'let them eat internet' impressions of post-communist beijing, december '07 by elvis demorrow |
LET THEM EAT INTERNET Click photos to enlarge.
Post-communist Beijing differs, of course, from post-capitalist USA, and it is useful to trace the vectors and presume that they will provide some questions and paradoxes that prove themselves to be a hair more interesting than the usual fare. I will of course include the full tourist report & stately photos as well! But first, some scattershot impressions: Although I have never had a problem seeing through the obscene joke - orchestrated in a lockstep that would put Mao to shame - that is the status quo of "airport security" in contemporary America, it is extraordinarily striking to embark upon a flight from San Francisco to Beijing and feel relatively liberated upon setting foot on PRC soil. I have conducted my own modest experiments in domestic and international air travel in the last several years, and it is clear to me that I can bring just about anything I care to into the cabin short of an handgun or perhaps plastique. Just as in the public school system, the sham is obscenely transparent: the means are successfully aimed toward inculcating subservience to authority at every level of the participating populations; you will play - no matter how temporarily - the role of the prisoner, in his most desperate straits, and the ends be damned. Thus we get the workforce we deserve and we shed our footwear, assign our precious fluids to 3 ounce containers, and kowtow to the magicks of the wand prior to carrying razor blades, inflammables, sharp things and mace, etc. into the cabins that - we are told - destroyed the twin towers. But I digress! In post-communist Beijing the free market reigns, but it is not the market you are used to. You will not find a vendor or servant who will accept a 'tip', haggling is the rule and retail prices are only firm at select establishments, the taxes are unspoken but omnipresent, but you are also hard-pressed to find homeless hands begging for drug or food moneys. There is an almost palpable 'honour among thieves' in the constant bombardment of offers of services of varying degrees of equity, and a lack of any perceptible threat to one's safety, regardless of how conspicuous you carry your moneys. The police presence is nearly perfected by contemporary US standards: barely perceptible yet - like the taxation - palpably omnipresent. They have varying levels of smartly dressed police from pure military personnel to unarmed guards at national sites, with others in between.
It is, bizarrely, not easily reduced to a playground of the wealthy a la Manhattan or, increasingly, San Francisco. Instead you see the miserable masses all around and choose to either pay local or American prices for any conceivable necessity or luxury, from an "hot pot" at a Chinese muslim joint to an impeccable monkfish liver flown in daily from Japan to a (legitimate or counterfeit) pair of Versace shoes to a boring hotel room at the Hilton. What strikes me in the nascent market here is the sheer range of options available for someone of modestly wealthy means (i.e., any American who can afford to travel abroad). During my stay I was only capable of perceiving two distinct classes: the massive subsistence laborers, and the significant amount of natives who are able to afford a lifestyle that would fit well within the suburbs of Minneapolis, if not the upper east side of Manhattan. The true elites must either blend easily into the latter group or keep to themselves more than they do in the states.
The sources of the wages at every level remain a mystery to me, as does their 'commute'. I spent quite a bit of time on the subway system, excellent by US standards (faint praise!), although not up to New York quality, yet. It is close to some sort of desirable combination of the best aspects of the CTA and BART, with obvious local flair & quirks. The line near my hotel was brand new, and impeccably clean and efficient. I ended up on a platform at all major periods of the day and night over a seven-day week, and not once could I discern a clear mass emigration of workers in suits & heels or any other uniform garb. The trains were almost always filled to capacity, but there was no mass '9-to-5' exodus like one finds in most western cities. Perhaps that has something to do with the widely present 12-hour workdays, like that enjoyed by my tailor Wendy. She works 9-to-9 seven days a week, and leaves her children in the care of the grandparents. Keep in mind that the owner of the establishment is her cousin, so she has some decent 'guanxi' as well. The suit cut from whole cloth was 1,000 RMB - abut $170 USD. She seemed to be doing relatively well by my perception of the new working class, so there is one microcosm for you to chew upon. One notable holdover from the more Communist days are the manual ticket sellers at the subway stations. You have to go to a window and buy an individual one-way ticket, then take it to the gate, where another employee will take your ticket like you are at the opera. That's one way to keep the workforce busy. Take that, ro-bots!
