What cost your DVD player?

You might think it was cheap, “Made in China” on the back, bound to be cheap and good value for money. Considering there is no real alternative, you had to buy it anyway, didn’t you?

At what cost, though?

Would the freedom of over one billion people be cheap enough?

Would the wholesale torture and killing of millions of be more than enough?

Would the enslavement of 100’s of millions by a comparative handful of the rich and powerful be enough?

Think China, because that’s how you got your cheap DVD player, and your cheap TV, and your cheap shoes, and your cheap clothing, and your cheap everything else that makes your “cost of living” so cheap and affordable.

Think again! Think China where all those “cheap” things come from. Are they cheap for the poor people who are slave-driven to produce them?

Think China!!

What is the Chinese totalitarian dictatorship “government” doing to the world? “Buying it up” is the answer. Using the money you gave them to keep their people enslaved producing all those cheap goods you love to buy at a whim, “Yeah, it’s so cheap, and look at the quality”.

How did they do it? They’ve managed to do what Hitler and Stalin did, but in much larger numbers.   Ridding themselves of all dissent by murdering people who oppose them. While we turned a blind eye – “It’s their business isn’t it. What they do in their country’s their business, not ours". Or so they, the dictatorship keep telling us.  Hundreds of millions, not the 7 or 8 million that Hitler disposed of .Or the 20 million that Stalin exterminated. NO, hundreds of millions have been disposed of for being Christians, Falung Gong, democrats, opponents of the regime, whistleblowers who hate the corruption they live under, or just hating a legal system that allows no defence against an all powerful dictatorship.

And now, what are they doing? Liu Xiabo has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Most people consider this to be the greatest honour a person could ever be given whilst still alive and on this Earth, but not the Chinese dictatorship.  Not only is the laureate in prison for advocating greater democracy in China, but the dictatorship have his whole family under “house arrest” and therefore unable to leave China to accept the prize on his behalf. So, an empty chair will symbolize Liu Xiabo’s imprisonment and hopefully the world will awaken to the plight of the Chinese people who struggle from day to day under the political might of their “compassionate” totalitarian dictatorship.

So, please think again, and “THINK CHINA”.

Now in Greece.....

For anyone reading this - my wife and I have moved to live in Kerkyra, Greece. BUT, I hope to be making more posts here soon about life in China, including Hong Kong.

This is what this blog is really about

When my wife and I were living in China and subsequently Hong Kong I intentionally self-censored myself, but here is the beginning of an essay I am writing about the real China-

China – what exactly is it and how does it work?

It takes time to understand the workings of today’s China, years in fact. I lived in Mainland China for seven years, the first in Beijing during the Sars crisis, which was grossly under-reported because of the lies spewed out by the Chinese “Government” concerning the fatalities. My wife and I were teaching at the time and one of our jobs was at a business English school that had been closed during the worst of the epidemic. When it re-opened we were reunited with our students who began to tell what was on the streets concerning Sars and not what the government edicts told. In addition to the thousands, not a few hundred, who died was the huge suicide rate. This was a revelation to us as nothing had been said of this phenomenon. What seemed to be very common was the sort of incident when one member of a family had infected the rest who had all succumbed, the poor person felt responsible and killed him/herself. These suicides were in the thousands, a statistic that was unpublished. It was about then that it really began to sink in what this “government” was all about – several years later, much research and reading, and we had really got a handle on what was happening and how this “government” worked.

Let’s go back to the Long March when Mao Zedong retreated to reform his troops before defeating the Nationalists in the Kuomintang. During the Long March over 8,000 miles, huge numbers of the Communist soldiers died from starvation and exhaustion. The women who gave birth during the march were forced to leave their babies at the trackside to die. Of the 90,000-100,000 people who began the Long March from the Soviet Chinese Republic, only around 7,000-8,000 made it to Shaanxi, but during that time the Chinese Communists won the support of the peasant population. Now, what is unpublished about Mao’s part in this march is that he actually didn’t march alongside his troops – he was carried in a litter for most of the way, eating well and having his concubines alongside. He didn’t exactly slum it! The main leaders of the march were later to become the core of the Communist “government” and subsequently the clique of families who now control the country. It is effectively a nepotistic hierarchy that splits the county’s wealth amongst itself – all done within the semblance of a communist regime. There is no communism or socialism evident in the way the governing classes behave - it is all for themselves. Now, when one of their group steps out of line, the heaviest of penalties are imposed. These can take the form of imprisonment and re-education, losing their citizens rights (effectively throwing the entire family on the street with no right to a job or housing/support of any kind) to total exile for the offender and his family or the imposition of the death penalty. The whole family will be disbarred from party membership for at least 3 generations as in also done in North Korea. During the Cultural Revolution, the “powers that be” examined everybody’s family history for three generations, expunging all those who didn’t fit the bill, expunging meaning torturing, killing or forcing suicide. It’s all still happening today! So this is the emerging super-power – pity help anyone who comes under its control.

Let’s jump to today and have a look at the way people in China behave towards Gweilos’s or “Foreign Devils” as outsiders are known. It has always been a trait in Chinese relations with people from outside the Middle Kingdom, or Centre of Civilisation, that they should be basically scorned and disabused at will. It comes from the fact the Emperors of old were deemed to be godlike figures on Earth and that, basically, they could do as they wished. Also, getting “one over” on your adversary was considered the only way to do business, either commercial or diplomatic. That attitude pervades China’s relations, both business and diplomatic, today too. Take for example the selling of China’s “new market” to western businesses needing new markets to sell to. Here were 1.3 billion customers waiting for your products, come and produce and market your goods here. In reality the market is at most 100 to 200 million of the newly created Chinese middle class. The others are either peasant farmers who exist on US$100 a month, if they are lucky – that is a family, not an individual, or workers in factories who live and work often in slave-like conditions. Most of the new middle classes have been indoctrinated by nationalistic propaganda to only buy or use Chinese products that are generally copies of western goods. Chinese reverse engineering is an art form so being able to recreate quite complex products is not difficult. The problem arises with the quality of the component parts. When metals that just look the part replace specific alloys, the device will work for as long as it takes the buyer to wear out the parts. Not exactly quality control, even in a copy, is it?

Cheating is commonplace, especially in universities where students buy others’ skills to sit their exams for them, even to the point, in my own experience, of a student trying to sit an oral language test with someone who wasn’t their own teacher!! Takes nerve to do that! Now, it also extends to business, especially when it involves foreigners. The Chinese believe strongly that in the past foreigners walked all over them and enjoyed doing it. So, they equally believe that it’s perfectly OK to do the same even though they are doing it all under the auspices of the WTO. If anything goes against them, they simply retreat behind the borders of China where their “legal” system blocks all attempts by foreign businesses to get any form of retribution. Common scams ar to get foreign investment in what seems to be a flourishing business. Factories are displayed and ideal working conditions are there for all to see. Even the workers dormitories, YES, they live communally in dormitories. Are air-conditioned and all the workers are happy. Oh wonders!! In reality the factory that will be doing the production is run down decrepit and the workers live in slave-labour conditions working 12 hours a day, seven days a week every day not being compensated for extra work and being locked in at night. Much of the work done in very “cheap labour” factories is in fact performed by people who have been dragged off the street and forced into 3 years re-education by labour by the police force who are being bribed by the local factory owners. It is perfectly legal for someone to “disappear” into the forced labour camps without trial or any kind of resistance. That’s one of the foundations of the Chinese Legal system.

