However, in spite of the charms of the place, I spend the last third of my contract itching to leave. It’s simply too small and orderly to hold you, but having said that, many westerns did stay here for much longer, and some never leave.
Let’s begin with a quick introduction. Zhuhai is a Special Economic Zone (SEZ-not to be confused with an SAR-Special Administrative Region, like Hong Kong and Macao). The SEZ’s were set up by Deng Zhou Ping in his last days to transform the moribund Chinese economy into something more prosperous and vibrant. “To get rich,” he was later to proclaim, “is glorious.” The SEZ’s are where people come to get rich, and the Capitalist economic model of free competition thrives and free markets reign. As a result, Zhuhai went from a forgotten fishing village in the eighties to a rapidly expanding city of about 1.5 million today. This is still small by Chinese standards, but it’s growing daily.
Those Chinese fortunate to live in this new capitalist utopia must obtain permission to work here. In a way difficult to comprehend to Westerners, the Chinese are not free to move from one part of China to another in search of a better job. The Party is keen to create an orderly urbanization in China, and fears the chaos that would ensue if China’s rural poor, who still make up 60 per cent of the population and often live on less than a dollar a day, were to suddenly up sticks and arrive en mass in the cities and the SEZ’s. While one can bemoan the lack of personal freedom, it should be noted that Chinese cities do not suffer from the slums and shanty towns of other third world nations.
So, the people in Zhuhai and nearby Shenzen, China’s number one SEZ bordering Hong Kong, are the lucky ones, who have arrived at the miracle land where fortunes are there to be taken and the streets are paved with gold. They have opportunities and can afford a lifestyle the average peasant could only dream of. Nevertheless, by Western standards, they still lead a tough life, for the most part. For every rich factory owner in a flash car with tainted windows, there are a thousand factory workers, sleeping 10 to a dorm room, and getting one day off a week. Their real working day is often 12 hours long, and their average salary would not tempt a work shy European dole bird out of bed, but they’re not going to give it up for a life of toil and drudgery in the paddy fields, or a dead end job in some less successful city under the ever watchful eye of their work unit manager. Moreover, with a national growth rate pushing 10 per cent, and themselves at the vanguard of that growth, they know, or at least believe, things can only get better.
Zhuhai is known in China as ‘Zhuhai Piaoliang’ or ‘Beautiful Zhuhai’, because of it’s coastal location, and immaculately manicured parks. It’s one of the greenest cities in China, and people often come here for their honeymoon, or holiday here, if they can afford it. Having said that, Hong Kongers and Japanese often come here for its relatively cheap prostitutes, but unless you go looking for them, you’ll never see them. Moreover, the brochures seem to rely on trick photography when they depict the crystal blue waters of the sea, as they’re invariably a muddy brown from the silt and pollution of the mighty Pearl river delta.
The Party has big plans for Zhuhai and Shenzen, and the Communist Party is quite good at turning grand plans into reality. If they succeed, I might return here in 20 years time to find myself in the biggest city on Earth, a metropolis almost too large to imagine. The idea is to link Guangzhou (China’s third city of 10 million) with Hong Kong, through a massively expanded Zhuhai and Shenzen, and create one massive conurbation-an area the size of France with a 100 million plus population. It sounds crazy, but I think it could happen. The Chinese see nature as something to be controlled and conquered, and the idea of needing a ‘green belt ring’ around a city was an idea my students didn’t really seem to comprehend, much less agree with. The Han see it as their right to rule, and if that means mega cities of 100 million, then so be it. Westerners may bemoan the environmental destruction and inhumanity of such colossal cities, but how many of us would volunteer to return to a life of toil in the fields, or wish such a life on our descendants, to protect something as ephemeral as the environment?
The Party sees its role as one of freeing people, not from dictatorship, but from poverty and want. Indeed, the Party has already freed more people from poverty in the last 20 years than all the NGO’s put together. My only concern is that an increasingly fragile Planet Earth will find itself incapable of supporting a rich China and its inevitable pollution, massive on a scale as yet unknown. Our future, and whether we have one, may be decided in here in the SEZ’s.
My thoughts turned to more mundane matters as we tried to get out of Zhuhai. Travelling is China is rarely easy. Matters are not helped by travel agency’s annoying tendency to hire people with little or no grasp of English, and a complete inability to understand foreigners when they try to speak Chinese. Things are made worse by their consummate lying. We were told by one travel agency, for example, that we had to wait three days for a flight to Guilin, our next destination, but we were told by another that we had to fly that exact day. One travel agency says there are no buses to that destination at that time of year, and another tells you you’ve just missed today’s bus. They are also wont to try to change your holiday plans, which you are obviously incapable of planning for yourself, and always keen to send you to an alternative destination, which coincidentally, they happen to have a tour of, and it has a special discounted price.
The trick is to pigheadedly go from travel agency to travel agency until you get the answer you’re looking for, and then buy the ticket immediately before they change their mind. On no accounts should you believe them if they tell you to come back tomorrow or the next day to pick up or pay for a ticket as this ticket will become mysteriously unavailable.
