China's infatuation with the West has brought it tabloid trivia, bad-boy rock stars, botched boob-jobs and a class divide. But it might also bring democracy and individualism. Where does China goe from here, asks Fintan O'Toole in Beijing.
The guy in the bright pink shirt and the sunglasses insists on speaking English, even though he's Chinese. His two friends and the waiter who's taking his order are Chinese too. He looks about 25 and he's obviously doing well for himself. His pals laugh at all his jokes and switch to English when he does, even though they speak it more haltingly.
It's Sunday evening in Beijing and he's taken them out for a European, to an Italian restaurant called, of course, O Solo Mio.
"This place is very authentic," he announces. He rolls his tongue around a few English descriptions of dishes on the menu, then reads out his choice with an expansive gesture: "This one, carbonara spaghetti." He runs his finger along the description: "Spaghetti with cream sauce, bacon, eggs and parmesan cheese. This is my favourite. I love bacon and eggs. They have it for breakfast, you know."
He leans back in his chair, basking in his friends' admiration. When his carbonara comes, a look of puzzlement passes quickly across his face, but he recovers in an instant and resumes his air of authority. Like many an Irish person who has flaunted a knowledge of exotic cuisine, he affects an exaggerated enjoyment of what he gets, even if it was not quite what he expected.
Beijing has a way of making you wonder about what is authentically western. Pop stars having tantrums over media intrusion into their private lives? Women risking their health to enlarge their breasts? House prices rising beyond the reach of ordinary families? Social inequality? Obesity becoming a serious long-term problem? Corporate slogans steeped in sickly sentimentality? If these are the markers of western civilisation, you don't have to be in China very long to know that its big, frantically growing cities are rapidly catching up with the West.
A fortnight ago, one of China's biggest rock stars, Dou Wei, whose avant-garde albums draw on influences ranging from reggae to The Cure, was questioned by police after an incident at the offices of the Beijing News. Infuriated by the paper's reporting on his girlfriend and his money troubles, Dou allegedly stormed into its office, threw water at a member of staff, and smashed a window, a television and a computer. The paper called some of his friends, who came to take him away. Two hours later, he allegedly returned, poured an inflammable liquid over a car belonging to a member of staff, and set it alight.
For many in Beijing, the story was far more interesting than the deliberations of the politburo of the Chinese Communist Party or the 40th anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards declared war on, among other things, "teddy boys", "flapper girls" and the decadent distractions of western music and fashion.
If Dou Wei's tantrum would not have been out of place on the front page of the Sun, much of the daily conversation in Beijing could be translated quite easily to a Dublin dining room or a Galway bus. Here, too, property prices have replaced the weather as the default topic. For the well-to-do, there is the chance to indulge in stories beginning with "I bought this apartment for X five years ago, and now it's worth Y . . ." For the majority, there is the familiar complaint that families for whom the state once provided accommodation now struggle to get a foot on the ladder. In the first quarter of this year alone, housing prices in Beijing rose by 17 per cent.
The problem is not that there is too little construction in a city such as Beijing, where men in yellow hats are everywhere, cranes dominate the skyline and huge areas of old alleyways (the hutongs beloved of film-makers but not always of their residents) are being replaced by aggressively triumphal tower blocks. It is that much of the building is not intended to meet the needs of the indigenous population. There is now an obvious mismatch between what investors want to build and what ordinary city-dwellers can pay. At the end of April, there were more than a million urban housing units on the open market. But only 12,000 of them were smaller than 60 square metres, the size that most Chinese families can afford. As a result, almost 70 million sq m of apartment space in China's cities is lying empty. Last week, the government acknowledged the scale of the problem and outlined a series of policy measures aimed at cooling the property market. That, too, has a familiar sound.
Other kinds of inflation are also causing concern. In a country which was wracked by devastating famines less than half a century ago and in which malnourishment is still a significant issue in the poorer rural areas, the western plague of obesity is now evident in the big cities. More than one in five Chinese adults and one in nine urban Chinese boys is obese. The reason is the same as it is in the West: too much fat in the diet. A glance through the window of the many branches of Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald's and Pizza Hut in Beijing, all of them full of Chinese diners, offers part of the explanation. Another part may lie in the proliferation of much-loved and devotedly fed only children because of the one-child policy pursued by Chinese governments since the early 1980s.
The other side of this disease is an increasing obsession with body image, as Chinese women bombarded with images of western female glamour try to remake themselves according to new standards of desirability. China now has around 1.5 million beauty salons, and the Chinese spend around €50 billion a year on beauty products. You can see ads for (supposedly) breast-enlarging creams on state TV. Breast enhancement has become a big and, in many cases, a dangerous industry.