This is what we in the west are dealing with, mostly with no knowledge of what is actually happening in China.

To re-iterate – I have the greatest respect for the desperate state-abused Chinese people who work diligently just to stay alive with little or no hope of salvation. Only the western powers-that-be can do anything for them by forcing a change in the government of China.

To be continued…

Hong Kong Children's Symphony Orchestra

Yesterday we had a very pleasant surprise. We went to yet another classical concert – this time a Wagner Prelude followed by Symphony No 1 by Prokopief and Piano Concerto No 2 by  Saint-Saens. The surprising thing was that the only adult playing was the Piano Soloist, Angela Cheng from Canada – all the other performers were the Hong Kong Children’s Symphony Orchestra, and all aged between 7 and 18 years old. Mind you, some of them even looked younger than 7 years old. We could hardly see their heads above their music stands! To all extents, if you closed your eyes and just listened, it was as if the orchestra was a full adult one. They were remarkable. Dr Yip Wai-hong founded the orchestra in 1996 on the principle that “When high quality music education is given to foster young buds, they shall sprout and become an influential force of Hong Kong culture in the future.”  He couldn’t have been more accurate!

And here's a very poorly taken photo - on my mobile phone and in a rush as they don't normally allow photos in the Concert Hall.

Lots to say

It's been a busy month with the Hong Kong Arts Festival in full swing. It's now over and ended with a rather disappointing performance of "The Tempest" by the Old Vic Company from London. Prior to that in the same theatre I had seen Steven Berkoff in "On The Waterfront" and was delighted by the magnificent performance. The actors in Tempest were very guilty of mumbling their lines and talking to the back of the stage and, unless you had read the play that day, most of the audience couldn't possibly have known what was going on. Other than that, the rest of the festival was memorable for the quality and variety of the performances. So there, that's my bit of theatre critic over!


Now, over the last few months there has been a growing drought over parts of South China caused apparently by a one-in-a-hundred year drought and the damming of the Mekong River in several places by the Chinese Authorities. Obviously they deny all responsibility, but it's strange that when they release some water, the river rises by over one metre. All being blamed also on the El Niño effect, another good scapegoat.
So, as a result of all this, the peasant farmers are losing their livelihoods and all their animal stock. BUT, the authorities are sending in the troops to drill 2,000 wells into the water table, no doubt worsening things when all they need to do is release the water from their hydro-electric dams.


Today we went for a walk along the bay in front of our home and wandered past a lovely market garden which we were unaware existed. Good veggies, all organic and freshly plucked before our eyes. Hong Kong continues to surprise at every turn. 


On the way back we went into another garden centre and Barbara got some more beautiful pot plants, all delivered one hour later, free of charge!


It looks like the Rio Tinto court case has followed the norms cor China - no proper defense against the charges and no access to defence lawyers during the six months detention prior to the trial. Sentence of between 7 and 14 years in jail were passed down for charges of accepting bribes amongst other more obviously politically motivated charges. Funnily enough, no one has been charged with providing the bribes - strange how one-sided that argument must seem. Looks like a bit of a plant and some coercion to confess are involved here! Nothing unusual in China, I'm afraid to say. 

Time for an update.....
We're now well and truly into the 38th Hong Kong Arts Festival and it's turning out to be quite a treat. Ever since we started visiting HK from the Mainland - almost 7 years ago, I have wanted to have the time to see as many shows as I could in the month of the festival. Well, so far we've seen The HK Philharmonic Orchestra, the HK Sinfonietta Orchestra and Ning Feng, The Cafe de Los Maestros - (amazing 10 minute standing ovation), The David Murray Jazz Quartet (encores demanded and given) and tomorrow we go to see Valdimir Ashkenazy and his sons perform in a rare family performance - can't wait!! It's not all music - on Monday we get to see "On the Waterfront" directed and starring Steven Berkoff. It's all culture and wonderful performances!


More to come...

A quick Trip

Now how's this for a bit of spontaneity! Yesterday, Saturday,  I was coming downstairs to make a cup of tea at exactly 4:00 p.m. Barbara looked up from the "What's On" section of Hong Kong's version of Timeout and said "There's a concert I'd love to see tonight". My reply was "If you really want to see it, then, let's go. Who's playing and what?" It seemed an innocent enough reply. "Well, the concert is by Fou Ts'ong and it's in Macao at 8:00 p.m. - tonight" Now, Fou Ts'ong is a remarkable man who escaped China in 1960 to make his home in London. He just happens to be 75 years old and one of the most gifted pianists in the world. The chance to see this "giant" of classical piano playing was too much to miss. It was quickly back upstairs, quick wash, change and in 45 minutes we were walking the short distance to the ferry pier to Hong Kong Island. About 400 yards from our point of arrival in HK, the ferry departs to Macao, just across the Pearl River. We managed to get the 6:00 ferry to Macao - now this means actually going through immigration and customs as we were actually going to another country for the evening. Of course, we would do the same again in Macao. When we got to Macao we quickly hired a taxi tout who took us to the theatre - it was all a bit too rushed to get a normal taxi as we hadn't the faintest idea where the taxi rank was and didn't have the time to find out.

After we had settled in our last-minute seats overlooking the stage and the piano and the orchestra had finished their 15 minute tuning exercise (which seems to be a peculiarly Chinese thing - I can never recollect any western orchestra tuning for 15+ minutes on stage before a performance. They all seemed to walk on take their seats, hum a middle C and get on with the concert.) Anyway, the side door on the stage opened and on walked this "giant" of classical music, a very diminutive, frail-looking gentleman who was dressed in a traditional black Chinese jacket and who had what looked like fingerless mittens on his tiny hands. He has been described as "the poet of the piano" and he was accompanied by another great in classical music circles, Lu Jia, our conductor for the evening's two pieces, Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 and Bruckner's symphony No. 4 in E-flat Major, "Romantic".

This is the man.









What an evening!!!!!

Needless to say we got home at around 3:00 on Sunday morning after battling the ferries and two sets on immigration officers again.

Settling in

Well, I think we are now well and truly settled into our new home. All the mad dashing from China - all done at breakneck speed - behind us. You might ask, why all the rush after seven years of living there. here are some answers!

When we first went to China, we had been living in Holland and simply put all our things in storage, got on the plane with the cat, a story in itself, and headed for Peking (Beijing in politically correct talk, but Peking in English). After a few years of paying half our income on storage fees, we decided to ship our goodies to China. What would be a simple task anywhere else is a mammoth task in China. First of all we had to convince our employers to support us - this meant getting them to "allow" us to import our personal belongings. The we had to get them, the college where we worked, to complete all the documentation required to do this. This actually needed signatures from four senior managers including the President of the college Board of Directors, PLUS, a copy of the college's certificate on incorporation, to prove it was a genuine college - not enough that it had 10,000 paying students and over 500 teachers! This took over a month to accomplish as most of the managers were somewhere else when it was their turn to sign.

