It was another hot, humid morning in a customer asked for something other than
Beijing. Outside, the sun was hidden somewhere
behind a grey shroud of smog that engulfed the
summer sky. I was lying on an unmade bed in a
small flat in the student district to the north-west
of the city, listening to the whirr of the air-
conditioning and reading a few pages from a red
book on the frontispiece of which were printed a
series of Chinese hieroglyphs followed in English
by the words ‘Quotations from Chairman Mao
Tse-Tung’.
The flat belonged to a girl called Coco, a
waitress who worked at a popular expat sports
bar in the commercial district. She hailed
originally from the Guangxi province in south
China, but she had moved to the capital to study
at Beijing Normal University. Her affluent family
had expected her to come to the city to earn her
degree, but her real dream – so she told me – was
to become a famous actress.
As she sat on a stool by a table on one
side of her small bedroom, studying her own
reflection in the mirror as she brushed her long,
shining, sable hair, I read a few passages from the
Little Red Book aloud with a half-mocking, almost
scornful laugh.
I wasn’t sure how much of what I said she
could understand. Though she worked at a bar
frequented by Westerners, her English – though
better than that of the typical Beijinger – was
poor compared to the rest of the staff. Whenever
Tsingtao draught beer, she would bring one of the
other waitresses to take the order instead. She
was a nonchalant girl: whilst the others were
quick and attentive, always rushing to bring the
patrons their food and their drink, and to take
their money, she was usually drifting around the
room, standing by the window and gazing silently
out at the Beijing night.
I promised her that I’d take her to The
Village at Sanlitun that morning, a shopping
paradise in the heart of the city where tourists
and wealthy locals spend hours marvelling at the
gadgets in the Apple Store, buying new summer
clothes at the Ben Sherman and Lacoste shops,
before settling down for a coffee at Starbucks.
The huge complex was begun in time for last
year’s Olympic Games, but it is still growing, its
north side due to be opened later this year.
I kept on asking her how it could be that
the Chinese seem to be so blasé about their
history and about their politics that souvenirs of a
cruel dictator are on sale beside all the rest of the
tourist tat. But every question I asked, she rolled
her eyes, contorted her lips and shrugged her
shoulders.
“China is a difficult place to understand,”
she murmured, hovering over each word as she
struggled to find the right one. “But politics is
boring,” she cried, petulantly. “Let’s go to
Sanlitun!”
 Nobody would argue that her conclusion has to talk about China the way I’d want the
was wrong. China is a nation admired for its rich, foreign press to talk about the US abroad.” He
five-thousand year cultural heritage; feared for its said that the government doesn’t mind people
extraordinary and unparalleled economic growth discussing politics; it’s only when individuals
as well as its potential to grow yet further; and begin to organise and protest that they intervene.
condemned for its government’s treatment of its
ethnic minorities, its authoritarian rule, and the Not long before I arrived in Beijing, the ethnic
human rights abuses it is responsible for. Bad conflict between the Muslim Uighurs and the Han
journalists sign off their reports on the country Chinese in the far-flung Xinjiang province led the
with tepid, tired conclusions about how the world government to block networking sites such as
is heading to China, how China is the future, how Facebook to quell potential protests. Such
modern China is where it’s at. It is a country about arbitrary censorship stuns and amazes Western
which everything that can be said already has observers, but to those who know the Chinese
been said – so much so that some of the things people it is easy to understand.
which have been said directly contradict some of
Rob introduced me to an Indian girl, Vanessa, who
the other things which have been said about it. It
had been working with a lifestyle magazine in the
is a communist state; but it is a capitalist’s
city for almost a year. She said that in her office, if
paradise. Its government is an oppressive,
her boss asks her to do something she will
undemocratic regime; but its people regard
sometimes suggest another way of doing it; her
themselves as safe, happy and free. For me, that
Chinese colleagues, however, will quietly and
girl – with her family’s expectations set against
deferentially do whatever they are told.
