The brown peril
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 12: Hot Air
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Chip Rolley
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As a student of Mandarin at Beijing's Tsinghua University in 1999, I made almost monthly visits to the home of a retired academic, who would arrange the purchase of books for my university's library. Visits with Mrs Liang and her husband were always occasioned by pangs of fear; fear that I might mangle my Mandarin or find myself sitting in awkward silence, unaware they were awaiting a reply to a question they'd asked. These visits were lessons for me not only in modern standard Mandarin but in modern Chinese etiquette.
My health and weight would be scrutinised by the pleasantly plump Liang and a seafood dinner would be promised. "You have wonderful seafood in Australia," she allowed. "But you don't know how to cook it. You wash it and wash it and wash it until there is no more flavour." Meanwhile, bowls of individually wrapped snacks would be pushed my way while I'd freeze under the arctic blast of their Fujitsu wall unit and slide off the plastic-covered leather chairs. Liang's home was, by Western standards, a humble flat. But it was very comfortable and well appointed and Liang was clearly proud of all it represented about herself, her family and what was available in China today. She was an ambassador extraordinaire for the gaige kaifang (reform and opening up) period, launched by Deng Xiaoping in the wake of the Cultural Revolution.
"What do you think of my home?"
"Lovely." (My Chinese friends described anything remotely good as "lovely".)
"Is it too warm? We can adjust the air-conditioner."
"How convenient," I'd marvel, staring at the remote. (If something's not "lovely", it's "convenient", perhaps the ultimate compliment in a society too long accustomed to the opposite.)
Every time I visited, she made sure I noticed her hardwood floors. "The timber is from Indonesia," she'd attest, stamping the floor with her stockinged foot.
The aspiration of middle-class urban Chinese is not so much a four wheel drive as it is a hardwood floor.
FAST FORWARD FOUR YEARS AND I AM TEACHING ENGLISH IN SHANGHAI. It's hairy crab season. Mr Wu, my landlord, stands at the door of my flat with a plastic bag full of crabs, some struggling for freedom from the hemp twine that binds them. "These males are intense! Real fighters!" he laughs, rushing them into the kitchen area. But it's the two females that will offer up the delicious roe that is the ambrosia of the hairy crab. After Mr Wu takes command of the wok and boils the fighters alive, we settle down to eat. A sweet soy and rice-vinegar sauce completes the ultimate Shanghai culinary experience. The best hairy crabs from Yangcheng Lake are shipped overseas and to Hong Kong, leaving locals scrambling for counterfeit Yangcheng crabs. (DVDs and handbags aren't the only fakes sold in China and the local fisheries department had to devise an authentication tag for genuine Yangcheng crabs. The tag itself was later said to have been immediately counterfeited.) Mr Wu is not even pretending to be offering me Yangcheng crabs. "These are farmed," he says.
"When I was a child, we used to catch everything straight from the Huangpu and eat it that night," he says, as he demonstrates the finer points of sucking the juicy meat out of the creature. It shouldn't be this easy to find someone nostalgic about the 1960s, when the Cultural Revolution ripped apart China's social, economic and cultural fabric. But here's my landlord (my landlord) glowing about life's simple pleasures when he was a boy and everyone was equal. He talks about how people used to leave their doors unlocked. "There was nothing to steal!" he laughs. And he rattles off a list of species he and his father would catch in the river that snakes up around the heart of Shanghai, past the Bund and out to the East China Sea. "You couldn't fish there now. If you did, you'd get very, very sick."
Mr Wu did not always bring crab, but he would often settle in for a chat when he made his bimonthly visit to collect the rent for the modest flat I took up while I was teaching in local city high schools. It was a shabby building far enough from the heart of the old French Concession (the hotbed of expat Shanghai) and smack in the middle of urban Shanghai daily life. Real Shanghai, I'd tell myself.
Unlike the manicured tree-lined streets of expatland, or the shopping arcades of boulevards to the north, there was life on my streets. Real life. Every manifestation of it. My window on the thirty-first floor gave me the industrial view of the gantry cranes at the Jiangnan Shipyard, Shanghai's hub industrial port. The new extension emerged above People's Hospital Number Nine as hammer clanked against metal and sparks sprayed twenty-four hours a day in a furious rush to meet the deadline.
My route to one of the schools led me through the morning ablutions and breakfast chats of those of my neighbours who could not afford a high-rise flat. So many seemed to live on the street, especially in the blistering, withering summer months, when de rigueur street wear is pyjamas (from thin diplomat-style to patterns of Winnie the Pooh, Hello Kitty and every flower you can imagine). This one sings out the hack-and-spit morning call of China while that one tucks into a fried bread stick dipped in soy milk and another squats over the gutter, bowl in hand, brushing his teeth.
When I'd assign my students the environment as a "conversation" topic, they'd drone well-rehearsed monologues about how clean the air has become in Shanghai. I'd glance out the classroom window and on some days could not see across the street for the smog.
On another rent-collection visit, a stinking hot day in spring, Mr Wu grabs my shoulder. "You know, we never had these temperatures when I was a boy, 35, 37, 38 degrees. Shanghai never had this kind of heat, even in the summer. Some summer nights you'd have to get a blanket!"
Life has changed for Mr Wu over the past twenty years. China has experienced two decades of extraordinary economic growth and cities such as Shanghai have reaped the benefits – better roads, green-belt parks, better plumbing and shops and boutiques lining its tree-lined boulevards, offering all the capitalist consumerist world has to offer. But even in Shanghai which, according to detractors, has attained its privileged position on the back of poor peasants in the countryside, change has not always been an improvement.