After all that, the documents had to be submitted to the Customs people for their approval, and only then could the shipment begin to actually move from Holland, by sea. This was no easy task as it required our container to be transshipped in Hong Kong harbour onto a small river ship that then trekked up the Pearl River to Canton (Guangzhou- as per Peking). Now it was in the hands of the Chinese Customs - HELP. They X-ray everything and then demand duty on such things as a twenty-year-old, old-fashioned, record player that Barbara had bought in a charity shop for ten pounds - she has a collection of old LPs and 45's, but no way to play them! We paid up about 200 pound in duty and "other" payments - never detailed, so you can imagine what they were for. Eventually our stuff arrived in our home in China.

Now comes the good bit. In order to export our things when we eventually leave China, we would have to go through the entire process in revers, only this time have to account for any items we had discarded, like anything which had broken and we had chucked out, and then pay excise duty on them - the authorities would think we had sold them on to some unwitting Chinese person. After all this we ended up asking our shippers if there was any possible way to get our stuff out of China without going through all this procedure. He scratched his head and came up with the fact that we could actually ship 10 cubic metres each out by truck, and only by truck, if we sent it by the equivalent of DHS, sort of mailing it! And it wouldn't even be X-rayed by customs. YES, we said, YES, YES!! China is full of idiosyncrasies, and this is only one of them.  Now 10 cubic litres is a lot of space, approximately 350 cubic feet for my American friends. So we now had the possibility of shipping almost all our things with absolutely no hassle and even without informing the college and having to get their approval just to get the stuff out the front gate. We lived on campus and had at least two levels of security to get through before the open road! If this sounds a bit like escaping from a prison camp with all your worldly possessions, including a cat, it is exactly that.

We were now in the middle of the summer break and the campus was almost empty, apart from a few teachers who had nothing better to do and the eternal security guards. The shippers arrived and we bluffed the truck through the gates. We stayed on in our house as poor Puss had to still go through the remainder of her vaccinations. After another week, the cat exporter duly took us all to the train station where we boarded the train to Hong Kong in the company of a young man who would handle the cat customs at Hong Kong side!

That was it and now we're here.

Letters from China No 1

Introduction

I’ve wanted to do this for quite a while and hope you don’t mind being used as guinea pigs. I always enjoyed listening to Alistair Cooke on the BBC’s World Service giving us his latest report on life in the USA in his “Letters from America”. This is my attempt at reporting daily life in China as it happens.

14^th June 2008

After several days of torrential rain and thunderstorms, we have a brief respite. Maybe some sunshine will appear as the summer break looms on the horizon. Two weeks to go, some final testing of our students, then our foreign teachers disperse around the globe on holiday, seeing family or just taking a couple of months to tour China. For some it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event, they’ll stay here a year then return home to take up their old lives again, though never to be the same. For others, ourselves included, it’s a time to relax and enjoy more of the surroundings in what has become our home here in Guangzhou.

Since the earthquake in Sichuan, things have quietened down a bit, the Olympic torch relay around the main towns and cities has resumed, although in a much more subdued manner. For people who twenty years ago were just emerging from the throes of the Cultural Revolution, the relay is something akin to Martians walking the Earth. To the ordinary people, it is almost meaningless, just another flash of the government’s push towards modernization. The meaning and symbolism of the Olympic Games is unknown to them, and of little or no interest. If they understand anything, it will be of some foreign culture being foisted upon them for a very brief time in their lives. The daily struggle will return tomorrow, even if it never went away today. We will enjoy the spectacle on TV along with the rest of the world, but for the farmers working a 14 hour day, day in day out, it means nothing and will benefit them nothing. In fact, it has probably cost them an enormous amount already in taxes they can ill-afford to pay. Watering their plants by hand from huge buckets slung on bamboo poles across their shoulders under the scorching heat, trying to get three, or even four crops a year from their tiny allotments is about all they can cope with.

The thunderstorms have returned as I sit looking at the cityscape from our 13^th floor apartment. As long as it’s number doesn’t have a four in it then it’s not unlucky according to our Chinese friends. So we’ll be lucky and not be struck. The lightning strikes the highest of the local skyscrapers, including the highest building in China just half a mile away. Dramatic, to say the least. The thunder rumbles around the apartment.

A few weeks ago we had a stressful few days. As the Olympic Games approach, the authorities here are increasing security, hoping to avert attempts by Osama bin Laden and his friends to disrupt them. Airport-style walkthrough security metal detector arches have been introduced to the subway in Beijing. Here in the south of the country, various people have been rounded up and deported, mostly African , Indian, Sri Lankan and Middle-eastern men who have been trading here semi-officially. There have been Middle-eastern traders in Guangzhou for over two thousand years and today there are about a quarter million of them, so it seems a bit strange to hear these stories. Visa conditions are being enforced and what was once the easiest country to work in as a semi-legal visitor is now more strictly controlled. I was always amazed at how easy it was for some people to enter China and find unofficial work. It’s another interesting aspect to life here. Apparently the authorities have said it would return to the old way after October! Well, at least our visas are being renewed legally by our college after a six-day jaunt to Hong Kong to get the documentation in order.

Last night’s news showed the culling of poultry in Hong Kong after traces of the H5N1 Asian Flu virus was found in three wet markets. Wet markets are still the favoured way for the local people to buy food. They sell live chickens and fish and very fresh fruit and vegetables. It is always disconcerting for us “Guilos – Foreign Devils” to see old ladies walking home with a fish flapping about in a half-filled carrier bag. Or, indeed, a chicken poking it’s head out of a shopping bag on the bus, looking around at us guilt-ridden humans.

No chicken for dinner tonight-----

Letters from China No 2

22^nd June 2008

There’s a great amount of superstition and “hanging on” to the old traditions and beliefs in China. Like burning incense to the house god outside your front door on auspicious occasions. Also, burning paper representations of worldly goods like money, cars, TVs, mobile phones, etc which you believe your ancestors might need to get on with their afterlife. So it’s not unusual for us to arrive at floor 13 and our apartment to find the air full of smoke from either incense or burning paper sacrifices. It replaces the usual smell of burnt garlic, which the Chinese seem to like in abundance and is not an unwelcome change.

So far this year China has suffered several major disasters, the earthquake in Sichuan is the one most people will know of. But there were others including a massive freezing ice storm in the north and north-west which shut down roads and railways leaving people stranded around the country at the time when just about everyone is trying to reach home for their one and only holiday, the Spring Festival. In our city of Guangzhou there were over one million people sleeping in the street for a week outside the railway station. Numbers like that are unheard of in the west and the fact that nobody died was amazing to us all. Fortunately the weather was mild for February and the local government shepherded the people into the International Trade Exhibition Centre where, at least there was enough room for all those people to lie down and toilets etc. The Chinese army set up field kitchens to feed all of them. Eventually, they either got on a train for the days-long journey home, often sitting upright for more than 48 hours, or struggled back to their dormitories in the factories where they had worked all year waiting for this one moment to see their families again, albeit for a few days only. There have also been typhoons battering the coast not too far from us, sending millions inland for refuge. And not to forget several major train crashes which killed many more.