her personal desires and ambitions, and her
Whenever something is censored, she believes,
consumer’s love for expensive handbags
they simply accept it without question. Younger
transcending any interest in the affairs of her
people, however, may be beginning to turn the
country – was an icon of the modern China I
tide: Rob says that he learnt all the ways to get
found when I arrived.
around internet censorship from his Chinese
I spent this summer in the capital Beijing, working students back when he was teaching. Indeed,
at an English-language magazine designed for among Chinese youth, “comrade” nowadays is a
foreigners interested in Chinese history and gay slang word.
culture, in doing business in the country, or in
The twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen
learning how to speak the language. It is
Square massacre came and passed in June this
published by the government-funded Commercial
year. Vanessa was working in Beijing at the time,
Press. Every word is printed only with the State’s
and she told me how at the time she casually
permission; even within the office, every article is
asked one of her Chinese colleagues what she
passed between the senior staff one by one,
thought about its legacy. The other girl replied
studied not only for syntax but for how it presents
defensively, “How do you know about that? Do
and portrays the country.
people in the West know about that?” All she
Reporters Without Borders has described China as would say was simply, “Some people did some
“the world’s largest prison for journalists”. But bad things.”
the Chinese staff at my magazine, raised in a
I met a British student who had been volunteering
society with a different concept of freedom and a
in a Beijing orphanage, and she told me of the
different system of values, would hardly put it
time she was sitting alone in The Village at
quite so baldly. Whilst most of those employed by
Sanlitun before a woman approached her who
the magazine are Chinese, two or three
she thought must have been in her thirties. The
Westerners are on the payroll to ensure it appeals
woman claimed to be a maths student conducting
to its target audience. The Executive Editor is a
a survey: she asked what the girl thought about
man called Rob, a Texan in his mid-twenties who
Chinese people’s habit of spitting in the street,
came to Beijing to teach Chinese after graduating
and then whether she had any brothers or sisters
from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. In
– which led to a discussion on the One Child
my first week he took me for some chicken wings
Policy. The mysterious woman disappeared to
at The Rickshaw, an American joint near Sanlitun,
take a phone call, but within minutes she
where he explained how he saw the magazine: “It
returned and pressed the girl: “So, now that we’re
friends, tell me what you’re really doing here.
Who really sent you? What are your real
intentions in China?”
The people of modern China have what seems to
be a far too easy relationship with their recent
history. They have not reflected on the brutality
of Mao’s Communist dictatorship with the kind of
torturous self-analysis that, for example,
Germany experienced in the decades following
the Second World War. How can its people have
embraced so many Western economic and some
social principles, and yet still sell souvenirs of
Chairman Mao, a mass murderer, in their tourist
tat shops?
The hierarchy at the magazine where I worked is
dense and confused, as one would expect from
any government-controlled operation in the
West: in all they have less than twenty permanent
staff, yet I met at least four people who were
introduced to me as the boss; the two “main
bosses” were both Red Guards during the Cultural
Revolution, going on to become Party bureaucrats
– and of course they had no experience of running
a magazine.
One evening, I shared a Korean cigarette with
Wen, one of these two “main bosses”. When I
fished a crumpled one yuan banknote out of my
pocket, I remarked how bizarre it seemed to me
that it still bore the head of Mao – as all Chinese
banknotes do. “In the West, we think of Mao as a
cruel dictator,” I said. “Well, a lot of people in
China do too,” Wen, the former Red Guard
mobilised by Mao during the Cultural Revolution
which saw the persecution of scores of millions of
people. I suggest coyly that to have Mao’s face on
their banknotes is like the Germans having Hitler
on theirs. “Well,” he murmurs, “politics is a very
difficult thing to talk about.”
There are times when it seems China is run rather
like a caricature of a large, wealthy Victorian
family: plenty of guilty little secrets swept under
the carpet, skeletons shut tightly away in the
closet, whilst always presenting to the world a
face of perfect harmony and stability. Whenever I
asked one of the Westerners in the office why one
of the Chinese said something or did something,
or didn’t say or do something, the most common
answer I’d receive would be that they wouldn’t
want to “lose face”. This fear seems ingrained in
the collective consciousness, to such an extent
that the Chinese government today won’t
renounce the legacy of Mao, instead following the
official line that he was mostly right in his thinking
but that he made some errors later in his rule.