'Fashion' in general is apparently non-existent although most of the natives are clearly able to choose new clothing to purchase and wear. There are no discernible trends and few distinct outliers among the young. Long puffy coats rule, but not the flashy kind, and the outlying extreme is a knock-off North Face jacket here and there. Many employees wear standard suits on the clock, men and women alike, but on the street it is a pretty clear washout compared to an American city of that size and relative 'prosperity'. My impression was that it was due to a degree of aesthetics rather than economy. The air pollution is literally unbelievable. It makes Los Angeles breathe like Duluth, MN. There is certainly no real comparable experience in America, yet. The combination of the desertification of the surrounding area and the usual industrial suspects contributed to a suffocating and inescapable schmog during my first four days in town. It smells like someone is making a fire out of things that should never be burned - everywhere. The visual perception is one of an exceptionally foggy day on the west coast of San Francisco, but with a yellow tinge. There is quite simply no way this is going to change in the next six months, and this will be a big story during the Olympics this year. I am usually an open-window addict and always want fresh air when I am indoors; in Beijing, I was ecstatic to get back to my tightly sealed hotel room each night after braving the brownish 'mists' all day. It offered some respite, although on the worst days the radiator had a pungent aroma of its own. As an unapologetic cigarette smoker, I cackle (hackle?) at urban lung police in the states, but nothing could have prepared me for this paradox. I was convinced that my filtered cigarette offered me superior comfort relative to the still sporadic but certainly increasing number of young natives sporting Michael Jackson-style surgical masks on the streets on particularly bad days. Best of luck with that approach, kids!
That said, the second half of my stay offered beautiful blue skies that wouldn't look out of place in well-ventilated San Francisco, and nearly complete relief from the oppressive haze that marked the first half. They scored some "blue sky days", but I don't think the Olympic time gamble is going to let them off unscathed. My guide for the Great Wall excursion said that the entire city prayed for clear skies when the Olympic committee visited for deliberations during the spring sandstorm season, and they were remarkably spared, only to get their annual hammering days after the committee left. We shall see. posted by elvis
I give the Haoyuan Hotel my highest recommendation. One block from the subway with amazing service at the desk and fancy rooms appointed with gorgeous antique furniture. Look no further if you are in town. Maybe get a drink at one of the western-style korp joints, but please, leave it at that!
Each morning upon leaving the hotel, we were greeted by a massive chorus of elementary-school aged children conducting an impressive 'peace riot'. There was one primary adult MC with a nasty super-loud PA system rocking out tunes while he 'toasted' on top. These kids would be at it all day, five days a week, in 25F weather, going absolutely nuts. I couldn't tell if there were shifts of different kids, but I assume there were. You never know, though. There were no immediate signs of a school to justify a 'recess' type institution, and I suspect it was more along the lines of some form of pre-boot camp day care. The kids were loving it. Forget about the economic or martial realms - with habits like this on display, these kids are going to totally culturally colonize yours if you aren't careful!
With a purposefully leisurely schedule, I chose to avoid any organized tourist activities with the exception of the Great Wall, which requires a driver of some sort no matter how you cut it. The hotel set us up with an excellent guide and driver, sanctioned by the PRC. The bargain involves three mandatory shopping stops at PRC-policed outlets: a jade factory, a silk factory, and the Tong Ren Tang headquarters, the Chinese equivalent of your choice of the premier medical school in the US, but they also are the premier 'pharmacist'; something like a twisted & harmonious combination of Harvard and Eli Lilly, with full state support (very alien & hard to imagine, I know).
The idea of the mandate, I presume, is that the state assumes that virtually every tourist will visit the Great Wall, so they tack on these specifically chosen addenda to ensure that each tourist receives a PRC-sanctioned version of the many counterfeit and minimally-regulated consumption stops they take in on their own time. You can buy a myriad of jade or silk of widely varying quality, but at these stops they actually briefly explain how it is made, how to distinguish quality goods, and then turn you loose on the shopping floor. No purchase required. The Tong Ren Tang stop included a free & fantastic foot massage (post-Wall), a brief lecture by a pre-eminent & pre-eminently smug Chinese physician who claimed that Beijing has no asthmatics and that McDonalds is the reason people are sick, and a casual examination of your tongue and pulse, Chinese-style. You can buy a ton of herbs if you want, or just hike it.
The Great Wall itself was perfect. Even in the winter season, it was filled with enough tourists for me to not want any more, but by no means uncomfortably congested. We opted for Badaling, the standard and closest point from Beijing, partly because the attractive & less congested alternative of Simatai was snowed in, as an humourous horror story from our driver re: a recent expedition confirmed (it involved flooring the accelerator and moving hysterical tourists backwards down an incline). I was well prepared for the ascent from San Francisco walking, but the irregularity of the totally un-adorned steps dating back 1,500+ years required conscious navigation, especially on the way down. The guide warned us that as soon as you reached a 'top' (usually adorned by a turret-style guard tower, one of which was encouragingly pumping some Euro dance beats and selling t-shirts), you would look and see higher turning point that wasn't previously visible. This turned out to be very true multiple times - it was that weirdly steep.
