China

An Introduction to the Culture and People

Kai Strittmatter, Stefan Tobler, Stefan Tobler

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781907973314
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

It's time we got to know a little more about the Chinese. Did you know they don't eat soup, they drink it? That their surnames come before their first names? That their good sense is to be found not in their heads but in their hearts? Or that white is their colour of mourning? This guide to avoiding the numerous pitfalls of Chinese etiquette is both amusing and informative. The writer and journalist Kai Strittmatter lived and worked in China for ten years. This amusing, affectionate and perceptive book provides a fascinating guide to this lively, sociable and friendly people and their complex and often contradictory society. As the author says: "Be prepared for everything when you come to Beijing. It really is unbelievable what can happen here." The new material in this edition takes a critical look at the challenges posed by this, the next global superpower.

	Xiao tie shi
	Final tips

When you return to Beijing

Don’t be surprised if the ‘Beijing feeling’ starts to creep up your spine. Once a European composer returned to the city he knew from his days as a student. ‘It’s crazy,’ he stammered, after he found his voice again. ‘You come back just two years later – and Beijing no longer exists. Gone, vanished. Instead there is a new city, and it is also called Beijing.’

The city does not merely shed its skin, it’s about to remove its very core. Visitors like to call it dynamism, but for many inhabitants it is a cross they bear: they cannot keep pace with their own city. Foreigners least of all. In the West you call a restaurant to reserve a table for that evening, in Beijing you call up first too – to make sure the restaurant still exists. Perhaps you think I am joking. So do our friends, until they visit us in Beijing. One couple stayed with us for a month. On Christmas Eve we set off for a feast in the famous Hot Pot King restaurant. At first we thought we must have got its address wrong. We hadn’t. But on the spot where the restaurant should have been we were greeted by a giant construction pit. We went to the Golden Mountain Village instead, where the food is just as delicious – two weeks later it was demolished as well. As was our favourite Japanese restaurant soon afterwards. It has been going on like this for years. I have given up counting how many times I stood in front of gaping pits. I just fondly remember some of my favourite places that are now gone for good: a cosy noodle bar here, an old theatre there – in exchange for which the city now has Asia’s largest office and shopping block (a building that in the ideal world of my dreams would be reason enough to take urban planners and architects to court). Yes, that Beijing feeling. It is an offshoot of the Beijing rule that bad-tempered gods have cursed the city with. The rule goes like this: ‘(1). Nothing lasts. (2). Certainly not beautiful and homely things.’ There is no need to cultivate the Beijing feeling, it ambushes you every time you find a new little wonder: a courtyard house from a century long past, an enchanting lakeside bar. These are little oases that leave you speechless. Out of joy? Only partly. Something creeps up your spine, floods your chest and takes your heart in its pincer grip – fear. Fear, worry and sorrow, as if you were looking at a dead man walking. This once imperial city is erasing itself to prepare for reincarnation: as a profitable, modern, ugly, planless city.

But wait, there is news of a plan. The city government called together 200 academics and 70 research institutes to swap ideas. A high-ranking member of the city’s planning commission presented the results to the public in 2005. As China Daily wrote: ‘The revised plan introduces the concept of “building a society suitable for living” as the city’s development target for the first time.’ In case you missed that: building a society suitable for living. For the first time – 800 years after the city was founded, six decades after the People’s Republic was established. That is the kind of city this is, that is the kind of people who run it.

I called it the Beijing feeling, but actually it can overwhelm you wherever you are in China. How did it come to this intoxication with speed, this orgy of change for change’s sake? Did it need a country that had stagnated and trodden water as long as this one had? A hundred years ago people complained that you could not move a table in China without blood being shed. China today: there is no lack of profit or excitement, just sometimes of clear thinking, and always of soul.

