High tech and hot pot, p.9
High Tech and Hot Pot, page 9
“Thanks,” says Charley. He takes the original Chinese document and draws three characters beneath it.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Just signing for you, with Si Di Fen. That’s how your name would be written in Chinese.”
Never try to be smarter than a canny local politician. With a satisfied smile, Uncle Yang puts both documents in his plastic folder.
“My uncle is offering to drive us home,” says Charley.
I drink up the last drop of beer and notice for the first time the unusual label. There is a signature and a sentence of incorrect English: “With thanks for acting a good example! Bill Clinton, Former US President, July 1998.” Whatever it is supposed to mean, I have some doubts about the authenticity of the quotation.
Unlike the following quotation, which I can vouch for: “You should pack your backpack. Get your things together and pack them. It’s very important,” says Charley, once we are home again. The next day I have to take an early bus so the advice is well meant. “Otherwise, you will have to do it tomorrow morning, and you will forget something in the rush. Understand? Better to pack everything now.”
We are sitting again beneath the Mao tiles and nibbling nuts. The tube TV screen with a greenish tint is showing a historical war movie, featuring men with pigtails and long beards and plenty of screaming. Charley’s mother forces more snacks and ginger tea on us with a big smile—chi ba and he cha—and just as I realize that I will miss Charley and his family, he suddenly becomes serious. He tells me of his worries about finding a wife—he is thirty-six—and bemoans his decision to return to the countryside. It was what his family wanted, and he obeyed, but he misses the modern world of Yangshuo and his job there.
“What do you think of me?” he asks suddenly. There again comes the Chinese fondness for ratings.
“I admire your work at the school. I think you put a lot of passion into teaching.”
“And what else?”
“You are very friendly and an exceptional host.”
“Thanks. The first thing I think about you is that you are good-looking. And second, you seem knowledgeable.”
“Very nice of you.”
“Will we appear in your book?”
“For sure.”
“Great. My parents will be very happy to hear that.”
ZHANGJIAJIE
Population: 1.5 million
Province: Hunan
VERY FAMOUS SOON
AFTER MANY HOURS on various buses, I reach Zhangjiajie station in Hunan province. I have some time to spare here, so at last I buy a Chinese SIM card and sit in a café to look for potential hosts online. The waitress serves a drink that calls itself cappuccino but consists of instant coffee powder, lots of sugar and lukewarm milk. Maybe I should have gone to the McCafé next door, but I was frightened off by a picture of their bratwurst hamburger.
Zhangjiajie is a so-called fifth-tier city, despite a population of 1.5 million and a famous national park nearby. The fifth tier is the lowest category in a ranking system that classes cities according to economic strength, number of inhabitants and per capita income. There are a number of such lists with four to six tiers. Everyone in China knows these rankings, and anyone wanting to do business, invest in real estate or relocate studies them very carefully.
First-tier cities are usually only the megacities—Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. As development is so dynamic, the finance magazine Yicai Global introduced an extra category of “Top 15 New First-Tier Cities” in 2017 that included Chengdu, Hangzhou and Qingdao, among others. Of the subsequent 30 two-tier cities, many fall into the “never heard of them outside China” category. There are 70 third-tier, 90 fourth-tier and 129 fifth-tier cities.
I sip my fifth-tier coffee and comb through profiles on the Couchsurfing app, a truly laborious task, as it soon becomes apparent that many members haven’t logged in for years and it is highly likely that they are not active anymore. Others, however, have such interesting profiles that I can’t wait to meet them—for instance, the artist Lin in Beijing who tells me on WeChat that the police recently demolished her studio. She invites me to visit her and promises to tell me the rest of her story. Or a thirty-four-year-old man named Sung Kim who runs a restaurant in Dandong from which you can look across the river to North Korea. I’m very happy when he sends me an invitation to stay for two nights.
Then the film crew comes to pick me up.
“Hello, welcome!” shouts Nora, an exuberant bundle of energy, almost five feet tall, with alert dark eyes and a conspicuously high-pitched voice that sounds as if she wants to drown out anyone within a twenty-foot radius. Looking into the camera and speaking into a mic, she launches off: “This is Stephan, our guest from Germany!”
I say hello to my traveling companions for the next few days: couchsurfer Nora, as well as a cameraman and a female reporter. They take me to a car where I get to meet Nora’s husband, an artist with a Beatles hairstyle, and then we head off to a restaurant.
“You are invited, of course—hotels, food, everything,” she says. “You are going to be very famous soon!”
I know that sentence from somewhere. The good old going-to-be-famous-in-China promise. A couple of weeks previously, I discovered Nora’s online profile, where she wrote of a TV series she was producing about traditional villages of the Tujia ethnic minority. On receiving my email, she immediately invited me to join the show. Filming was due to last three days, and we would be accompanied by a team from Hunan TV, a broadcasting station producing a documentary about Nora’s work in the villages. So I would also be appearing on that. Hunan TV is the second-most-popular channel in the country, after CCTV-1, with 210 million viewers per day. At last, my plans for hitting the big time are moving forward, I thought to myself as I accepted the invitation.