We hauled it and turned around after the allotted 45 minutes, and were glad we did due to the freeze and the fact that it was much harder getting down those stairs than getting up. I had a pseudo-Maoist revelation in that the higher one climbs, the fewer comrades surround you; and when you get back to earth, it doesn't matter how high you say you climbed - who cares? The 'helmsman' himself said that if you hadn't climbed the Great Wall, you couldn't be a man. Supposedly a ceremonial tablet at the base carries this inscription, but as always I suspect a more insidious anti-imperialist message for returning tourist photos!
At the bottom of the wall they had a warm cafe that served the usual awful Chinese 'espresso' and I sipped & grimaced along with the European tourists at the next table over. This was a recurrent theme over the trip. I like my coffee even a little more than its 'siamese' twin, the cigarette, and although 'espresso' wasn't too difficult to track down in Beijing, the quality varied immensely. The only proper one I had was in a very western-style cafe near the Lama Temple. Even at the various Starbucks I paid my moneys for (an addict has no lefty shame - pfft!), the quality varied from 'palatable' to 'basement hospital cafeteria on tour in Ohio'. I actually moved my cognitive currency conversion from "yuan to dollar" to "how many Starbucks visits was this". One double espresso for me and a hot chocolate for the lady would be about 50RMB each time. Again, a tailored suit is 1,000RMB and a decent meal for two can be had for less than 100RMB. A fantastic pig-out sushi dinner was around 600RMB. So korp coffee costs about the same (or even a hair more) than it does in America, but real necessities were all over the map. My point being that you can pretty much pay what you want for what you need, high or low. This was a bit of a revelation for this un-traveled yanqui.
The highest denomination is 100RMB (basically a $15 dollar bill) and you just roll with wads of them and try to get rid of the singles you get in change. The only scam attempt I ran into the whole time was arriving at the Beijing airport at 5:00AM and going to exchange my dollars at a bank kiosk. A shady looking old man offered to do it on the side with a wad of "yuan". I of course declined and throughout my stay my bills were subsequently laboriously checked for legitimacy by about half of the cashiers - do the maths! When was the last time a cashier scrutinized your $20 bill for possible counterfeit? The bills are pretty, by the way, but they have big Mao face on all denominations with a varying b-side. Some luck.
posted by elvis
They sure start 'em young! I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to eat a reasonably healthy winter diet in Beijing. The fact that you are heavily warned against drinking tap water puts a real damper on a traditional California fresh produce intake, but it is true that the fancy new supermarkets have decent stock. I had some defensible apples & oranges from Australia (adding some additional oil consumption to my 12,000 mile flight). The bakeries were all terrible. The lady was looking for red bean bao in vain, and the joints in SF or NYC Chinatown put the Beijing jokesters to shame; all fake croissant and nasty 7-11 style cheese dog monstrosities.
The real-deal Chinese cuisine was spotty, but by no means problematic. You get what you look for, really. I don't eat the birds, so the Peking Duck was off my menu, but I bet it's perfect from what I saw. I had some killer squid in various preparations, and some great northern Indian food and some of the best sushi I've ever had; the monkfish liver was superb. We also found a bizarrely classy Malaysian joint straight out of some secret SoHo locale that was very good. No matter what the level or familiarity of your venue, the servers hand you the menu and then stand there waiting for you to order everything ASAP. It was weird, but they will take a few forceful waves and give you some time. Many decent places also follow this up with brooding silent service like a 5-star joint in the states, pouncing upon you perfectly whenever you need anything and trying to disappear the rest of the time. Again, all with a universal refusal of tips. As far as crazy on-the-street markets, New York's Chinatown far out-weirds the Beijing fare. I have seen buckets of live frogs, and giant fishes thrown, still flopping, onto a 'for sale' rack south of Canal St., and this sort of thing was just not present in Beijing. Instead, the indoor markets were large and often housed numerous distinct vendors with all kinds of different foods for sale. One common approach was to lay out a lot of different raw items and then stir-fry them on the spot for customers.
As the sun begins to set on the main shopping drag of Wafujing, dozens of food vendors suddenly emerge and form a gonzo culinary gauntlet that only Masta Millions would be able to conquer.In the recently built mega-mall, we sampled a sensory-overload cafeteria-style place called "Megabite". You purchase a dedicated debit card and then hop from vendor to vendor accumulating dumplings, noodles, meat face, etc. This being civilized Beijing, you can also drink a beer and smoke a cigarette. I kept the casual/emergency snacking to the Lara & Clif bars I brought and didn't get adventurous, although I did find one type of vegan cookie twist that kind of tastes like sausage and is pretty yummy.
