Beijing Journal, Part II
How China has improved.

Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor
July 11, 2001 8:25 a.m.

Editor's note: Part I of John Derbyshire's Beijing Journal aired yesterday.

E-mail John Printer-Friendly E-mail a Friend Derb's Archive

Beijing, China: Week of July 1st to July 7th, Part II
Tiny things that I love about China, series #829: The way a Chinese girl emits a little "Eh!" of surprise when she turns round and realizes she has been standing on line next to a foreigner. Also, the way she drops her eyes and puts a hand over her mouth when you make her laugh. Also ... this is going to need a whole column to itself, though. In fact, it needs a book ... which, now I come to think of it, I have already written (glance to your left). But enough of these personal obsessions.

If you have time to see only one of the sights in Beijing, see the Temple of Heaven (Tian Tan) complex. Whenever I come here, the beauty and harmony of the place soothe my soul and ease my spirit. Tian Tan has, in fact, tremendous spiritual gravitas, the way the old European cathedrals do, and is, by Chinese standards, surprisingly unspoiled. Get there early, before the tour buses arrive, and just soak it in. The Temple complex was part of the great burst of building activity that took place during the reign of the YongLe Emperor in the early 15th century. That was the Ming dynasty, the last truly Chinese dynasty, and the last one to restrict its administrative ambitions to those territories actually inhabited by Chinese people. It was followed by the perfectly uncreative Manchu dynasty, a Siberian tribe who never had an original idea between the lot of them, and who extended the bounds of their realm far beyond metropolitan China, thus establishing the rickety, resentful empire the Communists still insist on calling "China" today. And even here, in the Temple complex, a place that ought to be kept holy and pristine, the Communists have left their thuggish mark. To the west of the Good Harvest Temple I came across a large display of flowers in pots. The flowers had been arranged to show, against a red background, a lurid yellow hammer and sickle, and the legend: "1921-2001." These vandals; these brutish, ignorant vandals.

Phrases you will hear often in a modern Chinese city, series #423. I went to the Bank of China to change some traveler's checks. Uh-oh: "Dian-nao huai-le!" (The computer's down.)

To the WangFuJing bookstore to buy books for the kids, in yet another doomed attempt to get some Chinese into their silly heads. Children's books? Third floor. Coming off the escalator on three, we were confronted with a row of giant portrait posters hung from the ceiling. Left to right: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Sun Yat-sen, Mao Tse-tung, Liu Shao-chi, Chou En-lai, Chu Teh, Deng Xiao-ping. The first time I came to this bookstore, in 1983, there was a similar display, but only showing the first four of these worthies (called "the four beards" by the Chinese, whose language does not distinguish between a beard and a mustache). In a jokey mood, and desperate to get rid of my last Chinese currency (perfectly nonconvertible at that time) I actually bought one of each and took them home with me to England, where they later got lost in a move. Eighteen years later, those four look exactly the same, and the pantheon has grown.

Daytime TV in China. The 25 cable channels I checked at a random time between 9:30 and 10:00 on a Friday morning were showing the following.

An MTV-type show with music videos.
A "product placement" interview program.
More music videos (Chinese pop is terrible).
Golf, with English commentary.
A soap opera set in the military.
A family soap.
An old movie about the revolution.
One of those Busby Berkeley dry-ice spectaculars advertising the CCP.
Financial news.
An old black and white movie from the 1950s, cloaks & daggers in pre-revolutionary Shanghai, struggles of the early Party.
A program about jewels.
A modern propaganda movie, the Party saves the day down on the farm.
Health program.
Propaganda show on behalf of the military.
Mao movie. (That is, a movie about the revolution, with an actor playing the part of Mao. There are so many of these, it's a whole genre, and a couple of actors seem to have done nothing else for years but play Mao. Some of these movies are quite good, though of course the history is all twisted.)
Another Mao movie!
Highbrow "dramedy" about urban professionals. No visible politics.
Lowbrow sitcom, very slapstick, no politics.
Soccer, Chinese commentary. The Chinese, the young men at any rate, are soccer-mad. In a dinner-table conversation, I mentioned that I had once lived in Liverpool. "It's a big port city in north-west England," I added helpfully. The men all laughed. "We know that! Liverpool — great soccer team!"
News.
Propaganda movie.
Kids' program.
Imported soap (Australian?) dubbed into Chinese.
Kids' program.

This evening, Friday, we boarded the overnight express to Changchun, up in Manchuria, where Rosie's father and brother live. We ride soft sleeper, which costs as much as the plane but is far more civilized. The kids grab the top two bunks and have the time of their lives up there throwing pillows and duvets around. Their entire experience of rail travel to date has been the Long Island Railroad commuter train — they have never seen a compartment locomotive. This is the high point of the trip for them so far: "Are we really going to sleep here? Really?" ... except that there is no one in the compartment to coo over them, Mom and Dad being way past the cooing stage. The lie-zhang (woman in charge of this carriage) does her best on her occasional calls to see if we need anything, but she is too young to coo properly. Chinese trains are far more pleasant than they were 20 years ago. The lie-zhang always used to be a dragon, hired (apparently) for her pinched, suspicious face, sour nature, and more-than-my-job's-worth refusal to contemplate stepping outside the rules by even a millimeter. On one memorable occasion in 1986, Rosie and I, recently married, were riding soft-sleeper together in a carriage whose lie-zhang had it fixed in her mind that I was, in fact, engaged in violating some Chinese equivalent of the Mann Act. Our wedding certificate failed to convince her, and she actually put a radiophone call through from the moving train to the Civil Affairs office we had got married in, a hundred miles away. By pleasant contrast, this new breed of lie-zhang is pretty, dressed in a smart flight-attendant style uniform, smiles, asks politely to see our tickets and passports, and actually seems not to mind us being on her train! No doubt about it, China has improved.