Secret tip 1

Close your eyes, and you will soon feel at home in Beijing again. No, you won’t recognise it with your nose either – not since the last of the Uighur kebab sellers were driven off the streets. But your ears … just prick up your ears, can you hear it now? Your taxi driver, who soundtracks the journey from the airport to your hotel with a monologue of curses; the ebb and swell of cicadas chirping in the trees when you get out of the taxi; the celestial wailing of a turning flock of pigeons equipped with little whistles on their legs by their breeders; the cheerful chaos that rings out from the neighbouring restaurant. And finally, in your room: that glugging of the hot water pipes, as if the building has got wind, that you nearly forgot; that familiar hammering from next door and the dearly loved scream of a drill from the floor below. Ah, back in Beijing.

And now: bury your head under your pillow.

How to cross a street in China

China’s drivers don’t learn to drive on city streets, but on specially-created training grounds outside the cities. Anything else would be too dangerous – for the driving instructors. Their safety is of utmost importance as they will supply the fresh crop of drivers to replace all those former learners who usually waste no time in forcing each other off the roads. To judge by appearances, the driving schools work with the latest teaching materials from Rome and Mogadishu, while taking into account ‘Chinese characteristics’. (The fact, for example, that the lights on buses and other large vehicles over 7.5 tonnes are to be turned off punctually at nightfall.) The following manoeuvres are taught: taking the right-hand lane to turn left; taking the left-hand lane to turn right; staying in the middle, and still turning off. Then there is simple overtaking on the curb side, as well as overtaking while cutting into the cycle lane; which again is followed by ‘advanced curb-side overtaking’. That allows you to mow down not more than two cyclists on a sunny day (the exception for rainy days can be viewed in the relevant government departments). As an accommodation to the Chinese love of flocking together you are finally taught freestyle-crossing at central traffic nodes. This requires firstly all the cars to end up as entangled as possible, and secondly the disregard of all rules of logic and self-interest. Creating a traffic jam in Beijing long after midnight will bring bonus points and a honourable mention in the newspapers’ sports pages. This is a popular exercise for advanced learners and normally all that it calls for are two vehicles moving towards each other at an empty crossroads. They then form the core for the docking manoeuvres of the other cars.

Learners must also pass a written driving test. Around 110,000 people a year die on China’s roads, according to Guangzhou’s Jinan University. That is world record, both in absolute terms and in relation to the number of cars. It comes as no surprise then that in the Chinese film, The Test Family, a driving examiner asks the candidates: ‘Suddenly you see a pedestrian and a dog in front of you – which one do you run over: the person or the dog?’ (The right answer being: ‘Neither, you brake.’) Army and embassy staff are exempt from driving school.

Traffic in Chinese cities is living (well, mostly living) Darwinism. Down at the bottom you can find the grey-haired backwards-walkers creeping through the jungle of streets: easy prey. Then come the average forwards-walkers. They form an amazingly robust species that does not let traffic lights, fences or approaching cars divert it from its migratory behaviour; it holds its ground through the strength of its numbers. A little higher in the chain come the few remaining cyclists, who once in Beijing’s distant past inhabited the savannahs of the city; then come the tricycle riders that frustrated policemen enjoy chasing because they cannot turn easily and generally offer their throats submissively to hunters. Above them on the evolutionary scale comes (a) the car-driving young bloods; (b) the mandarins hovering behind their Mercedes’ tinted windows; and (c) the lorry drivers, who fly somewhere beyond good and evil. (‘It’s still smoking’ is a good enough reason in China for a lorry to be considered roadworthy.) The above-mentioned military and embassy drivers are right at the top of the pyramid, without any natural competitors. They are allowed to overtake on pavements and to bag a maximum of three traffic policemen per day. For everyone else driving a car in China is not unlike a video game. Our tradition of concentrating on the road in front of you is taboo in China. Instead you must use 180-degree vision, keeping track simultaneously of every moving object and all the gaps between them, as if you were watching a radar screen. This enables you to slalom instinctively through the flood of metal. Thankfully traffic in Beijing flows sluggishly, sometimes excessively so. China Daily recently reported a traffic jam in north Beijing that the police took ‘two nights and three days’ to remove.