In food as in everything else, straight efficiency is the rule. All business transactions can include "please/thank you/you're welcome", but you very rarely find the type of melodramatic superficial 'courtesy' that is common in American business transactions. This is true even in the venues that cater to moneyed tourists, like the notorious Silk Street Market - four floors of individual vendors selling counterfeit versions of just about everything (and some real stuff, too). I actually started to appreciate the approach: we're doing biz here - save the fake emotions for the wife & kids! Of course, the various haggling techniques may incorporate emotions in a cynical way, like the young lady we saw throwing luggage around in a neighboring booth to spook her European consumers into accepting her price. I found that the general approach of naming a price thee times and walking away would work well; I only had two vendors actually let me walk away - the rest called me back and agreed to the offer. It makes sense: of course they won't sell you something at a loss! You just need to wrap your head around the fact that their initial offer is likely 40 times the amount they are willing to accept, even it seems cheap by western standards. There is a lot of heavy prediction that such bald-faced counterfeit dealing will have to disappear in time for the Olympic games, but I don't believe the hype. They will likely just embark on some sort of 'reform' program and continue to piss off Ralph, Calvin, Louis, et al. Regardless, the straight-shooting tailors are where you should spend your money anyway. No fake brands, whatever!
The local beer is plentiful & plenty cheap. Along with American familiars Tsingtao and Yanjing, there was a slightly less omnipresent lite-brew called Beijing Beer, which I preferred over the other two. Still, all Budweiser-esque. Unfortunately, the dominant bottom-shelf exports were Carlsberg & Heineken, so I stuck to the local reliables over that noise. The good news is that if you go looking for good beer (not hard), you will be overwhelmed by Belgian ales over everything else. Wine is a lost cause: forget it, unless you want to pay a lot for a familiar bottom shelf varietal from the states. This was particularly painful for a San Francisco citizen, and I swore it off after my second awful sip on the Air China flight until I broke down at the end of the trip and indulged in a decent French cafe. I also tried "absinthe" for the first time from a Czech label. It was nice, like a heavy duty version of a good anise liqueur. I would assume wormwood not included, but I'm not nerdy enough to follow the trades on that stuff. The bottle of Johnny Walker I bought had a strange glass widget grafted onto the top of the bottle. It didn't work properly and wouldn't pour, and when I succeeded in removing it, the top wouldn't screw back on to the bottle! Brilliant! This is how you can tell that your dealer is not really interested in their product. The real-deal local drink - supposedly referred to as "wine" - is a scorching 110 proof transparent moonshine that comes in 100ml bottles at a corner store price that would make the bums in my neighborhood weep with ecstasy. I tried it once at a Sichuan restaurant and couldn't take it. The waiter delivered and poured the rotgut for me like it was a fine wine, but I realized he just wanted to wait around and watch me make the baby face when I tasted it. He was out of luck: I took it like a man, but I did stop after two sips! It is undoubtedly popular and undeniably foul. I wanted to bring a bottle home for CansaFis but decided it wasn't worth the luggage-soak gamble. Besides, you can probably buy it at the Korean Market in Oakland for the same price. BONUS SUBWAY FUNNIES:
posted by elvis
In our earlier, schmoggier days in Beijing, we visited the Forbidden City and its opening act, Tian'anmen Square. We passed on a viewing of the embalmed corpse of Mao Tse-Tung, which our state-sanctioned Great Wall guide assured us was the first and most anticipated destination of all Chinese citizens visiting Beijing; this is one of those statements which is true even if it is false, right? Instead, I purchased both a lighter and a flask carrying Mao's visage, signifying an complicated existentialist blow against the tyranny of all states through all time, etc.
Tian'anmen Square may loom large in different narratives of modern Beijing, but its magic pales in comparison to the Forbidden City, and it serves quite modestly its place as a frontispiece to the architectural glory of the dynastic compound, as well as being a right proper 'square' in the terms that American cities very seldom comprehend these days. Certainly there was a sense of the violence that had preceded us on this cement, not only of course in 1989 but in the previous years beyond. But, the faint rumblings were no more coherent than those provided a student of modern police riots via a visit to Chicago's Grant Park, or Tompkins Square on Manhattan's lower east side.
