An Outsider Inside
More notes from China.

Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor
July 23, 2001 12:20 p.m.

feel as though I am the only person in China that is not thrilled by the acceptance of Beijing's bid to host the Summer 2008 Olympic Games. Everyone here is jubilant. That, given the fierce nationalism of the Chinese, and their aching desire to be a normal country like any other, is understandable. Yet it is sickening to see the play the Communists are making with this. There is no doubt they regard it as a stamp of legitimacy on their horrible, cruel, and corrupt regime. Even worse is that few people here seem to notice this aspect of the matter. Arriving back in Changchun yesterday after a trip to the Korean border, as we entered my brother-in-law's apartment the TV was tuned to a gaudy stage spectacular titled "Salute the Red Flag," with more of those emetic songs praising the Party and identifying it with the nation, that I have written of before. With a dozen or more channels to choose from, this was apparently their viewing of choice. There was a strong "welcome the Olympics" theme — the wretched thing must have been in preparation for months. It is as obvious as anything can possibly be that the most pressing task for the Chinese people at this point in their history is to get rid of the Communist Party and acquire a rational, constitutional form of government. Even just from the point of view of economics, there are zero historical instances of full advance into a modern economy under one-party dictatorial rule. It has never happened, and it is not going to happen here. Yet the Chinese people seem to have their minds fixed on the bread and (Olympic) circuses their rulers arrange for them, and to be not at all inclined to do what ought to be done.

That is to some degree an unfair judgment of course. They will say, if you ask them: "What do you expect? Conditions are not bad, and are still improving. I have a life to live, and I just don't want to live it in a dungeon. Would you?" Chinese people, from millennial experience, think of politics as being something like the weather — you just have to put up with it and make the best of it. There is nothing you can do. The fate of the 1989 student movement confirms this, in their minds, though one could equally well argue that it proves the opposite. The Party is not loved, by anyone I have asked about it, but they have delivered some modest progress and prosperity, stand up for the nation against foreign ill-wishers, and pretty much any TV channel is showing some Party-patriotic extravaganza in prime time, or else a two-hour report of the production of hog bristles in Shanxi Province. I understand, I understand. Still, I wish I had not found my sister-in-law watching that dreadful program.

You have no doubt been asking yourself how your intrepid correspondent files his copy to NRO from remote parts of China. The answer is wang-ba. Wang means "web" and ba means "bar" (one of the very few loan-words in Mandarin). A wang-ba is an Internet cafe. They are all over the place in China — there must be dozens in Changchun. At any rate, when I enquired for the nearest one in this very ordinary residential neighborhood, it turned out to be just round the corner. You walk in, pay a tiny sum of money — about one U.S. quarter for an hour — and surf the web. Nothing seems to be blocked, though I confess I have done no systematic checking. Certainly NRO is not blocked. Before leaving New York I was apprehensive that I might not be able to find a wang-ba, having heard that the government was cracking down on them, had in fact closed 8,000 of them so far this year. I supposed, when I read this, that the crackdown was political — a way of keeping people in the dark about what's going on in the rest of the world. No doubt this is something to do with it; but having now frequented three or four of these places, I feel sure that the main motive is social, not political. The wang-ba is low life. The computers are stripped-down, beaten-up and grimy. You sit jammed in an unlit back room with a dozen other tube jockeys, practically all young men of the kind your parents (if you were Chinese) would warn you not to associate with. They have long hair, sometimes dyed surprising colors. They are round-shouldered and sunken-chested. They wear T-shirts bearing legends in English that do not quite make sense yet manage nonetheless to be mildly suggestive (SING PRECOCIOUS GIRLS). The air is thick with cigarette smoke. Pop music of the maximum-parental-disapproval variety (which in north China means Cantonese pop from Hong Kong) is being played much too loud through poor speakers. The youths — definitely "youths," not "young people" — converse in slang and croon hoarsely along with the music. Slutty looking girls wearing make-up and short skirts occasionally drift in. A wang-ba is, in short, the Chinese equivalent of a pool parlor. The whole institution labors under the further disadvantage that its name is almost a sound-pun for wang-ba-dan, a common Chinese curse, roughly equivalent to "s.o.b." No wonder there are campaigns against the wang-ba. May they never succeed. One of the minor dangers facing China is that it will degenerate into a big Singapore — drilled, hygienic, and boring as all hell. Let's hear it for low life. Support your local wang-ba!

I have always nursed some skepticism towards the idea that travel broadens the mind, having grown up with a man — my father — who was both well traveled and narrow-minded. There is no doubt, however, that if you have plenty of friends and relatives in the places you travel to, travel is a great corrective to the idea, rather common among journalists, that the only things that happen are the ones reported in the newspaper headlines. Alastair Cooke had a story I like about being in New York during WW2 while London was enduring the Blitz. After several days of reading headlines screaming LONDON IN FLAMES! Cooke managed to get a phone call through to his friends in London. "George, George, are you all right?" he yelled down the phone. George: "Well, my rheumatism's been acting up a bit…" So with China today. Falun Gong? WTO accession? The Hainan plane incident? Sure, you can get a conversation going on these topics (see below) but they do not loom very large in the minds of most people. Of much more pressing concern are getting the kid through her latest round of exams, recent developments in a long-running plan to get a better apartment, and whether Tianjin can shut out Sichuan in the soccer playoffs. Except at once-in-a-century moments of acute national peril, this is what life is like for most people. For journalists, who make their livings from the headline stuff, it is salutary to be reminded of this simple fact. Yes, I am on vacation.

Fifth Uncle has joined the Party. This emerged at a family banquet the other night. Everyone congratulated him. The whole thing had me baffled, I must admit. Fifth Uncle is the Uncle Vinnie of the family. In his late forties, he works installing heating boilers in buildings for a state-owned enterprise. He is broad and heavy in a slightly intimidating way, is always well turned-out, with designer glasses and hair en brosse, is exceptionally worldly, something of a fixer in fact, and is a devoted family man, with a wife who never seems to speak. In New York he'd be wearing pinkie rings. Why did he join the Party? I asked him straight out, but got only boilerplate in reply: "So I can make a better contribution to the modernization and opening of our country…" yada yada. I made further inquiries among family members. The bottom line is, his company offered it to him as an incentive, the way American companies give you a title (VP, Director) when they don't want to pay you more money. Is there anything in it for him? Well, being a Party member will get you some connections. It's like joining the Freemasons — helps smooth one's path through life. Also like the Masons, it comes with a tariff of time and money — in the case of the latter, five percent of your income. Perhaps that is how the Party will end at last: as an arcane, slightly comical secret society for middle-aged men.