So 2008 has not been a particularly auspicious year for China and the coming Olympic Games in Beijing. So, much so that people have began to doubt the meaning of “lucky eight”. The number eight has always been considered lucky and the government, bowing to popular belief, has arranged that the opening ceremony of the Games will start at eight minutes past eight on the eigth day of the eigth month (August) in 2008. The reason for all this is that in Mandarin the word for 8, "ba," sounds like the word "fa," which means "fortune". That kind of superstitious thinking would have earned you stiff punishment not many years ago in China. The authorities have spent decades trying to root out "feudal thought." But it still runs deep in the popular mind, and Beijing apparently knows it.

People here believe natural disasters portend trouble for the country's rulers, which is an interesting thought. This dates back over 3,000 years, when the king who overthrew China's first recorded dynasty justified his rebellion on the grounds that the ruler he deposed had lost the "mandate of heaven" by ruling poorly. The belief is that “Good government preserved the harmony between man and nature”. So, if a ruler fell down on the job, there would be strains on the natural order reflected by catastrophes such as floods, droughts, and earthquakes" that augured his downfall”. This was the official ideology until the end of the 19th century. When a massive earthquake destroyed the city of Tangshan in 1976, killing at least 250,000 people, the popular imagination quickly linked the disaster to the death of Chairman Mao six weeks later.

Here are a few other examples of how the Chinese relate numbers, dates and symbolism –

It is customary to eat long noodles on your birthday, for example, because they signify long life.

Words that sound like one another, and dates, have an especially powerful attraction; September 18 is a popular day to open a business because the Chinese word for that date "jiu yi ba" (nine one eight) sounds like the phrase meaning "get rich quick."

August 8 has been regarded as a particularly auspicious date, both for its numbers and for the fact that the Olympic Games, a matter of intense pride to most Chinese, will open on that day. Beijing hospitals say they are expecting a spike in births that day, according to the state-run press, even if it means an even higher number than normal of C-section deliveries.

Parents of prospective "Olympic babies," however, laid their plans before doubts set in about just how lucky the number 8, or even the Games themselves, actually are.

Heretical numerologists have been all over the Chinese Internet in recent weeks, reading ominous significance into the string of misfortunes that have struck China in recent months.

The heaviest snowfall in 50 years that paralysed the south of China over the Lunar New Year holiday fell on January 25, ie 1/25. Add one to two to five, suggest the woe-mongers, and you get eight.

Same with the date that riots broke out in Tibet – 3/14, they point out. Same again with the date of the Sichuan earthquake – 5/12. To make matters worse, the earthquake struck 88 days before the opening day of the Olympics, which perhaps means double bad luck.

Then there's the "Curse of the Fuwas," those five cuddly Olympic mascots, each with a regional or mythical association, that some diviners of ill-fortune say represent a ghastly premonition.

One is a panda, native to Sichuan. Another is an antelope, native to Tibet. A third carries a torch, recalling the embarrassment of the protests that dogged the international torch relay. Another holds a kite, symbolic of China's kite-flying culture that was born in Shandong, in April the site of the country's deadliest train crash in decades.

What might the fifth, a fish, portend? The floods that have displaced more than 1.5 million people in southern China in recent days?

Back to College tomorrow and the last few days of testing. Monday night at around ten o’clock we will no doubt experience the massive setting off of fireworks, as will happen every night until exams are over. This scares away the demons, allowing our students to sleep peacefully. Never mind the fact that it keeps us awake through the night as some of the over-enthusiastic ones set off massive explosions throughout the night!

At least we’ll sleep well tonight in our apartment…..

Letters from China No 3

This letter was lost during the Chinese Totalitarian Dictatorship's censoring of my blog.

Letters from China No 4

6^th July 2008

With the upcoming Olympics on everyone’s mind (and I don’t mean just the Chinese), the World’s attention is focusing on Beijing and the other two cities where events will take place, Qingdao and Hong Kong. Beijing is a capital city that is rapidly running out of water, not solely to the games, but to things like the 30 or so new golf courses that have sprung up around the place. There’s even talk that the centre of government will be moved to another city as a result. It hasn’t taken long for this shortage to occur, less than five years. When we lived there 6 years ago there was one golf course, but with the burgeoning middle-classes the demand for things like this are booming in a city that is nearly in the Gobi desert. Beijing is a huge sprawling city expanding faster than you could imagine, but without the water resources to accompany this expansion. Visitors to the Games, including the athletes, are being advised to bring their own supplies of drinking water! The schemes to divert water to temporarily green the city are surrounded by all sorts of controversy. Here are some of them courtesy of Reuters –

Olympic city's water in state of crisis-report

Thu Jun 26, 2008 2:06am EDT

By Chris Buckley

BAODING, China, June 26 (Reuters) - China's ambitious hopes for a "green" Beijing Olympics have magnified, not relieved, the city's reckless dependence on water from strained underground supplies and a mammoth canal project, a critical report says.

Beijing has promoted its 2008 Games as a nature-friendly festival of sport, but water for the expanses of greenery and sparkling waterways greeting visitors in August will be pumped from sources already battered by over-use and over-engineering, says Probe International, a Canada-based conservation group.

"With each new project to tap water somewhere else, demand for water only increases, and at an ever greater cost to China's environment and economy," says the group's report given to reporters on Thursday.

"Whether diverting surface water or digging ever-deeper for groundwater, the underlying solution is like trying to quench thirst by drinking poison."

The Beijing Games have been beset by worries that air pollution will impair athletes. Yet Probe International's study suggests the Games' thirst for cheap and plentiful water will also leave an environmental burden.

Strained underground sources supply over two thirds of Beijing municipality's needs, and since 2004 the city has also begun drawing on "karst" groundwater supplies 1 km (0.62 miles) or deeper below the surface.

These deep underground sources, stored in porous rock, were originally set aside for use only in times of war and emergency, the report says.

Beijing's thirst for water for the Games has also piled pressure on Hebei, the largely rural province next to the capital that supplies much of its water.

To ensure there was no risk of Beijing running short for the Games, officials ordered a 309-km (192-mile) northern section of the larger South-North Water Transfer Project first be completed to pump more water, if needed, from Hebei.

Hebei is already one of the country's most water-short provinces after a decade-long drought, but nonetheless supplies Beijing with about 80 percent of its water.

A visit there this week showed the canal project has been completed, but only barely, and many farmers have been left weighing the costs of giving up land, water and crops for the sake of presenting a verdant Olympic city.