One of the currently unfolding scandals concerns a colloidal liquid called Ao Mei Ding (which translates roughly as "man-made fat"), manufactured by a company in Jilin in the north-east and injected into the breasts (and in some cases hips and lips) of perhaps 300,000 women by small hospitals and beauty clinics. A few weeks ago, the State Food and Drug Administration, which approved the product in 2000, decided that it should be withdrawn because of "negative effects and consumer complaints". Those effects have included severe pain and disfigurement, in some cases necessitating the surgical removal of a breast. One of the enduring images of the modernisation of China in the early 20th century is the banning of the old practice of binding women's feet to make them small and therefore "beautiful". One of the abiding images of modernisation in the early 21st century may be a return to the deliberate distortion of women's bodies in the name of beauty.
At first glance, it can seem that China runs the danger of replacing one empty language with another. Forty years ago, the manic language of the Cultural Revolution was one in which words became almost entirely separated from meaning. As the China scholar, Rana Mitter, has written: "Terms such as 'class', 'bourgeois', 'demon' or 'capitalist roader' could take on whatever meaning a group or person in control chose to assign to them. 'Humanist' and 'compassion' could become hideous insults; 'destruction' could become a term of praise."
Now, wandering around Beijing, you come across a far less deadly but nonetheless striking emergence of the same phenomenon. English phrases are used, not to mean anything, but simply to signify modernity, trendiness, the cutting edge. China Mobile, one of the biggest mobile phone companies, assures its customers, with sickly sincerity, that it is "Reaching out from the Heart". A down-at-heel food shop has a sign that declares its name as "Live the Fresh Supermarket". Behind a plastic curtain lurks something called "Adules sex shopping". A packet of nuts carries the enigmatic but undeniably alluring promise: "How delicious it can not be forgotten, special taste, return ture flavour, Give You." An old man shuffles down the street in a T-shirt that says "Imperial Ridding and Ppolo Club."
Modernity speaks, but it's not easy to know what it's saying.
These symptoms of western diseases don't detract from China's extraordinary achievements over the last two decades since the opening up of its economy, and to some degree its society, to the rest of the world. The half a million foreign-owned or financed companies who have invested $560 billion (€439 billion) in China since the early 1990s have not done so, of course, out of altruism. They have made a collective profit of around $200 billion (€157 billion) after tax by using China's abundant labour and low wages to lower their manufacturing costs. But they've also directly provided jobs for more than 24 million Chinese people and contributed to average annual growth rates since 1978 of 9.6 per cent. That has helped to lift about 225 million people out of absolute poverty.
China's average income per head of population remains that of a relatively poor country, but its levels of life expectancy and literacy are now those of a middle-income country. No social change anywhere in the world over the last 20 years has been nearly as important.
At the same time, though, China has swung dramatically from the forced equality of the old Maoist system to a stark inequality. Women are two and a half times more likely to be illiterate or semi-literate than men, and thus far less likely to be able to compete for high-skilled, well-paid jobs. The cities are patently better off than the rural villages, where most of the population still lives: urban per-capita disposable income and urban consumption are well over three times those of the countryside. The World Bank estimates that inequality has risen by 50 per cent in two decades. The average income of the highest 10 per cent of earners is 11 times that of the lowest 10 per cent.
The 140 million rural migrant workers who are looking for work in the cities face official discrimination which deprives many of access to education, healthcare and social security and forces them to live in less desirable parts of the cities. Last week, Wang Guangtao, the minister for construction, announced the government's intention to abolish gradually these systems of discrimination, but with another 200 million workers expected to leave the land for China's cities over the next five years, the challenge will be immense and the fear that rural resentment will create instability is palpable.
ALL OF THIS should create some discomfort both for the West and for China's rulers. For the West, China's rapid absorption of so much of its culture has created a mirror that reflects back a sometimes unflattering image. If the deep-rooted official suspicion about decadent western influences is often justifiably seen as mere paranoia, it is nonetheless obvious that there are western influences that China could well do without. The assumption in the West that China's progress can be measured by the pace at which it becomes more like us begs questions that demand more complex answers.
For the Chinese authorities, too, the undesirable accompaniments of economic openness, the ills that come like an unpalatable sauce on a hearty dish, must be a source of discomfort, not just in themselves, but for the bigger questions they pose. If you can't have western investment and western know-how without also getting tabloid trivia, botched boob-jobs and a new class divide, what else might come as a hidden part of the package? Does the contract with the West have a hidden clause that includes democracy, individualism and political pluralism? And where does all of this leave the notion that fuelled China's 20th-century revolutions: national pride, the belief that China had been humiliated by the western powers in the 19th century and needed to change radically in order to be strong and distinctive again?