Secret tip 2

For pedestrians: always look both ways before you cross the street.

For drivers: if you return to your homeland after many years’ driving in China, for God’s sake don’t sit in a car. Contact your probation officer immediately, he will guide you through the rehabilitation programme to which you are entitled.

Where English is spoken

Congratulations to all of you who were planning to use drugs or visit prostitutes in China. Wise move to wait until after 2004, that being the year when the Chinese police, at least on paper, renounced the use of torture. Or rather, it is no longer worthwhile to torture suspects because the courts officially no longer recognise confessions extracted under torture. However, according to the new rules, this only applies to minor ‘administrative crimes’ like those mentioned above. Burglars, saboteurs, followers of religions whose practice includes certain gymnastic exercises and other hardened criminals are advised to go and find themselves a different field of operations.

More good news: foreigners in police custody now have the right to an interpreter. The police in the capital are even busy learning English themselves. After all, the 2008 Olympic Games with all its exciting possibilities for intercultural interrogation has only just died down. In Beijing’s bookshops you can buy the ‘Olympic Security English’ textbook that was written to prepare China’s police force for every eventuality. In the very first chapter an observant constable comes across a rather clueless foreign reporter who, in answer to the question of what he is doing, replies in all honesty that he is working on a story about the outlawed Falun Gong sect. ‘But Falun Gong has nothing to do with the Games,’ the policeman instructs him. ‘It’s beyond the limit of your coverage and illegal,’ and promptly escorts the journalist to the police station, ‘to clear up this matter’. Cooperative foreigners would also do well to learn the book’s dialogues. In the conversation ‘We stop a stolen car’ on page 121 a British woman called Helen is dragged out of the car and off to a police station. ‘You’re violating my human rights!’ she protests. The trained constable’s correct answer: ‘No tricks! Don’t move!’

Once you really immerse yourself in the role-plays, you will soon realise that the polyglot policewomen can be both vigilant and empathetic. One policewoman, for example, confronts an Afghan who has broken into an American’s hotel room. The Afghan wants to take his revenge for the bombing of his homeland, where his family lost their lives. ‘We feel sympathy for your misfortune,’ she comforts him, before continuing in a tougher vein to say that this is still no reason to harass innocent Americans, ‘especially during the Olympic Games’.

The guardians of law and order can also make foreigners happy. They return the wallet that a tourist had left in a taxi. ‘It’s really incredible!’ exclaims tourist Joe Kennedy on page 55. ‘A lost wallet can be recovered! Only in Beijing can this be possible!’

Secret tip 3

Be prepared for everything when you come to Beijing. It really is incredible, the things that can only happen here.

If you are planning a trip

Fetch your diary and make a note of three dates: the Spring Festival (in January or February, the exact date changes according to the moon calendar), Labour Day (1 May), and the National Holiday (1 October). Then take a red pen and write in big letters besides those dates: STAY HOME! Because that is when the Chinese travel. All of them at once – well, almost. The Chinese Ministry of Railways was proud to announce that it had carried over 149 million passengers last Spring Festival. They will all be sitting in your carriage. At least, that is how it will seem to you if you ignore this warning.

Travel is a relatively new development. For 50 years the Chinese working class did what it did best: it worked and worked, and then it worked some more. Sometimes for a change the workers would cheer on their great leaders. The word ‘vacations’ did not exist. Then in 1999, exactly half a century after Mao liberated China, a new revolution arrived. China was given holidays: a week off at each of the three dates listed above. Since then even the urban proletariat has been gripped by the travel bug. Former textile factory workers, cooks and taxi drivers do something completely new: they travel. They march into travel shops, ask for as long a flight as possible, and find themselves airborne for the first time in their lives, begging their neighbour for the window seat on their way to Yunnan, where China borders the Golden Triangle. At least, that is what my wonderful cleaning lady did in 2002, for the first time in all her 65 years. On arrival Mrs Yang and her husband were treated to colourful spectacles by minority peoples, as well as fried scorpions and pickled tree bark for supper, a risqué dance show by Thai transsexuals, overpriced tat in the shops and great opportunities to pose in front of elephants and pagodas of all sizes. A real package holiday, in other words. ‘Flying was the best bit,’ she told me happily afterwards, giggling as she showed us her souvenir: a DVD of the transsexuals’ show. She wants to go on a trip again soon.