"We've been lucky with the rains this year, but we still don't have enough water," said Liu Xiuge, a middle-aged farmer in Gaochang Village, who said farmers had planted corn, rather than wheat, because not enough water was available.

Other villagers there said wells were running low because engineers had pumped away groundwater to make way for the canal, about 100 metres across, now cutting through the fields.

"If you dig a well now, you hit rock before there's any water. It was never like that before," said Wang Guiju, a 55-year-old grandmother.

"We've had good fortune with the rain this year. But what happens next year when we have another drought? I don't think they'll be rushing to help us."

Such complaints reflect a much broader water crisis facing northern China and the national capital, where industrialisation and population growth have overwhelmed conservation concerns, says the Probe International report, written by Chinese experts who requested anonymity.

"Long distance diversion is extraordinarily expensive and environmentally damaging," says the report, which calls for reforms to water pricing and economic policy so consumers are encouraged to save water.

Quingdao is currently trying to clean up its waterfront and in-shore sea from an invasion of green algae. The PLA (army) have been moved in en masse to clear the hair/wool-like stuff by hand. Thousands of soldiers are on the beach stuffing the algae into yellow plastic bags which are then trucked off to be dumped somewhere well away from sight. The run-off of salt water from that lot will no doubt cause the local farmers some grief.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong doesn’t seem to be having any problems in the run-up to hosting the equestrian events. I wonder if this tells us anything?

Letters From China No 5

Saturday night took us, with some friends, to the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra 2007-2008 Finale Gala (sic) and Mahler’s Symphony No 3. My understanding of classical music was tried to its extreme to get a handle on the opening movement. Discordance and very loud climactic brass and timpani did very little to prepare me for the beauty of the remaining 5 movements. Written around 1896 it seemed to be a harbinger of the horrors of World War one. What relevance might you ask has this to do with a “Letter from China”? Well, the situation in China today in the lead up to the Olympic Games leaves me with similar feelings. There is not the feeling of euphoria one would normally expect with little over three weeks to go. The security precautions in Beijing have been upped to such an extent that you would think a “Great War” was about to happen. Ground-to-air missiles deployed around the main sites and 200,000 paramilitary personnel tells a lot. The New York Times’ David Barboza notes, Beijing appears to be "less concerned about hosting a global party and more concerned with making sure no one spoils it." Seems about right!

Needless to say, we, being well away from the epicenter of all this fuss, see nothing of this security build-up except for the fact that any luggage we carry must be X-rayed before we can board the train to Hong Kong. The people in Beijing are being subjected to X-rays, metal detector walk-through doors just to get on the subway!

Last week saw us taxiing our way back out to our college to pick up our passports, newly stamped with our new residence permits a relief to us both in the current climate of deportations for any infringement of the immigration laws. On the way we saw more evidence of the recent flooding in the from of landslides in places we thought very stable. Just tells us how heavy the rainfall has been. The fields were almost back to normal with the farmers trying to pick up the pieces and salvage whatever they could. I’m just hoping that we have had the worst of the rainy season and that the rest of the summer will be blue skies (a rarity here because of the pollution) and sunshine. Talking of pollution, recent TV pictures of Beijing show it is just as bad as it’s ever been. It will be interesting to see both what the authorities do about it and how the athletes who have to perform in it react when they get here.

We’ll see……..

Letters from China No 6

24th July 2008

We’re well and truly into the hot part of the year with the day’s highs reaching the high 30’sC or around 100F for my American friends. Two years ago it hit 45C or 113F and that was HOT HOT HOT. With 15 days to go to the Olympic games, I’m getting a bit concerned for the athletes, not to say I wasn’t concerned before now. BUT, when we were in Beijing six years ago it was 47C (116F) in August, very dry and dusty as the winds blow down from the Gobi Desert bringing it nearer and nearer to the city. Dust would settle everywhere and seep into just about everything. So it’s not only the pollution that people should be worried about, think about running a Marathon in that temperature whilst wearing a surgical mask to keep out the dust!

A few days ago three new subway lines were opened in Beijing for the sole use of officials, participants and contestants at the Olympics. The Beijing population has accepted this state of affairs until after the games, as would any people who had been told “it’s for the good of China”. Special “Olympic lanes” have been made in the main roads for the use of “officialdom” and and odd/even system has been introduced for cars. That means that cars with an odd numbered registration plate can drive today, even ones tomorrow etc. The last time I saw that in practice was in Rome many years ago. The rich just went out and bought another car with a number plate with the opposite numerical attributes – no driving problem for them. I can well imagine that the same will apply in Beijing. Now there are about 3.3 million cars in Beijing. The odd/even system now means that the public transport system will have to cope with an added 4 million passengers – we saw the catastrophic results on the news last night.

Talking about the subway lines in Beijing! Six years ago there were three, today there are eight. Not bad in five years, and all the latest technology. How do the build a subway line in Beijing? They do it from the top down. In other words they blast a channel through the city, houses, factories, shops, everything demolished, then they dig a huge hole, put in the subway line, stations etc and finally fill it all in, level it off and plant trees. Simplified version, of course. But what happens to all the people who have been displaced when their homes were demolished? Questions like that do not arise too often here. Totalitarianism has a way for everything…….

Letters from China No 7

24th July 2008

Well, today’s the big day. Tonight sees the Opening Ceremony for the Olympic Games in Beijing. It’s a public holiday here in China as it is also in Hong Kong. The “mist” still hangs over Beijing, whether it is really mist or the unfailing dust particles that come down from the Gobi Desert is another matter. The pollution indicators have been at 98 with 100 being the safe limit within Chinese Standards. The WHO (World Health Organisation) consider a reading of 50 to be nearer the mark. But as with any indicator, what it really means is open to interpretation, so, do we consider single day or long-term readings. Now if you take the long-term readings for Beijing, it would be declared a disaster zone from a pollution point of view. Swimming, Gymnastics, weightlifting etc and all other indoor events will not be affected by outdoor conditions as they’re in air-conditioned environments, BUT, the athletes do have to live in the outside world for the most part of their stay, so how that will affect them and their performances remains to be seen.

When we lived in Beijing for one year, we lived for part in one of the villages on the outskirts of the city. I believe that village has been consumed now by the city’s huge expansion. But six years ago, just about all the villages in and around Beijing were using a form of compressed coal dust/charcoal as a form of heating and cooking fuel. Anyone who remembers the smog of the UK cities in the pre Clean Air Act era will know what I’m talking about. A few feet visibility and acrid smog in your lungs is a very vivid memory for me. Well, BJ was just like that and, as far as I know, hasn’t got much better for the normal everyday times of the year, i.e. non-Olympic Games. I do believe that the use of gas in households has been increased immensely, but the number of households and of those living in squatter-like accommodation has increased enormously too.

We have to remember just how much this means to the Chinese who are a very proud people and enormously nationalistic. What they have achieved in the last ten or twenty years would leave most, if not all, countries standing breathless, so the coming of the Games is their due reward. I only hope that they will see it as one observer said –

"I think this will mean a lot for the perception of China. On the one hand for the rest of the world to discover China will be to discover a country that is for most of the world a bit mysterious. But they will find a country with 5,000 years of history, a fascinating country. I believe the spotlight on China will help the world to understand China, and it will also help China to understand the world."

