Beijing Journal, Part I
A moral quandry over the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor
July 10, 2001 8:45 a.m.

Editor’s note: Part II of John Derbyshire’s Beijing Journal will air on Wednesday.

Beijing, China: Week of July 1st to July 7th, Part I
Having written a couple of pieces on this site in strong opposition to Beijing getting the 2008 Summer Olympics, I find myself in something of a moral quandary over here. I still don't want Beijing to get the Olympics, for the aforementioned reasons. On the other hand, here I am among Beijing friends and relatives, all of whom are treating us with unstinting generosity, all of whom I am dearly fond of, and all of whom desperately want their city to get the Olympics. Beijingers have a great sense of municipal pride — as well they might have, considering the transformation this city has undergone this past 20 years. (Yes, you can deplore the destruction of picturesque old neighborhoods if you like, and if you have never depended for your water supply on a standpipe shared by nine other families; but the Beijingers wanted a modern city, with skyscrapers and six-lane expressways, and they made one.) It seems harsh to want to deprive this kind, witty, hospitable people of a thing that would give them so much satisfaction, especially when one recalls how they supported the students in the 1989 uprising, and bore the brunt of the disgraceful army rampage that followed. Am I letting my tender feelings get the better of me? No, I still don't want Beijing to get the Games. I am, though, very nervous when the topic comes up in conversation, which it does two or three times a day. What if someone asks me: "Do you think Beijing should get the Games?" I'm not going to lie, but on the other hand I don't want to start a fight, or to cause distress and dismay to people who have treated me with consideration and kindness far beyond the call of duty. So far I have not been brought to the test; and since we only have a week in Beijing, I may escape altogether. In fact, the question whether Beijing should have the Olympics does not seem to have occurred to any of my kith and kin here. All they ask is: "Do you think Beijing will get the Games?" To which I reply, in perfect truthfulness: "Yes, I am sure she will."

Mysteries of the East: What is this thing with rolling up the trouser legs? When a Chinese man wants to relax and watch the passing charivari for half an hour, he sits on a wall with his back against a pillar, gets himself comfortable, lights a cigarette and then rolls up his trouser legs. Why? I asked Rosie. She: "I don't know. It's a guy thing. Why don't you ask them?" For some reason this is not as simple as it ought to be. I don't want to ask family, for fear they might think I am mocking them in some way. A stranger, then; but how to broach the subject? In a dumpling parlor this afternoon there was a man sitting on the far side of the room from us with his trousers rolled all the way up to mid-thigh, exposing a pair of white, scrawny, hairless and singularly unattractive legs. I was of a mind to go over and ask him about it, but chickened out. Shall report back on this one.

Anyone who thinks the Chinese Communist Party has withdrawn to some place out of sight so that the people of China can get on with their lives should have been here this first week of July. Sunday was the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Party, and you can't get away from the fact. Every night this week there have been TV spectaculars of breathtaking vulgarity extolling the CCP and its achievements. These shows feature meticulously choreographed formation dances, backed with garish light displays and periodically flooded with enough dry-ice stage mist to throw global warming into high gear. Totalitarian self-advertisement has, one gathers, advanced from Leni Riefenstahl to Busby Berkeley. In between the dances are desperately unfunny xiang-sheng (i.e. double-act) comedians, with punch lines pointing up the benevolence and omniscience of the Party. To delight the ear there are fat operatic types, their faces contorted in simulated emotion, belting out songs of unspeakable sentimentality and, when they descend to the realm of actual fact, mendacity. "Eighty years ago my country was born," gushed one fat tenor. Say what? Eighty years? China? But of course it has been a constant propaganda theme of the Party that they are the country. In fact, a little later, a large contralto woman with terrifying messa di voce and a dress that looked remarkably like the one Scarlett O'Hara improvised from the family drapes came on and sang that old evergreen from the seventies: "Without The Communist Party There Would Be No New China." This one I actually knew, having learned it for a college choral competition back in '83, so I sang along for a few bars:

Mother taught me a song:
'Without the Communist Party there would be no New China.'
This song
Flew up from Mother's heart —
This song,
As she roamed across
Our country's mountains and rivers.

At which point Rosie came in. "For heaven's sake, can you still remember that stuff?" It had been during one of those choir practices that our eyes first met. Yes, honey, I can still remember.

It's a cliché, but it's true: Traveling with small children in China opens up to you a whole new side of the national character. The Chinese have always been philoprogenitive, of course, but sentimental about children? Surely not. What about those stories of peasant women giving birth with a bucket of water next to the bed, so if the infant is female it can be quickly disposed of? What, for that matter, about foot binding, a gross form of child abuse? Well, I don't know; but I do know that Eleanor Muriel (8) and Daniel Oliver (6) are being spoiled rotten by absolutely everyone. At first they were alarmed when perfect strangers bore down on them in streets and parks, beaming, arms outstretched, cooing in Mandarin. They soon got the point, though, and now express unfeigned delight at each new shower of compliments and gifts. One old fellow took Ollie's hand, lifted it up with great tenderness, stroked the boy's forearm, and murmured: "Look at the color of his skin! So beautiful!" (Not an utterance you will hear much in the U.S.A. nowadays, I think.) The question of course is: how shall we ever re-acclimatize them to the humdrum disciplines of home and school after six weeks of being drooled over by every adult they encounter? Nellie, in the space of one week, has learned to simper. Oh, Lord.

At the entrance plaza to the Summer Palace we were approached by a man of about sixty, shabbily but cleanly dressed, who asked, in perfectly clear and grammatical English, if we wanted a guide. I thanked him and said we did not. He bowed diffidently and wandered away. From the style of his English — a style I have often heard in China — I would guess that he learned the language in his youth, probably for some academic purpose. He had the bearing and manners of an intellectual. Supposing him to have been born in 1940, he would have been 9 when the Communists came to power, 17 in the "anti-rightist" purges, 19 to 21 during the terrible Mao famine, 26 when the Great Cultural Revolution broke out. He was, in short, of that generation whose lives had been comprehensively wrecked by the communists. Probably he had made it as far as college graduation, had a year or two of suitable employment, then been sent down to the countryside to shovel manure for a decade, being "rehabilitated" too late in life to get a decent job. Later, walking round the lakeside in the shade of the trees (the loveliest long walk in Beijing), I wished I had hired him. He might, of course, have turned out to be a bore, a crank or a con man, but most likely he had some stories to tell. If you are visiting the Summer Palace and this old boy comes up to you, please hire him. Pay him what he asks, then tip him extravagantly and send me the bill, care of National Review.

Dinner-table talk with Uncle and Aunt. Uncle is a native Beijinger; Aunt, Rosie's mother's younger sister, is, like all Rosie's family, from the northeast (which nobody in China ever calls "Manchuria"). Uncle says Beijing has been overrun by immigrants from other provinces looking for work. At first they work very willingly for anyone that will hire them, for any wages they can get. Then, when they wise up and realize how much higher living standards are in the capital compared to what they have known out in the sticks, they become resentful and difficult. The city couldn't cope without them, though (here it starts to sound like a discussion of U.S. immigration). Each province or region develops its own employment niche. The Zhejiang people are good at petty street commerce, Henan people make the best construction workers, and so on. "How about us northeasterners?" asks Rosie. Uncle laughs. "Their specialty is crime."