I was significantly struck by the amplification infrastructure neatly installed upon the light posts around the massive square; I couldn't help but recall my knee-depth in the complete W. S. Burroughs interviews as I imagined the sheer revolutionary potential afforded the man & machine that could successfully tap into the sine waves emanating from these public address towers at the right time & place in an historical crisis point. The symmetrical & massive workers' murals were very well done, with life-sized laborers hoisting the Mao profile aloft in convincing detail.
In front of the "Monument to the People's Heroes" I chuckled at the plaque outlining in meticulous detail its dimensions & history of construction, with nary a word regarding the non-materialist significance of a big workers' boner in the middle of Tian'anmen Square. I guess they forgot the "'nuff said!" at the post-script. That said, there are some killer bas-reliefs on the base illustrating various PRC-sanctioned "movements" over the years.
The stolid architecture of the Soviet-era state buildings on the east & west flanks provided a proper counterpoint to the toxic fogs of our current hot war against ecological sustainability and reminded me that there are various strategies of policing the human condition, and they don't all need to involve tear gas, or bullets hard or semi-hard. Indeed the sheer majesty of the adjoining southern gate to the Forbidden City underscores the point mightily. Imperial ambition & arrogance neatly made material, outliving generations of semi-enlightened emperors and brutal empresses descended from the invading northern tribes of past ages as the majority of the indigenous Chinese simultaneously cowered, seethed & kowtowed to the sheer force emanating from within.
An inarguably potent symbol of the inequity of the preceding centuries, after the tide shift in 1949 it was very nearly razed by the new boss, with cooler heads in the PRC supposedly prevailing and preserving it, perhaps smelling my very yanqui dollars more than 50 years in the future. I have little to say to an apocalyptic tyrant such as Mao, but I will tip my stocking cap to his portrait over this move: well played, sir.
The small portion of the interior that is available at any given time to visitors is underwhelming, but the beauty and scope of its architecture is more than overwhelming at any number of visits. Supposedly well over 50% of the interior is under renovation at any given time and thus off-limits, but it is not hard to guess the truth beneath such a shell-game and wonder what the hell they are hiding in there that Chiang Kai-Shek didn't manage to smuggle out toward Taiwan as he fled with the moneys & the weapons in October of '49. The rooms that are accessible are small, and do a decent if unassuming job of displaying what appears to be well-preserved living quarters of the long-dead elites, as well as some decent artifactual displays following the lineage of the various Qing emperors. The plazas, eaves and even stairways outdoors easily trump these in their grandeur and symmetry, and I was well-pleased as well as well-freezed by the end of my self-guided tour.
Exiting the southern gates, I noted a line of flag poles proudly flying the Japanese as well as Chinese insignia, and wondered if I had missed something significant in my 'news blackout'! Our Great Wall guide later informed me that it was merely in honor of the visiting Japanese premier and nothing very extraordinary. I will nevertheless file under: you don't see that every day.
An attempted excursion to both the Drum & Bell Towers found the Bell Tower closed for renovation and a large outdoor rock & roll venue under active construction between the two. I was told by a native that the outdoor stage was - of course - in anticipation of the opening Olympic ceremonies, and that big time musicians were coming, as well as the Mayor. I tried to contain my excitement and proceeded up the remarkably steep stairwell to the top of the Drum Tower.
The top-most floor greeted us with many awesome ancient drums and a sign that forbade any striking of the drums; as a guitarist, I was unfazed by their totalitarian proscriptions. The large room contains several beautifully strange and old instruments of time-keeping via simple physical movements of the elements. I was once again struck by the uncannily fundamental nature of the drum that underlies our biology and collective muscle-memory, and tipped my cap to Mr. Brians & der Clxps as stand-ins for the drummer archetype within us all. How else do you keep time, space, or blood-flow absent the rhythm that sounds?
Upon the half-hour there was an inspiring re-enactment of ceremonial drum jams upon the old beasts, but I was even more struck by the paradox to my left: an intact & embroidered monster was righteously proclaimed by a plaque to be "The Biggest Drum in the World", its head made whole from an entire cow hide. But not 20 feet away was an even larger, older & busted drum; how did they make that one?
Having clearly reached the bounds of my drummer-knowledge, I carefully descended to the street level and caught a quick drink at the "Drum & Bell", which greeted me with friendly dart-board atmosphere straight out of the old American west, a bottle of Johnny Walker Gold Label on the shelf that was "not for sale", and an eerie shots menu that reminded me of my least favorite undergraduate adventures, as well as the fact that I was thankfully present in the early afternoon rather than 1:00AM during the tourist season.