We’ll just have to wait and see…..

Letters from China No 8

14th August 2008

The “Games” are well and truly underway now and no complaints about pollution levels. Mind you the Marathon is traditionally the final event, so perhaps we’ll just have to wait until then to get the full picture. The complaints I’ve seen so far could very easily be relegated to the “usual” things about ticket touts, scalpers or whatever you might call them, police dragging away protestors – well that happens just as much in London, New York or any major city where there’s some international goings-on going on. Apart from the fact that they are shouting about Tibet, the Falung Gong etc, there’s no real difference from the millions who marched in the UK against the Iraq invasion and had a very cool “blind eye” turned to them by Mr. Blair, who, by the way, happened to be here just before the games started and presumably stayed for the opening ceremony.. He’s not exactly shunning China when it comes to his $500,000 fee for a three-hour trip last November. I’m not really a political person at all; I just can’t stand the hypocrisy. So why was he here? More money presumably, he does have his staff in his London office to pay after all.

We did notice at the opening ceremony that all the world leaders and the heads of state etc, including a few royals, were herded into a block whereas the Chinese official party had very nice seating with serving wenches pouring them tea as they kept cool by wafting their gold souvenir fans. The world leaders had to be content with waving their programmes.

We were talking with a Chinese friend this morning and she was delighted at the whole thing, but declared the walk-on of the teams to be “velly boring” and took too long. The Chinese can have a very short attention span when it comes to things non-Chinese.

Today, at last, we received our digital TV box and had it fitted. It just took about 8 months or more of haggling our landlord and eventually a ten-day rent strike before we finally got what has been a legal requirement for the last 6 months. Our landlord seems to roam the world and is currently in the USA meaning that the TV Company would not give the box to his representative until a little “commission” had been paid. This is the curse of China. So now I’ll go and watch the swimming from the Water Cube in Beijing, quite a remarkable building. By the way, one of the main designers of the Bird’s Nest stadium, Mr. Ai Weiwei, didn’t attend the opening ceremony. He is a very strong critic of the government.

Apart from all that, it’s sunny and getting very hot again…..

Letters from China No 9

16th August 2008

Yesterday was the Chinese Ghost Festival, the 15^th day of the 7^th lunar month. Known locally as the “Hungry Ghost Festival”, it is a time when people burn incense and joss paper, a papier-mâché form of material items such as clothes, gold and other fine goods for the visiting spirits of their ancestors. Elaborate meals are served with empty seats for each of the deceased in the family treating the deceased as if they are still living and food is left outside front doors as offerings to the “ghosts”. So it’s not unusual to see a large plate full of chicken, vegetables and bowls of rice sitting outside our neighbours’ doors, even in a high-rise apartment block - the “ghosts” come anyway. It is also a day when children should respect their parents, parents of past lives and even parents of future lives. So it should really be "The Season of Filial Piety". It is celebrated in various forms in India, China Japan, Vietnam and all countries with a Buddhist population.

It’s all very different from celebrating Christmas and Easter! I’d better go and light the incense at our kitchen God’s little shrine!

We were given a picture of “Guang Yu” to hang facing our front door in order to frighten away nasty people. He is rather intimidating.

It’s not unusual that local hillsides are set afire by people visiting their ancestors’ tombs on “Tomb Sweeping Day” or Qingming as it’s known. Another day of ancestor worship - a day when people flock to the cemeteries, usually on hillsides as the hill gives easier access to the heavens, to clear their ancestors’ graves of weeds etc. Sometimes they will open the caskets and re-arrange the bones. At the same time incense will be burned and offerings made, usually burnt. So you can imagine what might happen - and it does. The local fire departments are out in force here and in Hong Kong

And this all happening in a country that is officially atheist, even though there is religious freedom, of a sort. In fact, China is a very spiritual country regardless of the official dogma.

Letters from China No 10

21st August 2008

Chinglish - a word meaning Chinese English which is often the bane of civic authorities and their like here. In preparation for the Beijing Olympics the city authorities tried clamping down on its use, replacing all obvious Chinglish signs with Standard English. A prime example at a market was a sign which reads in English “To sell inside the commodity space all accepting money sipe supplies examineing the price service”. The Chinese characters actually mean “All cashiers in the marketplace offer price-checking services.” As you can see, a trip to the market can mean a lot more than buying some eggs and fresh veggies.

What prompted me to raise this topic was reading an article in www.news.cn, a Chinese online news service in English. It was reporting the fact that the T8 Typhoon warning had been raised in Hong Kong with the imminent arrival of Typhoon Nuri. (Nuri means “Blue crowned parroquet” in the Malay language.) It has already killed seven people in the Philippines.

The warning system in Hong Kong is a hangover from the days of British colonial rule and barely makes sense. The warning rises from T3 to T8 with no intervening T4, T5 etc. When the T8 is issued, all government offices close, schools evacuate their children homewards, the buses stop running and, very importantly, all the ferry services, which HK depends immensely upon, are cancelled. It is also very true that Hong Kong relishes hanging on to its colonial past and still uses the names from that era for its streets and institutions. It retains its use of English Common Law and magistrates, judges and barristers all wear wigs as in the UK. So, to come to the point and to quote the www.news.cn article about the coming typhoon it said

“The arrival of the typhoon forced the cancellation of Hong Kong's most ferries connecting some of the far-fetched islands, the neighboring Macao as well as some cities. Most of the bus transport in the city was also suspended.”

Apart from the terrible English, the correct term is “the outlying islands”, but that hints a bit too much of the colonial English used a few years ago, and which is still very much in use. So, in order to avoid using this terribly colonial remnant the writer stretched his/her vocabulary and almost reached the desired “far-flung islands”, but not quite. So, however far-fetched the islands might seem to some people, they actually do exist, all 200+ of them and are happily outlying Hong Kong at this moment, albeit under the rains and winds of Typhoon Nuri.

Letters from China No 11

31st August 2008

Well, the Olympics are all but over, the Paralympics getting next to no coverage on TV. I did notice that the Hong Kongers are giving away tickets to students and others to encourage attendance at the dressage event, the only equestrian event available to disabled riders. During the “other” games the spectators were seen dozing off en masse as most of them had bought tickets just to be able to see an Olympic event, not knowing in the least what dressage was. Dancing horses indeed!

Just as the games have ended, so has our summer break and it’ll be back to our college tomorrow, just to register as being there. We don’t actually start teaching for another three weeks. Our freshmen (first-year) students will first have to complete two weeks military training as a substitute for national service, I believe. The poor sods have twelve hours of marching and parading in the heat being ordered around by army trainers. This happens in every tertiary education institution. The end result is an assembly and march-past before local dignitaries in the sports field. After that we take over and try to re-instill some sense of liberalism and freedom as we coax them to divulge their abilities in speaking English – all good fun. A new type of schedule awaits us with the possibility of having around two hundred new faces in our classes, not all at once, twenty at a time. With the recent shenanigans over visas during the games, many foreigners just gave up and went elsewhere. So, I believe that recruitment of new teachers is becoming more and more difficult. Bering in mind too that there are colleges and universities springing up all over the country. There are more people in China learning English than there are people in the rest of the world who speak it already! So that might give you an idea of what things are like. For our college to have around eighty foreign teachers, some of whom having more than five years service, is nothing short of a miracle.