But more tellingly than all this, Wen says:
“Although we still have communism in name,
most people will say we are not a communist
country.” Certainly, China looks like a capitalist
powerhouse. Beijing has grown like a modern
Western metropolis: yellow taxi cabs jockey for
position on long, broad highways; glass-and-steel
skyscrapers stand tall over decrepit slums;
shoppers and businessmen walk the same streets
during daylight where hookers and drug dealers
openly do their trade late at night.
Every week brings another round of news
headlines about China’s inexorable rise towards
economic world domination. But the Chinese
economy is fraught with structural problems of its
own. Corruption within the Chinese business
culture is deeply rooted enough to make Bernie
Madoff look like little more than a smiling parish
priest with his hand in the collection plate. Take a
brief walk around the capital and you will see so
many people wastefully occupied in unnecessary
jobs to keep them from unemployment: two or
more security guards manning ghost-town car
parks throughout the night; dozens of girls
lounging around at supermarkets, in shops and at
restaurants, waiting for someone to serve.
Furthermore the country’s prosperity is merely a
statistic for many. Out alone one day I got talking
to a cute girl from Inner Mongolia called Li. She
had just graduated with a degree in history, but
for now she was living in a hutong – a traditional-
style Beijing neighbourhood where living
conditions are poor and cramped. She took me
back to the family home near Gulou in which she
lived: her room was no more than two metres by
three, with barely enough space for a low, hard
bed.
Yet this severe social and economic inequality is a
hallmark of Western capitalism like so many more
that are visible in Beijing. The principle at the
heart of much Chinese thinking, whether in
economics or in art and architecture, is the
pursuit of “Western styles with Chinese
characteristics”. It is almost beyond
comprehension how such a vast nation has
progressed from a centrally-planned communist
despotism to a capitalist’s dream full of shopping
malls and office blocks, with a massive market of
cheap labour as well as consumers with growing
levels of disposable income.
But analysts who argue that China is set to
become the world’s largest economy are quick to
point out that this does not mean they will be
dominant. When foreign firms are knocking on
your door to exploit your labour force and to
seduce your consumers, the power does not rest
with you in that relationship. You might call China
the engine room of twenty-first century world; I’d
call it the labour camp. A nation is only powerful
when their firms are knocking on foreign doors.
Western brand names are everywhere: in the
supermarkets, in the shopping malls, even on
Beijingers’ t-shirts. But are there any Chinese
brand names entering into the Western
consciousness? Where is the Chinese Starbucks?
Where is the Chinese McDonald’s?
Over a hot dog from a stall in the student district
late one night, I ask Nick, a Canadian at my
magazine who is fluent in Mandarin, exactly these
questions. “They’re working on it,” he says.
The question is: how long will we have to wait? In
recent years, cultural exchange between China
and the rest of the world has been a one-way
process. The Chinese economy has grown
inexorably, increasing its global status as an
attractive prospect for foreign investors eager to
take advantage of its one prime asset – its
population. Chinese-manufactured goods take
pride of place in every room in our houses. But if
we weren’t getting these goods from China, we’d
be getting them made somewhere else. I even
met a British businessman based in Beijing who
works as a consultant for firms interested in doing
business in North Korea of all places. The reality is
that Western businesses will invest their money
wherever they think they can make a quick buck,
and they will flatter any developing country into
thinking that their money matters most – right
until the bubble bursts.
China is still the dominion, the crown jewel of an
economic and cultural imperialism led by the
American hegemon. But as the tectonic plates of
geopolitics shift steadily with every passing day, a
multipolar power balance may well emerge, and
what happens in downtown Shanghai or far-flung
Xinjiang will matter more than ever. Westerners
ought to begin by studying Mandarin, and
learning about where China has come from and
where she is headed. In China’s big cities, it is the
three hundred million baby boomers born in the
eighties and early nineties – young men and
women just like Coco – who will decide the
country’s future, and perhaps the world’s.