An subsequent excursion to the classier joints surrounding placid Hou Hei Lake absolved all quandaries and I slept like a baby in love.
This Tourists' Edition is well-rounded by some impeccable "blue sky day" visits to both the Lama & Confucius Temples on the near north side of the city. The subway navigation to the Lama Temple was, briefly, illustrative: on a map it was perfectly simple - a major tourist monument lying just adjacent to a subway stop. But I once again miscalculated the sheer magnitude of the city blocks in Beijing, which were supposedly designed for pedestrians & bicycles once upon a time, but were clearly laid out with 60mph traffic in mind. During my visit I on several occasions walked three insanely long blocks in the wrong direction before giving up and interrogating a cab driver, and walked three insanely long blocks before giving up and later realizing that I was going in the right direction, but was another insanely long block or two away from my destination. The bottom line is of course get a good Mandarin/English street map (which I had), but also adjust your bearings to an eagle's view of a typical American neighborhood! Beijing is sprawled huge: like Chicago, but without the east-side water boundary, and with 1/3 as many blocks per city-miles. I will take hutong-life any day over this madness.
Regardless, the Lama Temple (Yonghegong Lamasery) is indeed one of the most tourist-populated sites I took in, and it kind of made me itchy. It is a seriously magical destination for both local and visiting Buddhists, and the composition is about 50/50 tourists and pilgrims. You are essentially viewing these once-in-a-lifetime monuments to Buddhist figures while standing aside true-believers burning incense and doing their most serious religious business right next to you. I was pretty uncomfortable, but still had to take in the seven temples, each holding a kingly shrine surrounding gigantic statues of Buddhist personae of increasing scale (photography within the temples was appropriately prohibited. The final one was as tall as my four-story apartment building, and either that or the one before it was supposedly constructed out of a single tree. All were amazingly ornate and painted in the purest golden colors. Magnificent.
I could dig more easily into the nearby Confucius Temple, having recently consumed the Analects and not ashamed to be photographed 'bro-ing down' with the solid thinker who was more a polite Machiavelli than a Lao Tzu.
I was very interested in the materialist historical magicks of the academic facilities, upon which many centuries of Ming & Qing society was structured according to the intense Confucian examinations that were the litmus test of getting anywhere close to the elite spheres of power. The 'lecture hall' grounds, surrounded by a vast moat-limned plaza, supposedly functioned upon a "telephone" system in which the current Emperor would lecture his nearby assistants, who would then start a whispering chain among the hundreds of students in assembly. I thought: we should try to do band rehearsal like that some time and then remembered we did, and it was awful.
A disturbing majority of the outdoor monuments within the temple grounds commemorated successfully suppressed rebellions against the prevailing dynasty, which gave me a dry chuckle that I then wanted to wet.
I have heard that the examination rooms were a real EC Comics affair, and many students either went insane or died while voluntarily absconding for weeks into their respective cubicles to prove their philosophical valor. I tried hard to find one but as far as I could tell all those relevant doors were locked tight.
Among the many amazing things that contemporary Beijing offers the American half-thinker, I was determined to fit in a "ground-level" rock and roll show before I departed, and managed to do so on the western New Year's Eve. As far as I can tell, the club D-22, located near Peking University on the far northwest side of the city, was the closest kin to where I would normally perform at home in San Francisco. My suspicions were confirmed but my expectations were a bit blown! A typical small, two-story bar with a balcony and modest stage, the D-22 bar was staffed by at least 50% native English speakers, and the audience held the most white faces I had seen during my entire trip. All in all, it was the only thing I experienced in Beijing that was essentially exactly the same as its American equivalent. The main difference was that instead of drinking bad beer, the undergraduate hipsters could order a bottle of Johnny Walker at the bar due to the intentionally undervalued currency in China. All the usual player were present: the large and egregiously drunk white man (no bouncers, whatever!), the casual musicians & musicians' friends 'enjoying' another day at the office, and...everyone else. I was struck by the sheer enthusiasm of the audience for a normal middle-brow rock show, but that could have easily been chalked up to the New Year's Eve magic as much as to them being genuinely hungry for it.
I caught the two headlining acts: Carsick Cars, and Ourselves Beside Me. The former was severely underwhelming, but I would blame at least half of it on the awful soundman who had the uninteresting drums and vocals above the interesting guitars for the duration. That jerk was straight out of my normal American noise tour nightmares, and he looked the part. The Cars did their part and the audience dug in accordingly.