So, tomorrow, it will be an early rise and a taxi ride to the Sun Yat-sen memorial park where a bus will take us to college. Sun Yat-sen is considered to be the father of modern China, not Mao Ze Dong as most people believe. A little bit of background info -

“In the West he is considered the most important figure of Chinese history in the twentieth century. As a revolutionary, he lived most of his life in disappointment. For over twenty years he struggled to bring a nationalist and democratic revolution to China and when he finally triumphed with the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1912 with him as president, he had it cruelly snatched from him by the dictatorial and ambitious Yüan Shih-kai. He died in 1924, with China in ruins, torn by the anarchy and violence of competing warlords. His ideas, however, fueled the revolutionary fervor of the early twentieth century and became the basis of the Nationalist government established by Chiang Kai-shek in 1928.”

He believed that “Government should be republican and democratically elected.” Not quite the current situation here...

Letters from China No 12

7^th September 2008

I don’t know if it was broadcast or “fed” to the networks, but last night we watched the opening ceremony for the Paralympics in Beijing on TV. Not quite the spectacle of the “other” Olympics, but wonderful in its own right and a very fitting tribute to disabled people throughout the world. The initial countdown to the beginning was done by several children from different nationalities holding up a book and opening it to show the remaining seconds. The last ten seconds were counted down by fireworks which burst into the numbers themselves. I believe only the Chinese could devise fireworks like that, just as they created the Olympic circles at the other ceremony.

The stadium was full as the ceremony started with what looked like 3 or 4,000 jelly babies in different colours dancing about. They were actually meant to be cartoon representations of athletes. They were quickly followed by the athletes and their various officials.

Then the real show began with the Sunbird descending from a large sun to a visually impaired singer who sang in both Chinese and English. Several other disabled performers took centre stage as the whole show moved towards the finale of a man in a wheelchair hoisting himself and chair to the rim of the stadium and lighting the Paralympic Flame.

Perhaps attitudes here will change towards the disabled, of whom there are 83 million in both the cities and countryside. They have been, and still are, heavily discriminated against, but official attitudes are changing although not yet at grass-roots level. At least in officialdom they have stopped referring to the disabled as “canfei” roughly translated as “useless cripple” and are now using the word “canji” which means “physically disabled”. We’ll see what transpires.

Overall the ceremony was a much more human show and showed the government’s desire to encompass the disabled into society, which can only be a very good thing…..

Letters from China No 13

21^st September 2008

It’s back to class tomorrow for an extended week of teaching our new freshmen. The National Day holiday is one of the three-day holidays that the government extends to a full week by having everyone work the previous weekend. This is called a “golden week” and is usually accompanied by a shopping spree throughout China and Hong Kong. HK usually expects at least half a million visitors in a day to walk through the border, several million over the week. It’s a time to avoid Hong Kong, yet the weekend before is Halloween which the Hong Kongers celebrate in style. The first time Barbara and I visited HK together was after we had spent 13 months in Beijing and Quingdao.

Beijing had had its ups and downs, the biggest down when we were plagued by the SARS crisis. All had been well until all the schools, Universities etc were quarantined. That meant effectively that if you were on campus, you stayed there until the crisis was over. Food and drinking water were left at the gates for people to collect and no contact was allowed with “outsiders”. If you happened to be outside the campus when the gates were shut, there you remained as happened to one of our colleagues who just happened to have been visiting her boyfriend over night. He then had a house-guest for the next two months! Fortunately we were living in an apartment and not living on ant campus. When the crisis was almost over, i.e. when the death figures were becoming acceptable to the WHO and the government, our school was allowed to re-open, but we were still effectively marooned in Beijing as all other cities required us to stay in quarantine at our own expense if we arrived by train, plane bus etc. The tales we heard from our mature students of what was actually happening in the city were horrific. One instance was of a young girl who had been quarantined at her university, only to find that her entire family had died in the epidemic. Her teachers rallied round and generally adopted her and basically prevented her from killing herself. Others did kill themselves through the despair if discovering that they had been the carriers of the disease that killed the others in their family. It was something we had never thought about and discovering that literally hundred, if not thousands of people had chosen to end their lives was extremely distressing. We too were living at the edge of things with our finances extremely stretched having no income for over three months.

We caught the first of the trains out of Beijing the day after the WHO took the city off its list of dangerous places to be! We headed for the seaside at Qingdao, where just recently the Olympic sailing events were held. The school was abysmal and we were housed in the old Dutch Consulate which had been left to decay after the revolution. The only saving grace was the beach, two minutes walk away and the amazing Jimmie from Mongolia who had somehow or other become the owner of a bar/restaurant on the beach. Our evenings spent eating wood-oven pizzas and drinking Quingdao beer whilst listening to the lovely Mr. Wong playing flamenco guitar become too bizarre to contemplate, but were in reality our saviour in their distraction from out teaching schedule. It was in Quingdao that I first saw the reality of poverty in the school system, classes of sixty kids, some doubled-up at their desks. One student aged about twelve come vividly to mind. A young boy, thin and wearing a threadbare tee shirt who eagerly sat in the front row absorbing every word I said and bending his head down over his scrappy notebook screaming out in his actions how much he wanted to learn everything, anything, to better himself.

These are some of the reasons we have stayed in China for over six years now.

Well, tomorrow we will start to meet our new students, all 100 of them. We are still short-staffed, so some of the students will have Chinese teachers for their oral English for a month or so until the foreign staff come to replace them. We can’t complain having a rather short semester which includes the National Day holiday, Christmas and the first half of the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year). All in all we will work for 13 of the 20 weeks – can’t be bad........!!!!!

Letters from China No 14

5^th October, 2008

The IKEA experience…

Last week was the Chinese National holiday, celebrating 59 years of the “New China”. We were invited by the Guangdong Provincial Government to a celebration at the Shangri-la Hotel or Sangali-Ra Fandian in Chinese-speak. Our bus driver took all 40 of our brave colleagues and us around the city to the new Business District and the hotel in a seemingly endless journey arriving 45 minutes after the speeches had begun. As we walked into the Pearl River Ballroom we just had enough time to hear the last speaker thanking us all for coming and to “enjoy your dinner”. No speeches!!!! YEAHHHHHHH

The buffet was declared open and the free-for-all began. The GD Provincial Govt. did us well with endless delicious entrees and desserts to die for – the diet went out the window and a quick extra kilo was registered the morning after – salads for a day or two!!