On our last night in China, we had dinner with our old Chinese teacher. I spoke to her about the possibility of a meag city in Guang Dong, but he seemed doubtful. ‘What,’ she asked, ‘could all these peasants do, except clean, wait on tables, and work on construction?’ Peasants, as I had noted before in China, are not well thought of.
She is principally an English teacher, and as near to fluent as any non-native speaker can get. There’s still an occasional mistake, of courswe, like when she mentioned that the restaurant we were in had been giving out ‘flies’ to passing pedestrians to attract customers. I think she meant ‘fliers’, but with Gunagdong eating habits, you can never be sure.
Shortly after I first arrived in China, I stopped walking when I noticed a really cute Siberian husky in a pet shop window. I very much a ‘dog lover’, I freely admit, and as the sweat dripped from my nose in the height of the humid Chinese summer, I felt sorry for the puppy in his glass cage. I then noticed more puppies, kittens, an array of exotic fish and even a baby kangaroo. ‘What an odd pet shop’, I thought to myself. As I peered through some foggy air-conditioned windows to see what other animals could be seen, I noticed rows and rows of tables, the clinking of ceramic chopsticks and occasional bones being spat out of mouths and onto the floor, a Chinese trait that never fails to make me wince. It seemed like an odd combination to me-a restaurant and a pet shop. It slowly dawned on me that the pets in the window were actually part of the menu. I felt sick to my stomach, but the puppy kept wagging its fluffy white tail, oblivious to all danger.
My vegetarian instincts told me to run into the restaurant and harass the customers into feelings of abject guilt, and harange them into bringing the pets home as a sign of remorse. The only problem with this proposition was my own shyness and the fact that I had about 10 words of Chinese at the time. I could just about say that I didn’t eat me, but the rest of my message would have difficult to convey. In hindsight, I’m not even sure there was a message to convey. The British and Americans do like to get on their high horse about cruelty to animals, and the british, in particular, like to consider themselves ‘top-dogs’ when it comes to the league of animal lovers. However, it is conveniently forgotten that factory farming is most widespread in Britain, and the cruelty of a factory farm greatly exceeds the cruelty of a Chinese one. Perhaps a factory farmed hen would dream of being able to sit outside in a cage in a restaurant while waiting for death. At least that way, when the customer used his finger to point out his desired victim, as they often do in China, the hen could look his assassin the eye, and take the image to eternity.
In much the same way, I believe, the sterile, cold and calculating holocaust of Dacau is somehow more revolting that the torture chambers of the imperial dynasties. It is those who kill by numbers, without emotion, who shall face the worst kind of hell… especially if God turns out to be a chicken!
On our last day in Zhuhai, we paid a visit to the school we used to work in. The non-Chinese teachers we had worked with had long since flown the coop, as TEFL teachers are a migratory bird, and need to keep moving. Occasionally, they take a fancy to one place, or find a partner there, build a nest and drop an egg or two, or they grow old and return home to die, but in general, they can’t resist the call of the wind, and keep moving.
I sometimes think this need to keep moving is the natural human state. We evolved as hunter-gatherers in the African savanna, but quickly spread out to colonise the planet, more thoroughly than any species before us, and home became wherever you laid your spear. Mass migrations continued, even though the world was long since full up. The recent colonization and conquest of the Americas is one example. Today, the third world moves north to claim its share of the pie, and borders, a very modern invention, can only delay rather than stop people moving. It is an innate desire of the species, I maintain, to move on, even though most people in our over-crowded world have to suppress this desire and are born, live and die in one place. Nomadic TEFL teachers are blessed in being able to roam freely and comfortably.
Some of the Chinese staff from the school were still there, however, and they seemed glad to see us again. In fact, much more than I had expected. They said we had left a deep impression in the heads of many of our students, which sounded a bit like we had thumped them in the skull with a hammer, but I’m sure they meant something nicer. I was genuinely sad to say goodbye again, and it takes a lot to make a cynical misanthrope like me feel like that.
Eventually, we had managed to buy a ticket out, but it involved an unwanted three hour bus ride to Guangzhou airport. In the airport, a thunderstorm came out of nowhere, just to remind us we were still in the tropics, and the rain fell so heavily that you couldn’t see out the window, which looked like a car window does in an car wash. If you peered closely enough though, you could see the planes were still taking off, dodging lightning forks in the night sky as they went.
Guangzhou airport is super modern, and makes Heathrow look like a museum piece. So much of China looks ultra modern and high-tech. It’s weird. They were eons behind the west, and then in the blink of an eye, they suddenly seemed to have leap-frogged us and become more modern. If this was a 21st century hare and tortoise fable, we would be the hare, watching as six-million dollar tortoise sprinted towards the finish line.
There is still an enormous amount of poverty and backwardness in China, of course, and I had yet to see the worst of it. However, even on the bus from Zhuhai SEZ to the metropolis of Guangzhou, the eight-lane dual carriageways past peasant farmers in straw hats tilling the land by hand, with the occasional reluctant help of a water buffalo, much as they have done for centuries. |