Ourselves Beside Me, however, should book a US tour if at all feasible. They would go over just fine at any of my buddies' nigh-profitable rock shows here in the Bay area. The front-lady rocked some sort of sweet-cheap guitar that I couldn't quite place, and they had the admirable effect of driving a small but packed club to ecstasy with 'modest' stage presence, which always astounds me in a good way. The slow burn would build with equitable PA mix before a blazing lead overtook the dynamics in just the right way, like a bad Velvets bootleg. The songs made sense, the sounds made sense, they were clearly the hometown heroes, and this foreigner says 'yes'.
posted by elvis The photos in this final installment are a selective tour of several hutong, the traditional alleyways that were the foundation of Beijing dating back to the Yuan, Ming & Qing dynasties. They are of course being rapidly replaced by modern architecture and its associated comforts and aesthetics, for better and worse.
In conclusion, the heavy parallels between post-communist China & post-capitalist USA are on the table for anyone who cares to look, and they are ominous indeed: The tangible (literally - you could almost squeeze it) air pollution calls one's attention both to the past and future of the industrialized nations that got there first (but maybe not worst - we shall see). As I mentioned previously, there is nothing in America that can prepare you for this. Los Angeles on a bad day is minor league - you can see it on the horizon, but in Beijing you see it across the block. It is incessant, in the bone-dry 20F winter, even at night. I can only imagine what it is like during their highly desertified sandstorm season in the late spring, or in the pits of August. Perhaps I should try out for the marathon this Olympic round; my half-pack a day habit may gird the lungs relative to the pink-tissued pansies at the starting blocks under the Beijing sun.
Again, they have their "blue sky days" as well and it varies with the weather systems, but above all I am very glad I had this particularly apocalyptic experience. My perspective on the overall sustainability of our current petroleum orgy certainly wasn't changed, but it was underscored in a visceral way that I will value for a long time. You can search around and read a vast amount of discussion of China's impact upon the environment, and no doubt the korp narrative will turn to this increasingly as we move toward the Olympics this summer, but the basic summary rings loud & clear: China has made a big fossil fuel-based mess, and when the west yells at them to clean it up, they say: "fuck me? fuck you!" Their logic is not unsound: we did it first and arguably worst, and they, along with India, are merely playing catch-up with very similar rules. My empirical experience in Beijing draws a very distinct line between what the US has gotten away with thus far and what is looming for all industrialized nations in the very near future. The specific geography and methods that the US has chosen for its particular blackening/profiting experiment has - one way or another - afforded us a few more years of reasonably human pollution levels before it all goes to hell. But as the oil dwindles and Appalachia is leveled for the coal that lies beneath, the Capitol Mall will be looking like Tian'anmen Square on a bad day sooner than later. The lesson I took from this experience wasn't "China needs to clean up its act" but rather: "this is the near-term future of petroleum man, and boy are future generations screwed". Thus I, like many travelers, had my previously held paradigms enhanced & fortified rather than shaken.
The vectors of post-communist China and post-capitalist USA seem to be striking a heavy magick true tone and converging, with significant inertia, toward an intersection in the near future based upon controlled consumption conducive to both elite profiteering and largely non-violent pacification of the masses. I didn't watch any television in Beijing, but ignoring that admittedly significant variable, the fact that there was no pretense of democratic governance seemed uncannily insignificant. The carrot of increased consumption 'autonomy' hangs as heavily over Manhattan, or Atlanta, as it does over Beijing. It isn't even a degree of "the same difference" but rather no difference. The only thing better for the masters than a regular game of "meet the new boss..." is "boss? - what is that?" If you provide the correct illusion of steadily increasing 'prosperity' and its potential to a critical mass of a state population, governance become increasingly irrelevant and control can easily be left to those with the propensity to control.
Regardless of your current impression, the only real level of internet censorship in the PRC is the usual question of who actually has access to the internet; aside from the BBC and many blogs (who needs them?), everything else is readily available. Most 'blogs' that use a distinct domain rather than a blogger account, etc, have no problem getting through to whoever calls them up. The PRC certainly does select and punish domestic dissidents who are publishing online from within China, but so do many other governments, including ours, as well as Interpol, the RIAA, etc. The bottom line is the carrot of prosperity and inevitable march forward; as long as the carrot looms in sufficient relief, questions of democracy or associated liberties are a secondary concern. Sound familiar? If anything, I see a near-term inverse movement of more US-style control in China, and more PRC-style control in the states. The federal government here may move toward more overt selective censorship of information and (already underway) increasing surveillance of the civilian population and hard police tactics on resistance movements. The PRC, on the other hand, is clearly aiming for the type of huge 'soft power' enjoyed by the media monopolies that stay comfortably under the covers with the state in the current US system. I wouldn't be surprised at all if some form of "Chinese democracy" is unveiled in the next ten years that has all the legitimacy and associated debate of our current system. Try hard to see the Chinese Communist party allowing one additional "opposition party" to challenge them as anything different than what you are pulling levers for in November (hint: you have to try really hard).