Stable as current political structures seem, it is clear that the changes China is experiencing can be disorientating even for absolute rulers. In some respects, it is already obvious, even in official political discourse, that censorship and authoritarian control are actually making it harder for the government to achieve its ends. At a local level, official media increasingly acknowledge that a lack of transparency and popular participation can lead to corruption and bad decision-making. At a national level, there are deep contradictions between government policies on the one hand and government actions on the action.
The issue of property prices is a stark example. On the one hand, the state is deeply concerned about the property bubble and anxious to slow the growth in prices. The Shenzen-based businessman, Zou Tao, who has launched a public campaign on this very issue, might therefore be seen as a welcome ally. He recently published an open letter on the internet calling for a three-year boycott of commercial property sales as a protest against what he sees as rampant speculation. Yet before he travelled to Beijing last week in the hope of meeting the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, he was detained for 10 hours at Shenzen Airport. An interview with him was then pulled from state television. Popular campaigning, even about concerns that the government shares, is still seen as innately problematic.
Likewise, in the cultural domain, it seems obvious that the best counterweight to a bland consumerist westernisation is a vigorous Chinese culture that generates its own stories and images. Yet the official response seems to be caught between, on the one hand, a hypersensitivity to what foreigners think and, on the other, an indifference to what anyone thinks. Thus, in the last week, we've had two contradictory reactions to movies. On the one hand, the authorities were so worried that brief shots of washing hung on balconies in Shanghai in the Hollywood blockbuster, Mission: Impossible III, might tarnish the image of China, that they ordered the offending scenes to be cut. Almost simultaneously, they themselves were doing real damage to China's image by forcing the withdrawal of the only Chinese entry in the official competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Lou Ye's Summer Palace had to be pulled because it failed to win the approval of the official censor. The reason given was that the film had "technical problems" but no one believed that the problems were not in fact political. The film deals with the lives of a young couple caught up in the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations.
These attempts at control may be as confused as they are misconceived, but the confusion is not without cause. It is never easy for middle-aged and elderly leaders to read the signals of a culture that is changing so fast that it finds it hard to read itself. Just north of Zhongnanhai, the complex that houses the headquarters of the Communist Party and of the governing state council, is the Lotus Market, a long strip of shops and bars that snakes around a lake. On Saturday nights, it teems with young revellers who stroll from bar to bar, trying to choose between the bewildering variety of musical styles on offer from the singers and bands who play there: bright Chinese pop, hard rock, disco, folk, even country and western. Milling along with the crowds, I wondered whether, if the breeze is in the right direction, the burble and blare ever drifts over the high walls towards the ears of officials burning the midnight oil.
If it did, it might sound cacophonous but hardly ominous. I sat for a while in one of the quieter bars, where a young man in a red T-shirt and blue jeans was strumming an acoustic guitar and singing soulful songs, looking a bit like a Chinese version of Bob Dylan from the era of The Times They Are A-Changin'. Behind him was a garish manga-style poster of a scantily clad woman with westernised features, advertising beer. In front of him, eight young people sat at either side of a table. They were not in couples. There were five boys and three girls, and the boys had to compete for the girls' attention. They did so mostly by playing a kind of rock/paper/scissors hand game, with the loser having to buy the next round of Heineken.
It was the kind of situation - youth, drink, gambling, sexual competition - that in Dublin would surely have led to a row, and possibly to a fight. But the kids had no more interest in a fight thanthey had in the singer's poignant melodies. They seemed just blissfully contented to be out on a Saturday night, with money in their pockets and nobody giving them grief. After the terrible upheavals of China's unhappy 20th century, it would be hard to blame them.
They reminded me of something I'd seen the day before. I was walking along the Gongrentiyuchang Beilu, a frantic boulevard flanked by office blocks and hotels. At the foot of a big hotel and business centre, there is a patch of green, with some grass and trees. From the trees, there was sound of birdsong so raucous and enthusiastic that it could be heard above the din of the traffic. I went to look, and sitting in the shade were five elderly men, chatting contentedly. At their feet were heavy blue cloth covers. In the trees above them, they had hung birdcages. In the cages, the birds were almost, but not quite, out in the open, able to see the trees and the sky and to feel the sun and the breeze, still confined but happy not to be stuck inside.
Fintan O'Toole will be writing from China in The Irish Times every Saturday