Going on holiday is even a patriotic act now. Every yuan that Mrs Yang spends is a service to her country. China’s rulers want its people to bring their savings into circulation in uninhibited holiday spending on trains, hotels, Polaroid photos, laughing Buddhas carved out of jade, silk carpets and talking stamp albums (‘Hold high the banner of Deng Xiaoping Theory’). The planners have even invented a phrase for this: the holiday economy. It is a wonderful thing. If you like to row oar-to-oar on the misty West Lake, be pushed off the Great Wall, asphyxiated in the Forbidden City and not be able to catch a glimpse of the sea for the mass of black rubber tyres in which summer holidaymakers are merrily rocking tummy-to-tummy (‘cooking dumplings’ is the Chinese expression for this). Nor can you have such a holiday without a fight for the best, the only spot for that most important event: the solemn pose for the camera.

Secret tip 4

How can I mingle with a Chinese tour group and not attract attention?

Pack a week’s rations of melon pips, fruit, beef jerky and eggs pickled in tea and, above all, all your living relatives into a bus. If you are going off for more than an afternoon, double the rations.

Then take pictures of every rock, tree and foreigner that crosses your path. Don’t take any of these photos without placing yourself or your mother/daughter/aunt/grandmother in the picture – better yet, they can all take turns to be in the picture. No matter how deep the drop is from the rocky ledge you are balancing on, stand as straight as a People’s Army soldier as you stare into the camera, thumbs on trouser seams (alternatively, young women may hold their fingers out in a cheeky V for Victory). While other foreigners are still taking pictures of the old pagoda on the mountain, turn to the actual photogenic scene: the giant VW Polo billboard on the other side.

Ask at least every two hours for hot water to pour on the tea leaves in your jam jar.

Climbing one of the sacred 10,000-foot peaks or a dilapidated part of the Great Wall, make sure if you are a woman that you wear at least three-inch heels, and if you are a man that you roll your trousers up over your knees and your shirt up to your armpits so that you can beat out a rhythm on your stomach during picnic breaks.

Always follow the guide’s megaphone. It can generally still be heard over half a mile away, piping out ‘My heart will go on’. Be careful to not follow any of the other 12 megaphones blaring ‘My heart will go on’.

Don’t be surprised if you are greeted in the lobby of a top hotel by a two-layered Glockenspiel, where traditional European figures circle around the top layer as they do on the Swiss Centre’s famous Glockenspiel in Leicester Square, while on the second layer Walt Disney’s Seven Dwarves dance around Snow...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Shi
• Zhi nan zhen
• Zhong wen
• Huang
• Mao dun
• Cha bu duo
• Jia
• Ming pian
• Zhong guo
• Ma jiang
• Re nao
• Yun dong
• Xian
• Jia yu xue
• Chao
• Chi
• Kuai zi
• Yin yang
• Cha
• Gan bei!
• Niu nai
• Yin shin an nu
• Ren
• Ye wei
• Xiong mao
• Si hai
• Hong ta shan
• Guo jie
• Jing ma
• Su zhi
• Luan
• Gong de
• Kong zi
• You shi
• Xuan chuan
• Jin Dun
• Guo hua
• Jia
• Ren quan
• Mei you
• Lao mo
• Gong chan zhu yi
• Tong zhi
• Zhong shan zhuang
• Mei
• Xiao zi
• Shi san yi
• Er nai
• Zi you
• Xiang ti zhu
• Huang huo
• Lao wai
• Cheng yu
• Xiao tie shi
• Zhong