There has been a good deal of noise in the wrong kind of right journals here about the impending Chinese menace in military and economic realms, and I have some thoughts on the matter, although they don't match up with well-paid bores at the Heritage Foundation. I do see a legacy of pre- and post-1949 solidarity that is virtually non-existent in the states these days. There is a value applied to work and the subservient end of hierarchy that has long since disappeared in a vapor of air-conditioned cable television and high fructose corn syrup on the east side of the Pacific. My values are far out of line from both models, mind you, but I am simply trying to point out that they don't play the state lotto in rural China. Although the aforementioned carrot of wealth now hovers always over the skyline of the cities, the essential contemporary American value of something for nothing just doesn't seem to apply. Within my general prognosis over the next few decades, this is all highly significant. Relative to the US, I see the Chinese population as both better prepared to endure the inevitable hardships associated with our collective expulsion from the Garden of Cheap Oil, and more likely to conform into a functional & coherent national movement when the proverbial shit hits the fan. Add to this their abundance of indigenous coal (which the US holds as well), and their potential alliance with Russia and its remaining oil reserves (well, we have Iraq as well), and there is indeed a serious 'threat' to US hegemony upon the western horizon. As the remaining oil supplies dwindle the ensuing alliances will be significant & portentous, but not necessarily surprising or novel. A 21st century & heavily nuclear Sino-Russian axis will give the New York Times a lot to chew on as the federal government makes its own domestic preparations for the petroleum end game. I can't help but see the Chinese population summoning a bit stiffer upper lip than the current crop of video game-bred poker-spectator fast-food drones we have littered across the continent. Keep in mind also that the Chinese have a long (2,000+ year) history of dealing with tribal/ethnocultural strife and are still a relatively coherent national body, whereas the federal government is still trying to sort out ending African slavery and decide whether or not 'illegal' South American slave labor is a very good or very untenable component to the new economy. Then, again, if they manage to keep the cable on and the doritos flowing here in the states, we could have a real hot stalemate on our hands...
In contemporary Beijing the fetishization of Mao Tse-Tung is not surprisingly still in full effect in any historical or cultural site draped with the necessary amount of state regalia. What is more striking is the lack of any materialist nods to the true godfather of the current systems: Deng Xiaoping. In the same way that our dominant narratives fetishize our "founding fathers" over the rest of the more relevant players, the ghost of Deng is content to lurk in the background as his seeds flower and produce new skyscrapers bowed to international commerce each new schmoggy day. It is not the lack of discussion of the blood on the hands of the pantheon - we all know what Mao, Chiang, Jefferson, Lincoln, et al, did - but rather the lack of discussion of the contemporary masters that is significant. It is always more acceptable to look toward the history books in any light than it is to examine the current captain and his crooked trajectories along a dwindling & increasingly poisonous sea. Mao may have starved 30 million human beings in the late 20th century; if there were 30 million Indians at the end of his barrel, Andrew Jackson wouldn't have flinched - progress, you understand. Beyond the schmog, the aetheric Mao and Jefferson share a stately portrait while Deng extends his hand to a smiling Rockefeller and the masses happily cringe like some (western) socialist cartoon from the '30s; let them eat internet.
These evolving narratives of nationalism over time stick in my teeth, but resonate in my chest enough to tell me they are important, not just for our understanding of our past, but to inform our decisions in the future. At this point it should be clear to even the most cynical neo-liberal cheerleader or proper world-systems analyst that the 21st century ride is going to desperately & bloodily graft 20th century models onto a quicksand-like materialist foundation, and not vice-versa. The stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we allow our states to tell us, will determine how effectively we triage this gushing motherfucker of a wound in the human & non-human ecosystem. It is not a matter of how well the majority of homo sapiens are eating as they enter the next century, but rather what we have to do now to limp a sustainable number of homo sapiens into the future to start work on the next model. The history of the human race up until now has been about power; all proper liberal notions are secondary to this narrative (and relatively recent developments). The next chapter must necessarily be about sustainability. This is not a value or choice, but an inevitability. There is one other option but the dinosaurs already tried that one without much success. Ganbei!
posted by elvis
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