A short while later, I was astonished to discover that Nora had posted my WeChat profile photo in her “moments” without asking me first. The image from the Pitu app showing me in traditional wear accidentally resembles clothing of the Tujia people. Beneath it she had written: “With this personal picture our foreign brother expresses his greatest respect of the Tujia peoples! Poor villages will get the attention of the world and become international places of interest! Are they soon to be civilized places for tourists? Witness how we become independent and prosperous! We hope that our live show Getting Rich will shock the world!”
What an ambitious young lady. Before it comes to that, my new showbiz friends take me to a tiny restaurant named Sun Family Shrimps at the Southern Gate. The walls are bare and the cold lighting reminds me of an operating room. The floor is dotted with the leftovers of previous meals, but every table except the one reserved for us is full. The reason why soon becomes clear, as highly motivated waitresses deck the table with oysters in garlic sauce, clams and a huge pot of delicious bright red chili shrimp—haute cuisine served on cheap plastic tablecloths, accompanied by Harbin beer in plastic cups. What might seem incongruous from a narrow-minded Western viewpoint seems perfectly reasonable to the Chinese. What is wrong with a restaurant putting all its effort into the food instead of hanging pretty pictures on the wall and tidying up nonstop? And what if, additionally, the prices are affordable? However, the reverse—that every grubby-looking restaurant serves fantastic food—is also a misconception, as is the idea that the Chinese generally don’t value outward appearances. You need look no further than the gaudy designs on packaging of all kinds of products from wine to cigarettes to cell phones, or the almost religious adoration of some luxury brand names. Our compartmentalized Western way of thinking—the either/or of our perceptions—is constantly challenged in a country like China.
After the feast we drive to the Zhongxin Business Hotel, where the lobby flaunts a polished stone floor, walls overlaid with exotic woods and a signboard with inflated room rates that are three times the actual price so that guests feel like they are getting an incredible bargain.
Beyond the lobby, the facilities have seen better days. I share a twin room with the cameraman, a reserved man in his mid-twenties with horn-rimmed glasses. When he isn’t operating his camera he is usually busy with his cell phone.
The only things in the room that can safely be classified as post-1985 are the calling cards with revealing photos and telephone numbers for sex workers that somebody slipped beneath the door, as well as the items for sale on a plywood shelf: playing cards, Red Bull, canned herbal teas, Wahaha bottled water and Nabs Standard condoms. The room smells of stale cigarette smoke and cat piss.
Via WeChat, Nora asks me to meet her at the escalator because she wants to talk to me about something.
“Our two companions work for the state media,” she says. “That’s why I haven’t mentioned couchsurfing. The government is not too fond of it because it allows travelers to see not only the good things but also the bad. Do you understand?”
“No problem. I won’t mention it either.”
“We will just say that I came across you via your blog.”
“Okay.” I don’t have a blog.
“Tomorrow we are going to the villages. We have already prepared something for you there.”
“Oh, what?”
“It will be more fun if it’s a surprise. Good night!”
LET’S TAKE A little detour to the subject of the media. The Chinese love rankings—but probably not ones from Reporters Without Borders about freedom of the press. In 2018, China was ranked 176 out of 180, which was thirty places behind Russia and twenty places behind Turkey, two other notoriously restrictive countries. Chinese journalists and bloggers who don’t strictly toe the party line are intimidated constantly and can only bypass the omnipresent censors with plenty of courage and subtle allusions.
The state authorities regularly send orders to editors about what they are to report on and how. The independent news website China Digital Times, which operates out of the United States, publishes such stipulations under the Orwellian title Directives From the Ministry of Truth and sheds light on the censors’ obsession with detail. In December 2017, for example, the government demanded the media avoid reports about Christmas, to counteract the “Westernization” of culture that celebrates “kitsch western holidays” and does not fit in with local traditions. This order was probably tilting at windmills; getting rid of Santa Claus for good seems quite unrealistic given the opulent Christmas decorations to be found in the stores and shopping districts in any Chinese megacity.
Other instructions from the Ministry of Truth are considerably less amusing:
Don’t report or comment on the matter of child abuse at RYB Kindergarten in Beijing.3
Delete an article about smog causing 257,000 deaths in thirty-one cities in 2013.4
Don’t report on a nationwide truck drivers’ strike.5
Play down correlations between the stock market and trade conflict with the USA.6
Do not make further use of the slogan “Made in China 2025” [because of the realization that China’s overconfident presence abroad was poorly received].7
Do not hype North Korea’s latest nuclear test.8
During the annual National People’s Congress, do not report on delegates’ personal wealth. Do not report negatively on property markets, foreign exchange, the stock market, smog or traffic congestion.9
Do not hype the story of Ping-Pong player Fan Zhendong’s defeat at the semifinals of the German Open championship.10
And time and again, when there are major accidents or industrial scandals: All media must use Xinhua News Agency copy as a guide.11
With a staff of more than eight thousand and 170 foreign offices, Xinhua is the largest news agency in the world. Unlike Associated Press or Reuters, they report in two directions. A substantial investigative department sniffs out scandals about which initially only the government is informed. Sometimes, a few weeks later, there are reports to the public about how the state leaders are tackling the problem.