We had planned to visit IKEA during the week’s holiday and so we set off on Thursday morning to find that half of the city had had the same idea, only difference was that we actually intended to buy something. When you visit IKEA in places like this – we used to do it in Saudi in Riyadh – the same thing happens there – you suddenly find that amongst all these “shoppers” – thousand upon thousand of them –there are really only a couple of hundred buying anything. The rest come for the air-conditioning and a chance to fall asleep in the comfy sofas and even more, the very comfy beds. Couples come in with cameras and tripods taking each others photograph in the room of their dreams, just to show their pals what they aspire to. Fortunately, IKEA closes at 10pm, so they all have to go home then. BUT, for the ones who do leave earlier there’s the Mr. Softee ice-cream stand at the door on the way out, so for all of 20 pence or 40 cents you can get a large ice-cream and extend your air-conditioned bliss for a few minutes more. Some even brave the trip around again and have the Swedish meatballs for a late lunch, all for about one pound or two dollars. It beats going to the park when it’s 35C and 100% humidity and you can also enjoy it when the latest typhoon comes roaring along flooding everywhere. So, for a few minutes, or hours, you can escape the reality of a tiny apartment with only a fan and a mosquito net. Sweden and flat-pack furniture becomes the reality.

It was the first time we had actually managed to get round and come out the other end through the finishing line of check-out girls without spending a fortune and had actually only bought the small frying pan we wanted. No scented candles, plastic trays or even flat-pack bookcases (our favourite) or the unenviable task of trying to describe how to deliver to our apartment using the English/Cantonese/Mandarin/hand signals/drawing sketches technique. The first time we had something delivered to our apartment the driver called us on his way here to inform us he was en route. Unfortunately he mistook our overjoyed response to mean that we wouldn’t be at home, so he went back to the warehouse with our goodies. We went back to the store, discovered what had happened and had them write directions specifically telling the driver to call the store and tell them he was on his way then they would call us in English telling us not to move for the next few hours as he might not in fact be coming to us first, perhaps after his other deliveries, or maybe before – just stay home!! All was well and the flat–pack bookcases were delivered safely along with the huge sofa, the office chair, two desks, three computer cabinets etc. etc. etc. etc. I just hope you all go through the same crises as we do with IKEA, at least you’ll understand what I’m getting at. After that particular delivery, Barbara and I decided to show our unending appreciation of the men staying until ten at night building our furniture by giving them a good tip. Barbara dug into her purse and pulled out two hundred Yuan (30 dollars) and stuffed it in the men’s jackets as they point-blank refused to accept it. BUT, they eventually got in their truck happy bunnies. I commented to Barbara that she had just given them about one man’s full weeks wages for doing two hours assembly – no wonder they refused at first, but were grinning all over as they sped off.

We do our bit for the economy here……..

Letters from China No 15

1st November 2008

Things are now getting back to normal, whatever that is, as the legacy of the Olympic Games disappears over the horizon. The X-ray machines at the subway stations have been slid away, out of use, but not forgotten, so, that’s one hassle less. There seems to have been absolutely no change to the country as a result of the hullabaloo, but, perhaps Beijing is now heaving with tourists and entrepreneurs as was intended. We see no evidence of it all here, only the news that even more workers are being laid off and factories closed as a result of the global economic crisis. Guangdong Province, where we live is called the World’s Factory as most of the manufacturing for the export markets happens here, but for the last year or so, increasing rents and wages have sent many of the factory owners further inland seeking cheaper premises and workers, not that the salaries of the workers are high in any way at all – usually about US $ 5-6 a day. What makes the Chinese goods so cheap is not only the low wages, but the fact that all the workers live in dormitory conditions with communal eating in school-type restaurants, their food not being of the highest quality and neither their living conditions. Most of them will be migrants working far from home, hundreds, if not a thousand or so miles away from their families. The only time they have to see their wives/husbands/children is at the coming Spring Festival or Chinese New Year as we westerners call it. Traditionally, several hundred million people will take to the trains and long-distance buses travelling for up to a week to have a few days respite, only to repeat the journey back to the misery of their jobs. Most will be sending their wages back home, saving for their children’s college education.

We see the end result in our classrooms.

This year some of our students are from very far-flung places like Mongolia and Heilongjiang in the northeast of the country. (Heilongjiang means literally “Black Dragon River” – place names here fascinate me – our usual route out of Guangzhou is along Dong Feng Lu or, in English, East Wind Street – visions of easterly Typhoon winds driving you along come to mind.)

We have decided to return to full-time campus living and giving up our city apartment. The college have very kindly offered us our old villa by our “Lake”, so it will be a bit like returning home again. Cat-sitters are becoming more difficult to find and carting her and us back and forwards every week-end is a bit of a drag. Back to the snakes and frogs and rural China living! The movers will be here next weekend, so another stage of our living here comes to an end.

BUT, the house is bigger, so we’ll start accumulating even more Chinese bits and pieces……… HELP!!!!!!!

Letters from China No 16

21st November 2008

Well, here we are settled back on campus. We left our apartment amidst a flurry of packers and movers loading our worldly goods into two (??? where did we get all this stuff) trucks and headed back to the countryside and some peace and quiet. Living in another Chinese city had been fun, the proximity of western delicatessens and the Concert Hall had been wonderful, but the noises of city life began too become tedious, especially after we walked around our married teacher’s compound and heard the deafening silence! Quite won over convenience and here we are unpacking yet again, looking occasionally at the lake which is now at full capacity, lapping our doorstep, so to speak. Now we can watch pied wagtails sparring and wren-like mini birds twittering about whilst the frogs have yet to come into force and the snakes are nowhere to be seen (yet). The cat is baying at the door every morning yearning to go hunting in the banana plantation and the nearby thickets. After she has had her anti flea treatment and some more cat shots she will be free to wander and sun lounge at will.

Last weekend I braved the buses and trains and made the one-day trip to Hong Kong to get our choice of seats for the Hong Kong Ballet’s performance of Giselle at the end of this month, Barbara’s Christmas treat. She has waited 50 years for it to be performed within her locale and here it is suddenly there and available. Hong Kong will hold it’s 37^th Arts Festival in the February and March 2009. No doubt we’ll be regular visitors as the opening concert is by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the closing with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin – can’t miss those icons of classical music. So next year is looking very good from that point of view.

The comparison between mainland China and it’s neighbour, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, is a bit along the lines of Black and White with no shades of grey in between. Friends back in the UK had thought that after the hand-over in 1997, Hong Kong would be absorbed by the greater China, but Hong Kong is still a vibrant international city with it’s own laws and government, albeit with some direction from Beijing. It suits Beijing very much to still have HK as their window to the outside world. China is catching up very quickly, but it will take many years before the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra plays with the skill and panache of the Berlin. They play wonderful, note-perfect music, but there’s something lacking – no freedom of expression in any way shape or form When a foreign orchestra plays locally, they have standing ovations lasting, embarrassingly, thirty minutes or so. It’s obvious to the audience what the difference is.

Enough of music, tonight we’re having a Thanksgiving dinner for our American colleagues, so, I’m off to make my contribution – mashed potatoes for twelve…….