold and choking on diesel fumes. We were travelling second class, sharing a dormitory with a chain-smoking old river trader dressed in a Mao suit, with a little red book stuck in his top pocket and a load of umbrellas under his bed.

In the unrefrigerated ship’s kitchen, deep in the bowels of the boat, pig carcasses were haphazardly thrown on the floor and hacked to pieces. ‘Don’t even think about eating there,’ warned Shi Jian, who insisted on taking control of our menu himself.

At each river landing he would skilfully procure local delicacies from the hawkers who lined the shore. Steamed baozi to eat for breakfast with salty eggs, hot bowls of stir-fried chilli potatoes for lunch, and delicious poached wild catfish. Preparing food in China is an art, and so is knowing how to eat it.

As the boat chugged through swirling brown water and entered the first of the Three Gorges, we stood aft—behind the toilets, because there was no viewing deck—and Shi Jian translated the captain’s continuous commentary on curious rock shapes. By the time we entered the second gorge it was nightfall, and the cliffs loomed as huge shadows through the cabin windows.

The fourth day of our voyage was cancelled without explanation and passengers unloaded early at a different destination. The four-day boat trip was Shi Jian’s annual holiday. He had first needed to get a permit from his local police station to vacation outside Shanghai. His girlfriend wasn’t able to make it, so he travelled alone. Unaccustomed to tourism, he hadn’t brought a camera with him, or even a change of clothes. He was nonplussed about the holiday hiccups. It was a tour to remember and tell his work-mates about back at the office. We posed for a large group photograph at a ghost temple, and Shi Jian said he’d pin the polaroid on his apartment wall.

We met again in Shanghai, where the price of beer in establishments fashionable among foreign expats was so high that Shi Jian could only afford one round. At a bar a few metres from the original meeting place of the Chinese Communist Party, he reflected that having a lifestyle was becoming more and more expensive. He doubted he could earn enough money to please his girlfriend, one of a new generation of young urban women whose expectations were skyrocketing. He didn’t like his chances of ever getting married, despite his rented apartment and job in the flashy Pudong district which towered over old Shanghai like some science fiction promise of a brighter future.

In Lhasa, a harsh but dreamlike place nestled in a cradle of snowy mountains on the roof of the earth, a child stepped out from the pilgrim crowd that moved slowly and constantly in a circle around the Jokhang Temple that sits at the Tibetan capital’s heart. She wore her thick black hair long and wildly unplaited, but bejewelled with red yarn and turquoise beads. She took my hand and addressed me directly in a clear voice.

Holding my eye she began reciting in English the Tibetan history of her once independent land and the importance of the Buddhist temple, as the story had been passed down through her family. It was the version she was not taught at school, where the Chinese view of the world was compulsory. I asked her if she had learnt English in the classroom. She replied that she had not.

Her grandfather, hovering protectively behind her, had taught her the language, and the history. He was a former monk, and like many had been forced out of the monasteries in 1959 following the Chinese occupation. They were now attempting a populate-or-perish form of cultural resistance, having as many children as they possibly could. The mainland government had resettled huge numbers of Han Chinese in Lhasa. Tibetans were fighting back by producing large families of up to eight or so children to keep their culture alive. Children that could make it to India left to train as monks with the Dalai Lama, whose image was forbidden here. Some were starting to come back.

The thick smell of rancid yak butter wafted with incense through the air. The young girl and her grandfather disappeared back into the Barkhor circuit throng. Towering, broad-shouldered Tibetan men and women in leather boots, sheepskin wrap coats and broad-rimmed felt cowboy hats who had made the journey in from the harsh farming lands; crimson-robed monks and nuns with shaved heads; women in striped woollen aprons spinning silver prayer wheels and strings of beads in their hands. Walking together, around and around. The old man and his granddaughter had avoided unwanted attention from the Chinese police, and had passed on their message.

Visiting the Potala Palace I was informed by my guide, who was from a family of eight himself, that the room of 3000 gold and silver buddhas held the key to China’s claim on his country.

‘Travel outside Lhasa and you will see the purple, silver and blue hues of the mineral-rich cliffs. China wants our gold,’ he whispered.

Tibet remained a land inseparable from its religion. Prayer flags littered the country, wrapped around trees and across mountains, and hung in a riot of colour on tall poles hoisted above houses. Public buses would not cross the few bridges that braved the plateau’s rivers without commuters first winding down windows to throw out paper votives.

It was also visibly a land under occupation. Chinese troops practised manoeuvres with guns along the riverbend. The green uniforms stood out starkly in the moonscape. As the new China extended a welcoming smile to the world, it still had an older, hidden face.

I returned home to Australia but red fever stirred in my mind. I needed to know more. I needed to know what happened next. As the language lessons continued it seemed that Beijing, the capital city of rolling rrr’s that dripped off the tongue in the perfect Beijinghua accent, would hold the answers. In 2004 I got my chance.

On the same day that the rice-paper acceptance notice arrived in my mail box from Beijing Language and Culture University, telling me when to start classes in the capital, I received a phone call out of the blue. A year earlier I had applied for an exchange program that would place an Australian journalist inside the Chinese media for three months. The program had been derailed by the outbreak of SARS and I’d forgotten all about it. It was now back on.

‘Congratulations,’ said an unfamiliar voice down the