Of course, Xinhua never criticizes the government. Maintaining harmony and stability is the primary declared publishing goal; depicting an accurate reflection of reality is secondary. A couple of years ago in Beijing I listened to a lecture by Yan Wenbin, a Xinhua boss. As a grand master of Chinese smokescreen rhetoric, he presented a rational-sounding explanation for withholding facts from the public: “We don’t describe problems in such detail because readers are not able to solve them anyway,” he said.
The other major state “not-describers” of problems are the fifty channels of CCTV, the newspaper group People’s Daily and, most recently, a radio and TV consortium called Voice of China, which is trying to gain a stronger standing internationally.
Most Chinese people get their information from the news-and-gossip cocktail served up online. WeChat is an immensely important source, as is the microblogging site Weibo. Between 2009 and 2012, something outrageous was going on, something that had been unthinkable in all of China’s five-thousand-year history. For three years, an almost undisturbed exchange of information was possible. The censorship authorities were lagging behind and didn’t monitor or control what was being posted on Weibo. Millions of users publicly discussed food scandals, environmental pollution and the government’s mistakes. All of a sudden there was a civilian society that talked about problems openly, and for the first time, readers were aware of the true magnitude of some of these scandals.
Years of absorbing propaganda led to considerable dissatisfaction in the country, and the Communist Party came in for some hefty criticism. When in 2011 two bullet trains collided near Wenzhou, people first heard of the catastrophe on Weibo. Two years later Xi Jinping, who had at that time only been in power for one month, banned any online posts that “threatened” the reputation or interests of the party or national security. On top of this, the Weibo profiles of known critics of the regime were deactivated. The short period of open debate that nobody had thought was possible was over. The nightmare of reality reverted to a state of blissful ignorance.
Xi Jinping has proven to be a hard-liner when it comes to the control of information. The list of forbidden terms in social and traditional media becomes ever longer.
During my travels, the news and entertainment app Toutiao attracted the attention of the authorities. With 120 million users a day, it was a huge success that offered not only popular videos and cartoons but also the option of sorting the kind of news the user was interested in. Theoretically, you could choose to read only about sports or celebrity gossip, or watch only videos of scantily clad ladies—and, for instance, block anything to do with the Communist Party. The state radio and TV regulators criticized the “vulgar content” and shuttered the affiliated jokes app Neihan Duanzi. The public letter of apology from the Toutiao CEO, Zhang Yiming, sounded as if he had written it with someone holding a gun to his head. He confessed to violating the core socialist values, disregarding Xi Jinping’s guidelines and only making halfhearted attempts to shift opinion in a positive direction. But all these mistakes would be corrected in the future, he promised.
The government’s strategy of keeping unpleasant facts and opinions out of the public eye has worked surprisingly well, considering there are 1.4 billion people here and a global internet where you can normally find information about every imaginable topic in seconds. But the Great Firewall blocks access to all major foreign news agencies, as well as Google, Facebook and Twitter, and access to VPN servers is made more and more difficult.
And apparently the Chinese people don’t want to know everything. This was demonstrated by an experiment by researchers from Stanford and Peking Universities in which 1,800 students were given the chance of installing free VPN access for eighteen months. The scientists were interested in discovering how many would seize the opportunity to access foreign information and news sources: sites in Taiwan or Hong Kong, for instance, or the Chinese editions of the New York Times or Financial Times. They wondered whether it would be almost all of them? Half? A quarter? Their guesses weren’t even close—the answer was a paltry 5 percent. Brainwashing is working so well in China that it seems the vast majority of people don’t expect to find anything interesting outside the country.
Censorship Trivia
1Images of Winnie-the-Pooh were banned on the Chinese internet after memes comparing Xi Jinping to Pooh became popular.
2Hexie means “harmony,” and “to harmonize” is a euphemism for “to censor.” Because hexie can also mean “freshwater crab,” regime critics use pictures of the animal when writing critically about censorship.
3When the term “MeToo” was banned on Weibo, people started using “mi tu” (rice bunny) instead.
4Many Weibo posts about Taylor Swift’s album 1989 actually refer to a massacre—the year and the singer’s initials allude to the Tiananmen Square protests.
5The Chinese word for “dictator” sounds like the word for “poisonous vegetable” (both are ducai), so the character for the latter is often used to describe the former.
The students in the research study were then given a quiz with money as a reward. To get the correct answers, it was necessary to visit Western news sites, and suddenly things looked different. Now, ten times the number—so 50 percent—of students who had activated their VPN accounts were interested in the information on offer, and they spent a longer time on the sites. In the questionnaire afterwards, they admitted to being more critical of the Chinese government than before and less optimistic about the future of their country. And, at last, they were interested in continuing to read foreign news sources via VPN. But—and this is a big but—they had to be directed there. Open internet alone was not enough, for most of them, to make them want to discover information that had been withheld in their country. The study showed that censorship can work even if there are loopholes, the kind of censorship that is chabuduo, which means “good enough but not perfect.” China was a chabuduo country for a long time, but President Xi is imagining a shift away from this. He wants total control of information and opinions.