In real Shanghai, I needed the tips I garnered from local teachers at the schools about how to shop in the wet markets and on the street. It's a culture that survives on rumours and secrets about scandals that are never reported, or when they are, too late to be helpful. Both river fish and sea fish are risky, I learned. Some might say the river more so than the sea, given the sea's infinitely complex ability to dissipate contamination and cleanse itself. But precisely because the rivers have become so polluted – widely rated as the most toxic in the world – river fish are farmed in a cleaner environment than the sea fish. Or so we're told.
"Always watch the local women in the wet markets. They'll be the first to know what's wrong with what fish. Shop where they shop."
"Be careful of the rice you buy. There have been reports that some is soaked in sump oil to make it shine."
"And never buy from street stalls." Just a few months before I arrived, there were reports that some street vendors selling "smelly tofu" were making the fermented bean curd out of plaster and white paint.
Living in real Shanghai was a lot of work. But a lot less than in other parts of China. The environmental cost of China's development is felt across the country. Sometimes softly, in a nostalgic lament; at others, violently, as guerrilla grannies take to the streets.
IT'S A SPRING DAY IN HANGZHOU PROVINCE, AND A YOUNG LOCAL INTERNET WRITER joins me on an island-hopping journey on the famously scenic West Lake. We've met through friends and our sightseeing is an opportunity for him to tell me some of what's been going on – and about which papers can be relied upon and which cannot. Peasant uprisings and rural discontent are foremost in his mind. He tells me the story of nearby Huankantou village, which had recently fallen under a media blackout after villagers rioted in protest about a local chemical factory. Some said it was built on contested land and others said it was the cause of deformities in newborn children. A brigade of local grannies were later reported in the international press to be showing visiting journalists their trophies from the conflict – battered police helmets and riot shields they'd seized from the police, who scurried away.
How does one give a sense of the discontent, the unrest in China today? According to official statistics reported by China's Public Security Bureau, in 2005 alone there were 87,000 "mass incidents" (to employ the government's Orwellian parlance). There were 74,000 the year before.
A number of these incidents were centred on grievances about inadequate compensation (sometimes due to embezzlement) for homes and livelihoods destroyed by large-scale development projects. Others, as in Huankantou, focused on aspects of the environmental contamination that has become a feature of China's development.
According to The Wall Street Journal, in Qingzhen in the southern province of Guizhou, contamination from a coal-run power station and a chemical factory has polluted the water system, not only causing visitors to gag at the smell, but possibly leading to a number of cases of nervous shaking fits and stomach cancer. The local rice reportedly turns the water it is washed in black and tastes sour after it is cooked.
Tales of environmental catastrophe – both those in the official, controlled media and those that emerge in hushed conspiratorial conversations – are now a staple of the Chinese economic development story. Debate about China's pace and style of economic growth percolates on the internet's multiplying weblogs, some blocked, some not. Zan Aizong is an editor at the newspaper China Ocean News, and also writes frequently, and independently, on the internet. In one piece, Zan gives simple, and apparently all too common, examples of environmental crisis in his own province, Zhejiang, which boasts China's most successful market economy, enjoying ten straight years of extraordinary economic growth. People who drive on the 104 State Highway past Xinchang county in Shaoxing municipality all complain of a noxious smell that forces them to roll up their windows. The villagers nearby say that at night as they go to sleep, they don't dare open their windows. When Zan stayed there, his hotel sat in the middle of a string of pharmaceutical factories. The surface of the Xinchang River and its surrounding creeks emitted a putrid smell. A nearby village's residents were told the well water was not potable. "You cannot drink the water, so naturally you cannot water livestock or irrigate crops," writes Zan. "Who takes legal responsibility for this?" (Zan's piece was downloaded in Australia. It is uncertain whether it is accessible in China.)
Critiques of China's dirty development seep into everyday conversations. One friend tells me he thanks his lucky stars every day that he lives in Beijing and not in one of China's interior cities. When I tell him about friends who said that on a recent trip to Xi'an the air pollution was so black and thick they stayed in their hotel rather than make their way out to see the famed terracotta warriors, his eyes light up. "Xi'an is cursed," he says. Even among its educated elite, there exists in China reliance on superstition in a way that startles. I look at him sceptically, and he does indeed show some embarrassment. But then he proceeds to tell me the story of Qin Shihuang, a familiar enough figure to anyone who has seen the latest crouching-tiger-house-ofhidden-hero flick. In addition to having hordes of clay warriors placed in nearby tombs to defend him in the afterlife, according to China's earliest extant historical account by Sima Qian, the first emperor to unify China has a replica of China in his as yet unearthed mausoleum – a necropolis over which he could rule. Rivers in the necropolis flow with mercury instead of water. It's an accurate enough forecast of the real twenty-first-century China, where at least one provincial study indicates mercury levels in local fish are eighteen times what is considered safe by the Chinese government. "Xi'an will always have a pollution problem because it is cursed," my friend says with renewed authority. In fact, mercury does show up in soil samples near the tomb at a higher level than in other nearby areas.
Xi'an's curse may be something more systematic and persistent than the current localised mercury contamination around Qin Shihuang's mausoleum. Today, according to a multinational scientific study reported in The Wall Street Journal, mercury contamination emanating from China's coal-fuelled power stations is carried around the globe by atmospheric currents and appears in samples taken in the United States. It rains down, contaminates wetlands and river systems, and seeps into the food chain. Some scientists in the US claim more than thirty per cent of mercury contamination there comes from China and other countries.